Introduction
Uh….Oh! Did the week just passed? It kind of went quickly to me, not because it took me a long time to playtest the cards, because (as said on last week’s article) there wasn’t much playtesting to do outside of one card, but because a lot of things happened to me during this week’s 7-day period.
About a week ago I was invited by Blizzard to do a Workshop on a Blackrock Mountain Release event hosted in Sao Paulo. Things went pretty good I tell you that. My job was to do exactly what I did a few weeks ago, which is: Theorycraft about the new cards. I had to do a 2-hour card review on the whole set, people liked it and the event itself was pretty nice.
Now back to the Hearthstone world, we didn’t have much of a busy week, outside of the South American Cup, which granted 50% of the spots of the players that will fight for the South American qualifier spots in the Americas Qualifier… wait a second… We have to qualify for qualifier so we can play to qualify for the qualifier that will qualify the qualifiers to play in the Worlds????
Well, yeah, that’s correct.
Anyway, the cup happened and I played with a pretty nice Dragon paladin build (which I will be sharing with you guys later in this article), unfortunately I wasn’t lucky enough to maintain a good winrate until the very end, and the format was (once again, unfortunately) Last Hero Standing, so if you randomly get countered Game 1, versus a decent player, you already lost.
The Weekly Report
This week’s bosses weren’t as fun as last weeks. The only one that really had a pretty different playstyle was General Drakkisath, which was the one that would change the cost of all cards to 1, then cap your total mana at 1. That fight was pretty interesting, but in the end it was all about it, as I found the other bosses to be boring “normal”.
I went after the storyline of Blackrock Mountain and everything that happened there, and as a Warcraft Lore lover, I actually enjoyed a lot the story. In case you guys want to know about the story, there is a channel called Nobbel87 that posts Warcraft lore constantly, and they happen to have posted the story behind Blackrock Mountain, which can be found in this link:Â https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TploBAj5XQ
In the tournament scene, there were quite a lot of tournaments but none of the cards released this week were used. We were still stuck that happened the previous weeks: Face Hunter with Quick Shot, Oil Rogue and Fast Druids with Thaurissan, Grim Patron warrior, and so on…
As for me, I actually found a home for dragon-consort before it was cool. Truth is, I ended up finding out that the card was so good by itself that you didn’t need to run other dragons with it, so I took the standard Midrange Paladin, which happens to be the best pick for today’s LHS tournaments and turned it into an almost Dragon Paladin”, in case you are interested in the list:
The list is pretty strong, and I believe it would’ve been the Dragon list if there would be no more Dragons added to the game. The fact the Consort will buff you forever means you’ll eventually get to play a Dragon, and a 5/5 for 5 mana is pretty decent on its own.
But since we’ll still see tons of Dragons, I am sure the list will change a lot. In case you are reading this and the 4th week has not been released yet, make sure to play this deck a little, because it’s preeeeetty good!
The good thing about testing these lists is that we were able to see what is the number of Dragons we are going to need to make it so blackwing-technician gets good value, and the minimum number of Dragon cards a Dragon Deck needs to have its Blackwing Technician playable is…..
6!!! Yeah, the minimum number of Dragons a deck must have in order to Support Blackwing Technician is 6. This is a pretty relevant information for those willing to make Dragon Decks this coming week.
Card Impact
Guys, I think we finally got it right! Everything we predicted ended up happening once again! We finally got good at it! As for saying what happened:
core-rager, dragon-egg, volcanic-lumberer, twilight-whelp and rend-blackhand are complete trash and haven’t and won’t be used in any deck from now until the end of times Muahahhahahahahaha *thunders*
dragon-consort didn’t see much play, mostly because no Dragons have been released yet, and people are waiting for the next wing to come out to start testing it to greater results.
Overall I feel like this Week was more of a filler…. I don’t know why they didn’t put any other card on it outside of Dragon Consort, but the feeling I have is that I was forced to buy a middle wing, filled with nothingness (Dragon Consort is good, but a pair of rares of 700g? ugh..) just so I can buy the next wings with an absurd number of good cards.
Talking about absurd number, next wing will only bring us good cards, so the impact will be huge! Predicting that, we will have tons of theorycrafting this week but there are no notable decks this week because of the reasons I said in the last paragraph.
Well well, shall we move to the next section then?
Lists for Tomorrow!
This section is going to be amazing!!! Anyway, here you guys will find tons of Theorycrafting about the new cards, with decks to fit them in so you can start playtesting them right away!
Note that these decks, although being posted here, might not be their final version, since it’s all about speculation and theory, and only playtesting will make it so you’ll find a better version for them, but for now these are the “perfect” initial playtesting lists we found!
Oh… Back to the origins, Shamans finally got an all-star card. After being 2 whole expansions without getting new toys, Shamans finally got their fireguard-destroyer. With that, the class now can play with four very strong 4-drops (that are actually worth a 5-drop, each, in both efficiency and stats). But the cards won’t just be randomly added to the build, we must change a lot on it in order to update it to the next level’s standards, and I thought doing these changes to the list would be a good initial start point. Firstly, notice we have no Azure Drake, because the card itself won’t have any board impact for a 5-drop. Then, we have two mana-tide-totems and the reason why I did such a drastic change (from 0 to 2) is that the Deck now has more cards that are able to stand their ground on their own, meaning you’ll want to drop a Mana Tide in the early stages of the game to keep up with the opponent’s unfair draw mechanism, and Mana Tide just seems like it got better with Fireguard Destroyer because of that.
Note this list runs tons of cards that are able to stand their ground on their own, such as Spider Tank, Fireguard Destroyer, Piloted Shredder, Fire Elemental, Sludge Belcher etc… This is the main reason we are using 2 Mana Tide Totems and those 2 Mana Tides are the reason we are using a antique-healbot, so we can actually heal ourselves without damaging our gameplay, since we’ll have extra cards somewhere in the game to make up for the “useless” 3/3 for 5 mana.
As I said before, I am very glad they added Fireguard Destroyer to the game, but as of now I am not sure if the card itself will be able to bring Shamans back to life on its own. But we have to remember dark-cultist, back in Naxxramas, was able to bring Priests back to life all by itself, so maybe Shamans will be playable again.
Moving to Tempo Mage, the deck is already a Tier-1 deck, and now we are adding another very good card to it, so I expect the deck to continue dominating the Metagame after this week hits.
Actually, not only that, I expect the deck to spike in popularity in the coming weeks, since a lot of people will be playtesting in these first few weeks, and we indeed have tons of new good cards to play with, but in the end Tempo Mage is likely to be one of the top decks.
Another Mage deck that I expect to see a lot of play is going to be the Control Mage, as known as Grinder Mage, is a Mage version that got “popularized” by StrifeCro. As of now I don’t know how to actually change the list in order to add flamewaker, because I actually have never played with it, and I also just added a Mage list so posting a second one feels just… strange, so let us move to the next one!
Moving into Hungry Dragon I believe that Priest is going to be the Class most able to fit it in. Being the class with the biggest Anti-Aggro support, Priests are also able to generate Value from Hungry Dragon’s huge body as well as from the 1-drop it gives the Opponent, because Priest is the only class that can actually steal it, hahahahhaa, cabal-shadow-priest is already a beast on its own, so this just adds value to it.
I am still unsure how not running thoughtsteals will affect the class, but we already have northshire-cleric so I guess all we have to do is play more carefully with it… actually, a lot more careful. Only play this girl if you’re getting value out of it!
Another thing is that Hungry Dragon adds value to resurrect, making an already good card even better!
For now we’re not trying to make any fancy Priest Dragon deck, but as the matter of fact I believe Priests can end up making a Dragon Deck, the thing is that I am pretty sure in case the deck happens, there will be no twilight-whelp on it.
About dark-iron-skulker, I believe It’s just another nice tool to add to Oil Rogue together with Hungry Dragon. A lot of people have been discussing that the Dragon is just the perfect addition to Oil Rogue, given how 64% of the 1-drops have 1 HP, and that the Dagger used the turns before will be able to clear it out.
Overall I believe Oil Rogue only gained board Control with Dark Iron Skulker, which is something nice but maybe we’ll be able to see some kind of Control Rogue in the near future, given how the Skukler seems to be a nice Control card.
As much as I hate to say it, I believe next week is going to be dominated by Face Hunter. Mostly because we’re about to get into a week where the most tested card might end up being hungry-dragon, and that opens up a spot for Face Hunter to shine, given the fact the Dragon is just another body for the Face Hunter to ignore, and it actually adds up to the board, giving the Hunter even more stuff to “throw” at the opponent’s Face.
As for the other cards, both revenge and demonwrath already have obvious substitutions (whirlwind for Warriors and hellfire/shadowflame for Warlocks). These, however, are not obviously better substitutions, and only through massive playtesting we’ll be able to determine which one is better, the new cards or the old ones.
chromaggus is a nice Legendary, and will see play in the Paladin Deck, most likely, as well as any Control Deck that wants to run a big drop that also happens to be Card Advantage. I don’t think we need to add any list with this card, since it’s just another big drop that will be substituting another Big Drop. This card goes inside any deck that would want to run sneeds-old-shredder as a better substitute for the card itself. I believe we can say, for sure, that Chrommagus is going to be better than Sneeds.
Conclusion
This week sucked. Even more than Week 2, since we actually had nothing new going on. However, we are indeed hyped by Weeks 4 and 5, since they’re not only the ones that will shape the Metagame, they also have the highest number of playable cards released by the Adventure Mode.
Also, the adventures were pretty lack luster this week, but I believe they’ll be nicer next week, as we said before: This week was something like a filler, and nothing happened now so more things can happen in the next weeks!
I hope you guys enjoyed reading this weekly report, which was a lot more like a Theorycrafting article than an actual Weekly Report, but Blizzard is to blame for this, not me! This article was a lot more than to write tho, since we had lots of Theorycrafting to do, and I just love Theorycrafting more than anything else in this game 😀
Hope to see you guys again next week,
Love yall,
Nuba
 
 
 
 /TheNubaHS
