Note: If you wish to see all the revealed cards so far, be sure to check out the beautiful graphic post by Disguised Toast over at Mana Crystals. It’s updated whenever new cards come out so be sure to bookmark it!
Introduction
We are a little off in time because there were only 4 cards spoiled last week that we didn’t talk about, and I wanted to talk about more cards than just 4, so I waited the whole weekend for a card that never came.
Today we got, up until this very moment, two new cards so combined with last week’s 4 we can already start to talk a little more about the latest spoiled cards.
Cho’Gall
This guy is interesting, but not as Overpowered as people think.
To start things with, you’re not getting a spell for free, you’re actually paying Health for it which means the spell needs a very good upside in order for Cho’Gall to be decent, then we need to have that spell in hand meaning we’re likely to want to have multiple good spells in our deck, but we’re talking about Warlocks, and Warlock spells don’t have a history of being good, do they?
The best spells to cast with this, that comes to mind, are siphon-soul, shadowflame and shadow-bolt(!!!), and both the playable ones are a bit situational – but not that much. You don’t want to draw cards, and there isn’t imp-losion anymore (the ideal Cho’Gall castable card) to make this better.
Just take a quick look at all the standard-existing Warlock spells, and you’ll start to note how they’re not really good enough when being played with Health points after spending 7 manas on a 7/7 while playing a Class that keeps on sacrificing Health for card advantage.
Yeah, this guy’s body recall Dr. Boom, and usually when remembering the almighty guy we have all these thoughts of greatness, which I don’t believe is this guy’s case.
Cho’Gall isn’t a bad card, by no means, and if it weren’t a Warlock-only card it would have been extremely overpowered, but the card was put in the class that needs it the least.
This isn’t a dustable card by the way, so if you get one of these you should keep it because it might find a home eventually, but I am just giving you the heads up that this isn’t as strong as people are mentioning and hyping all over.
Wisps of the Old Gods
Nice pun, unplayable card.
Putting a bunch of 1/1s on the board isn’t good – at least not when you have to spend 7 manas on it – and this card probably isn’t playable as is (maybe Druid gets a powerful interaction with wisps to justify this card??) maybe the rest of the set will have good interactive cards with this one?
power-of-the-wild comes to mind as a decent interaction, but even Token Druid wouldn’t want to run an over-glorified Power of the Wild just for the fun of it, this card reminds me a lot of dark-wispers (which is an unplayable card) only that much worse (costs more, worse effect, etc).
We don’t need to go into a lot of details to know this is a bad card.
Soggoth the Slitherer
So Blizzard wanted to make a Shroud (immune to spells and hero power)Taunt card with a lot of health, but they didn’t quite know where to put it mana-wise.
When looking at this card, the obvious comparison is ancient-of-war which costs 2 less mana, has 1 more health but isn’t Shrouded. Looking it like this we start to think the card is bad, and people really started calling this bad…. Hey! guys! This isn’t a Class card! At 8 mana this would’ve been completely broken, and you can’t compare this to Ancient of War because any class can run this card!
That said, the fact this guy is immune to spells and hero power is huge, don’t take that lightly because it isn’t, then consider that this is a neutral card and you notice you can use it in any deck you want, and how good this can be!
So, a 9 mana massive wall that can only be taken down by Silence or pure damage starts to look much better.
I like this guy, it isn’t overpowered but isn’t bad either. So, since all the overpowered stuff is leaving the game, we might end up finding a lot of homes for this big guy – Remember: this is a Control-playable card in mostly all Control decks.
Did I just forgot to mention how much this makes the-black-knight better? This becoming a good card also makes The Black Knight a much better card, and With the upcoming nerf on big-game-hunter, TBK can end up being a much better card than it is right now, so keep an eye out on that guy too!
Possessed Villager
A Balanced Warlock 1 drop!! This card might look bad, but trust me: it isn’t.
The obvious comparison to this card is argent-squire which is a fine 1/1 Divine Shield. While Argent Squire is better with buffs, it feels much worse with Zoo’s tools, like abusive-sergeant, dire-wolf-alpha and power-overwhelming.
This is a fair card, not overpowered but not bad either, this leads me to believe that in case Zoo survives in a post-rotation world it will for sure be a part of the Deck’s core.
Thistle Tea
I tried to think about situations where this card would be playable if it was a 4 cost card, and all of these situations were connected to a Reno-Rogue deck list.
At 6 mana cost, however, there isn’t any situation where people would want to run this card over anything other than a “lulz” deck.
Sure, getting triple reno-jackson can be cool, but this card just isn’t good enough to justify its high mana cost. This seems greatly worse than sprint and I might even add worse than burgle which rarely sees play outside of a tier-infinite Reno Rogue.
“But Nuba, isn’t drawing 3 cards a good thing? I mean you only draw one card from your deck but the other two are just value!” – The thing is that there aren’t enough cards that you would need in multiples to deal with different situations, and usually Rogues will need different tools to deal with multiple things rather than many copies of a single card.
Sure we could be talking about a Mill Rogue, which isn’t my area of expertise (thankful!) and this could be played in, but just as Reno Rogue is nowadays, Mill Rogue seems more like a tier-infinite deck than anything, and this card wouldn’t make the deck better (or in this deck’s case, less horrible) in any kind or shape.
Going a little deeper, and justifying my thoughts:
Three Backstabs? Horrible.
Three Preparations? Maybe, but only if you have a powerful hand already.
Three Blade Flurries? Hell no!
Three Eviscerates? Yes!
Three Shivs or Fan of Knives? Horrible.
This goes on and on, and in the end – only talking about Rogue spells, as getting multiple copies of the same minion is 90% of the time bad which is already 40% of your deck – you’ll need at least something around 80% of good spells for you to draw with this card for it to be good. Considering “so so” spells as good, and only taking in consideration the playable Rogue Spells we have:
5 good spells and 8 bad ones – not even counting mill rogue spells as playable by the way.
Errrr, obviously this is just a way to talk about it, and there obviously are better ways to analyze this card, but I believe that in every way possible that you try to analyze this card it won’t feel like a playable one.
Twilight Summoner
Firstly, before talking about this card, I would like to tell you all that Naxxramass was a mistake and so was Goblins versus Gnomes. Blizzard literally fucked up, they shouldn’t have made such powerful and automatic cards, ever, and they recognize that now as the format rotation is getting rid of these cards in the competitive Hearthstone scene for good.
Now that this is through, I would like to talk about this card: it obviously is a worse version of nerubian-egg, which was totally overpowered. Does this mean this card won’t see play? By no means, no.
This is still a decent way to keep board Presence post-sweeper, and there won’t be many ways to do that once Naxx and GvG rotates out.
Sure, this card has a lot of downsides, but it is just fair for it to happen on a low-costed card:
- It feels horrible against silence.
- It generates no tempo at all.
- It takes three turns before this starts making a difference.
- Not all decks are going to run sweepers.
Then, this card will feel awesome when playing against a Control deck that runs a lot of sweepers.
Sure, the chances of you not wanting to run this card in your aggro deck are huge, but it could end up being the only anti-sweeper option for you to run, and you would have to either suck it up and play it or get destroyed by full board sweepers when you overextend.
What does this means? Well, this is a win-win situation for competitive Hearthstone, because you either prepare yourself to play against sweepers by running low power-level cards, or you get totally devastated by them for not running.
And what happens right now while Naxx and GvG are still legal? Most of the best power-level minions are persistent deathrattle, so you almost never have to worry about sweepers or play around them, simply dropping everything on curve and herping derping your way to victories you wouldn’t be having otherwise.
I like this card’s design, Blizzard seems to have finally gotten it right.
Closing
Woah now I made the article quite big with the last 2 analysis didn’t I?
Well, this is it for today. I hope you guys enjoyed my way of talking about the cards!
Just as an explanation on the Thistle Tea’s part, I know there are a billion ways to analyze that card, and probably none of them are 100% correct, but in the end the card is bad and although we might be wrong in our analysis, they are nothing more than impressions since we don’t have the cards at our disposal to playtest or anything.
I know I have been doing quite the bold analysis, talking down on cards that might be playable, but in the end that is how analysis should be. Everyone will say all the cards are good unless they’re complete trash, and that just isn’t the way write analysis. Sure people might get upset because you said a card they thought was good to be bad, but that is just they way it is: people think different!
Love you guys, and hope to see you again in my next review, I have a good feeling about the next cards!
Love you all,
Nuba
