In-Depth Analysis of MSG Spoiled Cards – Part 3

nuba

Published: Nov 9, 2016 09:24 pm

Introduction

Finja, the Flying Star

Alright so we start off with a pretty different kind of card design that we didn’t see before. Finja, the Flying Star is clearly a tentative at making new cool designs as are some cards shown to us in this expansion. Finja, however, comes to us at a wooping 2/4 body for five mana that does literally nothing the turn it is played, hooray!

Now, all serious, I don’t believe a card such as this one is playable simply because it actually has to kill a minion in order to get the activate going. When I first saw this card getting spoiled I had some hallucinations of getting to dig free murloc-knights out of my deck generating tons of value and a huge board with just one card, but then I realized that this card actually needs you to kill a minion in order for it’s effect to happen, but it happens to only have two attack.

Two attack, as mentioned before and multiple times in the past, is just not good enough for such as high-cost card like Finja, which makes it so it won’t be able to often kill minions and survive (or even to just kill minions) the turn it attacks. Sure, you can buff him but then a lot of randomness comes into play as to finding the perfect situation to run this and everything like that, which we know only leads to disastrously bad decks.

This is likely to be a 400 dust ticket.

Fel Orc Soulfiend

So this card has Priest written all over it. The fact it is a 3/5 for 3 mana to be played on turn 3 is already huge (because let’s face it, if you deal 5 damage to this, it dies), but then there is this thing that is: This dude deals damage to itself! Not too much, but just enough for us to generate some cool value from our northshire-clerics!

As a Priest card, this dude is an amazing one, and I actually think this should be bringing injured-blademaster versions of Control Priest quite up in the metagame.

A card such as this one makes me very happy because it is not obviously broken, needs to be worked with, has good stats which doesn’t make it a bad standalone card, and raises the skill cap of the game by a good amount.

I usually like to hate on Blizzard for poor design, but this time, with this card, they got it perfectly right.

Loved this card.

Big-Time Racketeer

Why Blizzard? Why did you have to make a fairly consistent card such as moonglade-portal become yet another RNG fest by adding a card such as this one to the game?

As far as cards go, Big-Time Racketeer isn’t a bad one – It has some amazing synergies with a lot of Rogue mechanisms, and I can not complain very much about it. shadowstep could get some use out of this, shadowcaster as well, but I have to admit I am quite skeptical about this card seeing play simply because it feels too vanilla, and in Rogue (the only class that has chances of playing this card) all this would do is allow you to trade your shadowsteps for a 4 mana 6/6 which won’t add much in trade for the inconsistency you’re getting into your deck.

For me, the only thing this card’s creation did was RNG-ing one of the few random cards that weren’t “random enough”.

Second-Rate Bruiser

Now, back into good design, this is actually my favorite card in the whole expansion!

This card is actually one of the few that punishes opponents for playing Aggro while not making your Midrange and Control matchups worse because you have it in your deck!

Second-Rate Bruiser should be a pretty common Control and Midrange card whenever Tempo and Aggro becomes tier 1 and 2 prominent, simply because you don’t get punished for playing a card such as this one – it isn’t a tech but can be played as one to punish aggro for overextending too quickly, in the meanwhile it is a fine slightly-below-the-curve card at 5 mana, which won’t punish you for running it in your deck against let’s say a Midrange deck as, let’s say, shadow-word-horror or tournament-medic would punish you.

I like pretty much everything about this card: the design, the stats distribution, even the picture! I just hope (I really do) that this isn’t a Goons-exclusive card and that I can play this on my Priest.

Kooky Chemist

So I thought about leaving this guy out of the whole In-Depth analysis thing but I quite needed to point out one thing for you guys here before analyzing the next spoiled cards which is the fact that abilities should have different “value cost” depending on a card’s actual cost.

For example, leper-gnome, at one mana as a 1/1 it feels “ok”, but at 10 mana getting a 10/10 with the exact same Deathrattle feels horribly bad, which is basically the reason why a card such as tunnel-trogg is so overpowered and holy-champion (I actually had to go look this guy’s name up, because I literally never cared about it) is so bad – They have the same ability + vanilla stats, but the Trogg only costs one mana.

Back to Kooky Chemist, I have no idea why on earth one person would ever run this card over crazed-alchemist, especially because you only want the Crazed one for its ability and not its body. A 4/4 for four is pretty bad, and having the exact same ability as a 2/2 for two only makes this a filler card and nothing else.

Mistress of Mixtures

And here we are, the card that got me super hyped when it was first announced, then got me unhyped because I noticed it wasn’t as good as I thought and I wouldn’t want to run it on my Priest deck, but then got me hyped again because I realized the implications of a card such as this one in the building of possibly future decks such as Control Rogue, Control Mage, Control Warlock and “Control anything that doesn’t have enough self-heals available in the game right now”.

This is a card that requires timing, shouldn’t always be played on turn 1, requires thinking and won’t be just “an OP card” as many people thought it to be.

Mistress of Mixtures is yet another card that heightens the skill cap of the game, making it more thought-oriented than it currently is while looking simply in design and easy to the eye.

Make no mistake, a lot of people will play this card even in decks where it won’t belong, but since most people will end up copying good decks in three to four weeks into the expansion, this card might have its playability diminished greatly, because you’ll realize it isn’t as simply as zombie-chow was.

At turn one, a 2/2 is miles worse than a 2/3, but later on, spending only one mana at a card that will not only be able to cause some damage but also heal you in the process is huge! I actually think timing the turn you play Mistress of Mixture is going to differ the good from the bad players.

Other Spoiled Cards

As of right now, a bunch of other cards were spoiled to us, none of those cards got my attention as cards that need “in-depth analysis” except the fact that we need to point out which cards of those that “buff stuff in your hand” are actually playable, but first let’s start with the cards that got spoiled and don’t have an effect such as the one we’ll comment after:

auctionmaster-beardo – Pretty weak, but we could probably find some Hunter shenanigans at 10-mana to justify some fringe plays, I guess?
shaku-the-collector – Get undercity-huckster, make him worse, and name it a Legendary.
grook-fu-master, worgen-greaser and hired-gun – Vanilla Fillers.

Now, to the ability I wanted to discuss a little deeper here, we have the “Battlecry: Buff stuff in your hand” – This obviously seems like a Tempo-oriented play, as it would add extra value to cards that are supposed to be in your hand, meaning you can’t possibly think to make a non-Tempo deck that would run cards such as these. Your deck needs to be a Tempo one, this happens because it heightens the chance of having cards in your hand (because if you don’t, you either already won or lost) while lowers the chance of having those cards as “dead draws”.

Now to the cards themselves, only two cards caught my attention right now:

grimestreet-outfitter – Because this would perfectly fit into a Weenie deck, actually making it much more powerful.
shaky-zipgunner – Because the value seems quite good for a 3-drop. I have to admit this one might not have as high chances of seeing play simply because Hunters already have so many powerful 3-drops, but nonetheless this card is pretty good.

The other cards don’t seem to fit quite well in the play style they are theoretically supposed to be played:

trogg-beastrager – Seems too weak.
stolen-goods – Can be a dead card in a lot more situations than you might think.
grimestreet-smuggler – Doesn’t seem aggressive enough, but at least is slightly better than the rest of the cards in this list.
grimestreet-enforcer – Too slow.
grimestreet-pawnbroker – Weapons aren’t as common I guess, seems too inconsistent and you won’t be able to play this as often as you would want to.

Closing

And with this I finally catch up with the latest spoiled cards. I probably rushed down the cards a little here in this last part but it’s because I don’t believe those cards will need any kind of in-depth analysis and I am only making in-depth analysis in this series.

From now onwards, though, I will be making articles with both my personal opinion as well as in-depth analysis (whenever needed) of the latest shown cards simply because I will have more time to do so!

Hope you guys enjoyed these quick series, and we’ll be seeing each other again very soon in the next articles!

Don’t forget to leave any questions you might want me to answer in the comments as well as your opinions regarding my comments!

Love you guys!

Nuba

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