Introduction
Hello everyone! It was such a long night playtesting all these cards, playing a lot of different builds to give you guys the best results possible for each and every card and their impact on their respective archetypes.
This kind of information is amazing to have, especially if you don’t have time to playtest everything in Hearthstone but still want to playtest the best new cards, which is the reason why I am sharing it with you
Obviously, I couldn’t playtest all the seemingly-playable cards in one night, but I have to say I actually managed to playtest all the cards I wanted to, which are the ones i’ll be discussing in this article today!
So, let us begin!
Deadly Fork
So, this was the first card I playtested, obviously – I am grinding those final wins for my Golden Rogue, so it was the best initial playtesting card.
As we thought, the card seems like a cute addition to Rogues, and it does seem to make the Rogue class a lot more consistent as well (you’re actually playing stuff proactively in the early game).
The feeling I had when playing with the playtesting Midrange Rogue deck posted in our Premium article was that the card actually made the deck a lot more consistent. I also noticed that it feels like a much better card to look for in mulligan than unearthed-raptor, which can ultimately mean it’ll take the Raptor’s place in the Midrange N’Zoth Rogue deck.
Another interesting point is that it is yet another Deathrattle card that replaces itself in the hand. I felt like I was drawing too many cards at some point, simply because all my Deathrattles put something in my hand, and now we have yet another one – This means that gadgetzan-auctioneer loses a lot of value in the deck, but I still can’t quite tell if I would want to remove him, probably yes.
Verdict(On Midrange Rogue): Deadly fork did good in our initial playtesting, and it might ultimately replace the Gadgetzan Auctioneer as the deck seems to be having no draw problems at all, but the second copy of Deadly Fork could also be added in place of Unearthed Raptor. The Auctioneer is the most promising candidate for replacement.
Ivory Knight
The next card we playtested was Ivory Knight. The initial feeling about the card was that it was going to be so good that we would be able to replace cairne-bloodhoof for justicar-trueheart just because of it. And while we indeed can be playing with more early game stuff like a pair of infested-tauren instead of ragnaros-the-firelord, Ivory Knight isn’t that relevant in the late game as we expected it to be in order to make Cairne a card we don’t want to have.
As a N’Zoth Paladin, the card I got the most out of the Knights was equality, to have extra ways of dealing with the opponent’s board – I have to say that this actually was very important and game changing.
Ivory Knight also made up for the Health lost by running dual rallying-blade, which also helped me a lot in today’s metagame matchups such as Dragon Warrior and Shamans.
Verdict(On N’Zoth Paladin): We overestimated the card’s power, in a way that it doesn’t change the deck it is added, still it makes the deck more powerful and that is something amazing to have. Despite this not being as OP and we thought, it is still a decent addition to N’Zoth Paladin.
Cloaked Huntress
And the biggest disappointment of the night is here. I mean, I actually thought this card wasn’t going to be as good as people were thinking, but in the end is felt terrible having it in our deck.
The main reason is that it not only forces us to run bad cards such extra Secrets, it also is a mediocre 3-drop when compared to the rest of Hunter’s 3-drop curve.
I played a lot of different Secret Hunter versions, with and without yogg-saron-hopes-end and the one thing all of these builds had in common is how inconsistent they were.
Even when I managed to have the dream hand of turn 4 lock-and-load -> Coin -> Huntress -> 4 secrets I still lost because the deck was too clunky and the cards weren’t good enough on their own.
Verdict(On Lock N’ Load Hunter): We didn’t expect much from this card to begin with, so the results actually matched our expectation. After playing around 10 games we could feel how this isn’t the correct way of actually making a Hunter deck.
Silverware Golem
Guess which was the most played deck in Legend tonight?
Yep, guessed right: Discard Zoo.
For some reason, a lot of people are playing that deck, mostly because of the deck’s potential.
silverware-golem seemed to be quite the card in the playtesting, but the most interesting thing about the whole playtesting thing is that the actual big number of Discard cards means we also want to run fist-of-jaraxxus in our deck.
This happens because we are playing way too many discard cards (we have to), while we would be only having 2 cards that we would want to discard.
So, Fist of Jaraxxus ultimately made the cut in discard Zoo in place of the other 4-drops.
The deck is good, but it feels like it’ll be even better when we have access to malchezaars-imp.
Verdict(On Discard Zoo): The card made even more unplayable cards viable than we initially imagined. Discard Zoo might become Warlock’s new face given how today’s Standard Zoo is vulnerable to ravaging-ghoul.
Priest of the Feast
The initial playtesting build was our N’Zoth based Control priest deck, and the results were the ones we expected – The deck still sucks. Priest of the Feast kind of fixes nothing at all for Control Priest lists, regardless of being a good card on its own.
Then I moved on to Dragon Priest, and here is where the card shined brightly – The card seems to help even more than initially thought.
The main reason is because you can run just a lot of proactive cards because you don’t have to worry about healing yourself that much (which means, we can actually drop darkshire-alchemist, for example).
Priest of the Feast helps catching up when you’re low on Health even on a deck that doesn’t have as many spells as Dragon Priest, while the body seems like something amazing and fitting for the deck – it is yet another off-the-curve card that you can play in Dragon Priest.
As we predicted, the difference between a 4-drop with 5 health and one with 6 is super relevant when the card is actually played on curve.
Another interesting thing that we noticed when playtesting Dragon Priest is how much netherspite-historian and book-wyrm should make the deck better – I played museum-curators and drakonid-crusher and I basically felt like having their ONK counterparts would feel much stronger whenever I played them.
Verdict(On Control and Dragon Priest): The card is good, but it is more of a support card than anything – it won’t make Control Priest playable, not even a bit. Meanwhile Dragon Priest got a neat upgrade with it – Another 6 health minion to curve on turn 4, and that is bigger than what most people are imagining – we know better!
Decks to Play
And these are the ONK-Based decks I recommend you playing this weekend:
Closing
And this pretty much covers all the cards we wanted to playtest in the first week of One Night in Karazhan!
This week is going to be quite crazy for me, i’ll be playing quite a lot of Rogue, maybe change the build more drastically but I guess you guys will also have tons of fun with it!
I probably won’t be posting more articles this week, because ROGUE! But don’t forget to let me know YOUR playtesting results here in the comments, especially the ones I didn’t mentioned!
Love you guys, see you next week!
Nuba
