Introduction
Hello and welcome to another one of those Reviews I make every a couple of cards have been revealed to us! This time we had some pretty good and innovative cards that are likely to bring different and fun decks to Hearthstone.
I am quite excited about the cards being revealed this week as they bring a lot of thought into deck building, making brewing much cooler and fun than it already seems to be!
So, since I can’t contain myself any longer, let’s just start the reviews!
Kabal Lackey
Tempo Mage, or as I like calling it “Midrange Mage” can have a new face with this card’s addition to Mage’s bunch of good cards. Take note that this wasn’t the only Secret Affinity card revealed this week, and we might even see a few other of those cards in the coming weeks. This means that there is a possibility (and Blizzard is likely to let that for players to figure out by themselves) of a future Standard Mage Secret deck to be done.
What I like about this card the most is that despite being too specific, it allows you to get a huge Tempo Boost in favor of card advantage, much like innervate and preparation, but in this card’s case you also get a 2/1 minion for your troubles of making a Secret-affinity deck.
Inkmaster Solia
The super mega hyper obvious interaction here is to combo the Inkmaster with kazakuses 10-mana potion for super value.
When I came here to write about this card I nearly forgot that I was writing an article because I simply opened the deck builder and started imagining what a Reno mage deck would look like once MSG is out, and so far the deck has looked quite good!
Inkmaster Solia is an obvious card, but I decided to talk a little about it because of how it impacts the creation of Reno Mage for the next 4 months before Reno Jackson rotates out – Reno Mage often draws so many cards (even more than Renolock!) that you likely will have a lot of choices to play whenever you get to play Solia, not to mention the Solia makes cabalists-tome a much better card at Reno Mage simply because it gives you an extra turn to cast such a slow but valuable card.
I just don’t get why Blizzard is creating so many “Reno” cards when they want to rotate Mister Jackson themselves.
Wild will surely be a much cooler Format after the rotation though.
Potion of Polymorph
So this card reminds me a lot of snipe, which is a “super” meta-oriented tech that can sometimes do good if you play it on the right deck in the right metagame.
That “right deck” would be a “Secret Tempo Mage” deck that is likely to become playable once the rotation comes, but outside of that this card isn’t as playable as many might be saying it is:
it is not a Midrange card, it is not a Control card, and likely not a Reno card.
However, like I said, this card could end up making (and being one of the reasons) a viable Tempo Secret Mage in the future, and I have to say that I even already have a decklist for it, one that doesn’t even uses cards that will rotate!
Seadevil Stinger
There has been some discussion lately, not about Murlocs viability, but about “Murlock” (Murloc Warlock) viability and this card.
Well, it works. Recently a Murloc Zoo deck made it to 12 wins in the Heroic Tavern Brawl, and I just couldn’t see that deck being worse if they had this card added. I don’t quite recall the exact deck list I saw on reddit, but being able to play two minions in one early turn seems like quite the advantage if you can take it.
There a few implications to “Murlock” decks, which are all related to the correct building, and if a deck happens to exist, it will likely have no room whatsoever for innovation simply because it would take even more damage than Standard Warlock decks, thus being very “build sensitive”.
Another point, this time against this card, is that it is only good if played on curve, so that could make it so this didn’t become viable for some reason, but since we are talking about a deck that only wants to play stuff on curve, this could be a good push for it to become a viable, strong, strategy.
Bomb Squad
Not as garbage as the overall community reaction to this card. No, you won’t always use this to clear Sylvanas and give your opponent a “time bomb”, but being able to remove Midrange minions at safe health seems like quite the strong push especially for classes like Druid that don’t have spot removal.
Now, back to the community reaction, this card isn’t quite the shining one, and could not make the cut into real decks at the end of the day, but the simple fact this card exists makes it so you have extra options to work with in terms of Removal, either being an extra Control Removal, a Druid Removal, or something else entirely that we didn’t think about right now.
Felfire Potion
A much cheaper Warlock AOE than twisting-nether that will still get the job done, most of the time. I loved this card as it should bring Renolock to a much higher level than it currently is, and Renolock is one of my favorite decks of all time.
Now, to the card itself, it does deals a lot of damage to you, but with the assumption that by doing so you prevent yourself from taking a lot more face damage, just as hellfire. The thing though, is that a card like this often requires a great amount of healing added to your deck, which means we would need reno-jackson more than anything here simply because of the amount of damage we would be taking from cards like this, Hellfire and our own Hero Power. Maybe they make a Reno-ish card that heals you for 10? That would be quite amazing actually (and we would be running two of those, likely).
The only discussion regarding the viability of this card post-rotation is related to how much healing can Warlocks do.
Kabal Crystal Runner
And this pretty much closes the Tempo-Secret deck that we have been discussing this article. With the addition of such a high Tempo Secret-affinity card we can actually have a pretty strong Secrets deck going within the next few months, and even if it doesn’t work right now maybe because Tempo Mage (the traditional build with flamewakers) could be just better, it is surely to be a very cool build to be played and tested once the rotation comes.
I wanted to talk some bad things about this card, like saying you won’t always be playing secrets or whatever, but between running eight secrets in your deck and having both kabal-lackey and kirin-tor-mage, you could even play this on turn 3 for zero mana if you’re lucky enough, even turn two with The Coin if you’re super mega hyper lucky I guess.
The big sellout of this card is that it is a card that in the correct deck can be played for very low cost, allowing you to play multiple cards in the same turn – And we know how cards like these can be overpowered.
Raza the Chained
Reno Priest never actually existed as a viable or playable/good deck because Priest cards are usually very bad and filled with Techs.
The fact we barely have a 10/30 deck base right now to make a viable Control Priest deck means that our Reno Priest base would be like 5/30, which would make it so we would be running 25/30 of Tech cards.
However, this doesn’t mean a card like this is a bad one. First things first, it is as strong as you get – Permanent Hero Power cost reduction is quite strong, especially on a 5/5 body for the cheap bargain of 5 mana only, and if you could upgrade your hero power with justicar-trueheart and still have it cost zero mana, then it becomes super overpowered if you could get the right deck to exist.
Once again, the place where I would see a card like this being playable right away is the Wild Format, which keeps looking better than better than the Standard format by the minute.
Priest actually has some cool and viable tools in Wild, which could lead to yet another high-tier Priest deck being added to the bunch, with the upside of being a super fun and interactive deck.
Cards that Don’t Need in-depth Discussion
The cards that I don’t think need much discussion:
- backstreet-leper – Trash card, if you want to know the reasons just read the previous articles, I discussed heightening low-cost abilities quite a lot in some of those.
- bloodfury-potion – Obvious Demon Aggro card, +3/+3 is “meh” but since we are talking Warlock, the card could see play simply because it gives Zoo lists with Demons a good boost, it also happens to be a 3-drop, and imp-gang-boss is rotating out. Would need more demons in Zoo to become better/viable.
Toxic Sewer Ooze
Much like Backstreet Leper and all the other downgraded classic cards Blizzard tries to push at us, this card doesn’t seem like a viable card simply because acidic-swamp-ooze is just way better, has a better battlecry, costs less mana, and if you want heavy weapon removal (or just better body) you also have the option to run harrison-jones.
Sure, you could run this card together with those two in some super Weapon heavy metagame Reno Deck simply because the 3-drop curve is often lacking in the Renolock department, and the metagame could call of stuff like this, but that seems to be just about it. Wow, I actually ended up talking about this card more than I thought I would! Well then, I will be giving this card a proper Zone in the article!
Closing
And this pretty much closes all the cards we had to review this week, yey!
I keep on getting more and more excited about these cards, so much that the only deck I want to play more and more right now is Renolock, and I just can’t stand playing anything else simply because I keep looking and newly announced cards and getting more and more Hyped about Reno Jackson decks.
This week was quite the blast in terms of card review, which totally made up for the super unfun week that we had last week! Let’s hope our next week brings some amazing cards for the Lotus gang, as I already have my Token Druid deck ready to be played in favor of the hype I will likely be into next week!
I hope you guys enjoyed these reviews so far, and if you want to add anything to the discussion, or point something about the cards I reviewed that I might not have noticed, feel free to post it in the comments as I will surely be reading them daily!
Love you guys, we’ll see each other again in the next review, very soon!
Cuddles,
Nuba
