Introduction
And so not even 24 hours after I publish a whole article discussing a bunch of “boring” cards and pointing my finger at Blizzard saying they were making a lot of unimaginative cards, they decide to shut me up and reveal a bunch of awesomely designed cards with a lot of possibilities and cool/fun mechanics!
Today we are also entering the Kabal reveal week, which means that most of the neutral cards revealed are going to be exclusive to the Kabal tribe, which is limited to Mages, Warlocks and Priests.
But I still have a few Goons cards to analyze, so let’s get started right away!
Madam Goya
madam-goya reminds barnes quite a lot, but Barnes she is not.
Fun fact is, it feels miles worse than Barnes for multiple reasons. First is that if you are aiming at a combo possibility you usually don’t care very much if the minion is 1/1 or 4/12 (I am looking at you, malygos!), at the same time you actually need to have an “ok”ish minion on board to use this on, and differently from Barnes you have to build your deck completely around it.
Surely, the thing everybody thought about when they saw this card was that you could play it in combination with a Token, but there are so many things related to it that… well, let’s start:
First thing is that you’re going to be “drawing” a token later on, be it a 1/1 Silver Hand Recruit or a Basic Totem, in which case both are horrible draws. Then, 8 mana? I would rather just play the card I want to.
Other way to play this card would be to have your deck filled with strong battlecry minions that cost little mana and big minions with static abilities, and cycle the small ones, but in every case you nearly always need to be winning with a certain number of specific situations and the correct randomness for this card to feel a tad useful, which is more than enough justification that we need to look for in order to not want to play this card at all.
The concept and design of the card actually made me happy. This card, despite not being good, is creative and interactive, and can create different and new strategies in the future, even if just “fun” ones.
Grimscale Chum
So I actually got the most negative of the community feedback regarding this card, and something tells me that people are just insanely wrong about it.
I actually believe this is one of the strongest 1-drops in the game, and a fair one nonetheless!
Buffing minions on the hand, on a case like this, is nearly equal “drawing a card that costs zero mana” while putting an “ok” board presence – That feels good enough for me, and probably good enough to even make a couple of underplayed Murlocs such as bilefin-tidehunter and murloc-tidecaller much better. The fact this is a 1-drop only adds value to the card, since now we have 6 strong playable Murlocs that we can run on our Goons Aggro deck.
This card is good, keep an eye out for it as it could even spawn a new tier-1 strategy.
Leatherclad Hogleader
So Blizzard decided to add a gang of Sideboard cards to the game. I usually don’t quite get the idea behind making sideboard cards on a game that doesn’t have sideboard, but I guess they exist for the simple fact they can put oppressive strategies in check and it helps making (masking?) the game feel less “broken”.
This first Hog-gang card is obviously an anti-Control tech card that could even make it into a couple of decks in case Control becomes tier-1 exclusive and as oppressive as Midrange Shaman is nowadays and Secret Paladin was an year ago. Truth be told though? I don’t think Control could ever be oppressive simply because of how much skill it takes to win Control mirrors, meaning that in theory bad players would always lose vs better ones.
Back to the card, if you can consistently get this card’s battlecry to work at least 3/4 of the games you play, let’s say on a super-Control heavy metagame, this card will surely see play – it is way above the curve, but don’t get your hopes very up, because it is super likely this card never sees competitive play.
Spiked Hogrider
So they created a counter card to second-rate-bruiser!
A couple of reviews ago I talked about Second-Rate Bruiser and how it was my favorite card released up until that moment, and how most Control and Midrange decks are highly likely to always want to run 2 of those. Now I see a counter card to that.
Something tells me Blizzard got the idea of creating these sideboard cards to make it so it becomes harder to have to nerf cards otherwise, in which case that card would be the Second-Rate Bruiser (in case it became too oppressive).
Back to the Hogrider, and much like his two brothers, he will only ever see play in very specific situations.
Tanaris Hogchopper
And the last (at least until now) of the Hog-gang is the tanaris-hogchopper, which looks like an anti-aggro card.
This card, much like other cards, is made to try and counter the possibility of Goons Aggro decks explode – In case Goons Aggro becomes uncontested Tier-1, people would start running this to try and counter it.
However, even theoretical decks such as the 1-drop-heavy Goons Aggro won’t always be without cards in hand – In between small-time-recruits, divine-favors and meanstreet-marshals, Tanaris Hogchopper might just have the worst time ever getting its battlecry to work.
Every one of the members of the Hog-gang have very “hard to trigger” battlecries that are very meta dependent, but of the whole bunch, this one easily has the harder one and the least chances of seeing play.
Volcanic Potion
And yet another potion just got revealed to us: volcanic-potion!
So, a better (more consistent) demonwrath for mages, which is basically one of the tools Control Mages have been needing for the past year in order to be more competitive.
Not only Control Mage gets more and more viable with this expansion, but also the “soon-to-be-dead” Reno Mage gets a lot more viable with the creation of this card!
So, Volcanic Potion is one of those cards that will, for sure, see play, but clearly it won’t be in every mage deck unless a deck filled with 2-health minions like Zoo or Goons Aggro takes over the ladder, which could make so a few Tempo and Midrange mage would use this as a tech card.
The most important thing about this card, though, is that “potion” actually became a card type and should be randomly drawn out of a couple of card’s effects, like the following card we are going to discuss…
Kabal Chemist
And now we get a “Draw a random potion card” effect that makes it so Volcanic Potion becomes a lot more noteworthy than it already is.
So we now realize there are a couple of “Potion” cards in the game, all from the Kabal tribe, with a couple of interesting effects and some… well, not so much.
pint-size-potion, despite being an “ok” Priest card, actually makes it so this card becomes much worse on the other classes, in the meantime dragonfire-potion is quite the powerful draw and can actually turn games around completely.
Just like Pavel won an already-lost game by babbling-book a Polymorph, games can be destroyed by 10-mana this card into Dragonfire Potion in some big tournaments out there, and don’t get me wrong – it WILL happen.
This doesn’t mean this card is bad, because despite drawing you a random card, you actually have to play the card and know when to do so – A completely fair card that should make the game more interesting, can’t wait to see how it turns out.
As for viability, this card seems like a decent one but I can’t quite tell for sure right now because we haven’t seen all the Potions.
Abyssal Enforcer
The Keyword here is effective.
This card is basically a hellfire attached to a 6/6 body, and it is amazing!
Time and again I talked about how cards with multiple effects were powerful, and once again we see it happening here. After we saw a lot of Aggro cards being added to the Warlock class in WotOG, we are finally seeing Control Warlock strategies going back into being invested on.
Abyssal Enforcer is quite the simple card, though, which leaves us with very little to talk about regarding the card itself – it is obviously a strong card, a Control card, and will obviously see play whenever any kind of Control Warlock deck has the slightest viability.
However, we can guarantee right now that this will see instant play in Reno Warlock decks at least until reno-jackson himself rotates out.
Closing
And we close this article a lot happier than we were in the last article, yey!
So many cool cards, and the certainty that we are going to see even more fun cards revealed this week – More potions, more interaction, more Warlock Control, more Mage Control and more Priest Control too!
I just can’t wait to see the cards they are going to be revealing this week *-*
I hope you guys enjoyed the reviews made up until this very moment, and if you want to comment anything regarding today’s review, feel free to do so as I read every one of the comments you guys post!
Oh, and in case you missed the previous Reviews, here you’ll find all of them:
Part 1: https://hearthstoneplayers.com/depth-analysis-msg-spoiled-cards/
Part 2: https://hearthstoneplayers.com/depth-analysis-msg-spoiled-cards-part-2/
Part 3: https://hearthstoneplayers.com/depth-analysis-msg-spoiled-cards-part-3/
Part 4: https://hearthstoneplayers.com/spoiled-msg-cards-discussion/
Love you guys, we’ll be seeing each other again very soon,
Cuddles,
Nuba
