Introduction
Greetings, dear readers, and welcome to another installment of ”Running Wild”, a article series where I cover all things regrading the wild format. Spoiler seasons are like Christmas to me. I love them and I get excited whenever a new card is revealed. You have undoubtedly already read some other articles on this site regarding the possible impact that new cards will have on the standard format. Today I’m going to talk to you about the impact that the revealed cards will have on the wild format and, let me tell you, things get wild pretty fast! I recall Ben Brode saying that the development team have the wild format in mind and that some of the new cards that are coming our way will spawn new decks in the wild format and, from what I’m seeing at this moment, he was right. These new cards really do have a great chance of spawning new and interesting wild decks.
Sit back, relax, and let’s dive right into this! 🙂
You’ve Got A Quest
First let’s talk about quests. Quest is a new type of spell. It appears in your opening hand, it takes up a secret slot although it is not a secret and it has a special condition attached to it. If you fulfill that condition you will get a pretty game ending reward (in some cases). As I’ve mentioned in my previous article (click me), quest cards are made in a way that they empower certain deck archetypes. There was a recent blog post about the design of quest cards and it turns out that I was spot on with my statement but, in that same article, a rogue quest was revealed and it turned the archetype empowerment concept on its head. Archetype empowerment aside, quests present us with a opportunity to make cool and unique wild decks so let’s explore them, shall we?
Awaken the Makers
awaken-the-makers is the first secret that we’re going to explore. This is one of the three pretty straightforward quests which require you to build a very specific deck around them. In this case we’re dealing with deathrattle priest or deathrattle Reno N’zoth dragon priest which is probably the longest deck archetype name in the entire game. First let’s focus on what good deathrattle minions to have access to in the wild format:piloted-shredder, sludge-belcher, sylvanas-windrunner, dark-cultist, zombie-chow, deathlord. There are more than these few but I didn’t want to name cards like mad-scientist because you shouldn’t play that card in a deck that has no secrets in it.
Another, and in my opinion far more interesting use of this card, is in a deathrattle Reno N’zoth dragon priest. Now, some of you might be wondering why are there so many deck archetypes piled into this one deck and that is simply because you can do this and the synergies are really strong. Since priest doesn’t have a super powerful hero power like warlock and doesn’t have great removal and/or utility spells like mage, what you’re left with is powerful minion synergy and it would be foolish not to use it. You’re already used to seeing this deck in the wild format and some of you might now a less powerful version that is currently being played on the standard ladder (reno priest without deathrattle synergy). The idea behind this deck is to go into super late game and beat your opponent either by fatigue or by board presence. What you want to do first is to finish your quest as soon as possible so that you can get the quest reward: amara-warden-of-hope. Once you’ve done that you’re playing this deck like any other Reno deck except that amara-warden-of-hope is your reno-jackson. When you’re low on health you’ll be using her to boost you to 40 health and next time you’ll be using reno-jackson to heal you to full health. By the time your opponent gets you to low health again he/she has already exhausted all of his/her removal option and strong plays. The only thing that you need to do now is just drop nzoth-the-corruptor and you’ve won the game! 🙂
Lakkari Sacrifice
Next on our list of quests is the warlock quest, lakkari-sacrifice. I’ve heard opinions about this card not being played in a discard zoo warlock deck but more in a control warlock type of deck as the win condition that you get slowly as the game progresses. I don’t think that the card will be played that way and here is why: if you’re playing a control type of deck, like a Reno deck or the old handlock deck, you usually don’t want to discard your cards because every card in your deck serves its own purpose. Fitting in several ways of discarding cards only to get the quest working will, in the long run, do you more harm than good. You don’t want to feel the loss of the cards that you’ve discarded in order to get this quest finished. This is why I believe that playing a deck that is fully centered around discarding your cards, a deck that doesn’t necessarily have to fit the zoo deck archetype, is far better than trying to fit this card in a control non discard oriented deck and fill it with cards that discard cards so that you might eventually get this quest up n running.
So, what kind of discard warlock deck should you be running? From what I’ve gathered so far, many players are discussing some type of midrange discard warlock for standard and saying that the discard zoo deck might not be the best option for completing this quest. Some of the discard cards are rotating out soon and among them are fist-of-jaraxxus and tiny-knight-of-evil. How important are those cards for the discard deck? To be completely honest, I’ve actually ran tiny-knight-of-evil in a discard warlock deck because I’ve wanted to try to make it work but it just doesn’t. It is simply not that good of a card and I don’t think that it will see any play in a discard deck. fist-of-jaraxxus, on the other hand, pun intended, is not that bad of a card. Yes, it is significantly worse than shadow-bolt because it costs more and its target is chosen randomly but consider it a bonus to the discard effect that you’ve just played. I don’t think that anyone here will be hard casting fist-of-jaraxxus unless it is the only card in their hand. I’m on the fence with this one but I don’t think that it will be used all that often. What tools to we have available to us? malchezaars-imp, soulfire, darkshire-librarian, silverware-golem, doomguard, dark-bargain and the new cards, lakkari-felhound and clutchmother-zavas. Have you noticed the problem with this? The problem is that there aren’t enough discard deck tools to warrant a full on discard zoo deck which is why I believe that midrange discard warlock is the way to go. Besides, I would love to toss in twisting-nether once the portal hits the board 🙂 Unlike the previous quest, lakkari-sacrifice is no doubt going to have a huge impact on the wild metagame as it will bring about a completely new deck to the game.
Unite the Murlocs
Murlocs, murlocs, swimming in the ocean. ‘Causing a commotion ’cause they are so awesome!
I love playing a march of the murlocs deck! If you don’t know what I’m talking about (I went into more detail here), march of the murlocs is a murloc deck archetype which is focused on playing a bunch of murlocs that buff each other and beat your opponent with your army of bloodthirsty fishmen! Mrghlrmglrmg! This is an old archetype which was, during the beta, played in a murloc warlock deck before blood-imp was nerfed into the version that we have today. Will unite-the-murlocs be enough to make a shaman march of the murlocs deck viable in the wild format? It might be good enough to make it a decent deck in the standard format but I don’t think that the deck will be anything too viable although we still don’t know all the cards that are coming out in Journey To Un’Goro so we can’t tell yet. Luckily, it is easier to predict the viability of a deck in the wild format.
A big problem for this deck in the standard format is the loss of everyfin-is-awesome. I know, I know, the card was never played anyway, but if march of the murlocs shaman deck is going to be viable then it will need a powerful buff spell like this one. Let’s be perfectly clear on this, everyfin-is-awesome is a fun card but it is far from an amazing card. It had multiple different metagames to see play in and it never did so I don’t think that it will see much play even now. I really want to tell you that murlocs are coming and that they are going to be amazing in a murloc shaman deck but unfortunately I don’t think that this is the case. Just because one quest card which supports this type of deck came out it doesn’t mean, by any stretch of the imagination, that the deck suddenly became viable. Murloc shaman suffers from a lot of problems, mainly card draw, and those problems have been around for years and the deck wasn’t viable in the previous metagames because there were other more powerful decks which had an easy time dealing with it. All of those decks are a part of the wild mode which makes it even harder for a murloc shaman deck to rise and take its place in the wild metagame. The only two things that wild murloc shaman has and standard murloc shaman lacks are everyfin-is-awesome and siltfin-spiritwalker. siltfin-spiritwalker seems like a great addition to the deck but keep in mind that this card has been around since Goblins Vs Gnomes and it never made any impact in making murloc shaman viable. If it had failed to make an impact until now then I doubt that it will make any impact once Journey To Un’Goro releases. Unfortunately, if you’ve hoped that you will finally have a viable wild murloc shaman deck it ain’t going to happen yet. Maybe, just maybe, it will be a viable deck in the standard format but I don’t think that it will. 🙁
The Caverns Below
As a veteran DnD player and someone who loves good fantasy art I must say that the only good part of the-caverns-below is the amazing artwork. The artwork invokes a sense of exploration and dungeoncrawling which is something that I love in fantasy games, especially in DnD, and I will most surely you this artwork in one of my next sessions. Now let’s talk about the actual card effect. I, like many rogue players out there, feel like rogue has been getting the short end of the stick for a very long time and that it will continue to do so with Journey To Un’Goro. In the same blog post where this card was revealed, the developers have stated that they have felt like quests were forcing players to build specific decks and stick with those decks so they chose to take a different route with the rogue quest. Unfortunately, I think that it might have been better if they just forced rogue into a certain archetype in order to fulfill the quest…a certain viable archetype, not this. So, what can be done with this card?
At least the means of fulfilling the quest are easy to come by. I think that most people thought about gang-up leaving the standard when they saw this card and I admit that I was one of them. Hopefully, I am a wild player so this doesn’t really bother me at all. Despite bashing the poorly designed quest I did manage to find fun ways of making it work in the wild format, but first let’s address what do you need to do in order to complete the quest. You need to play a minion with the same name 4 times in a game. What this basically means is that you need to bounce the minion twice. Just playing two copies of the minion from your deck like you would in any other game already gets you half way to completing the quest. It is painfully obvious that the developers want thistle-tea to work but we’re going to do our best not to use the card! thistle-tea sucks, don’t use it, it is an awful card. What you can use to get this quest done is shadowstep, shadowcaster and youthful-brewmaster. I would rather play kidnapper than thistle-tea!
Ok, now that I’ve ranted about completing the quest, how can we use its reward to its full potential. There is the painfully obvious route and the stupidly fun yet difficult to achieve rout. The painfully obvious route is to us this card in a mill rogue deck, gang-up your coldlight-oracle and eventually have a deck filled with 5/5 mill engines! However, why should we do that when there is an even crazier combo that can be done with this card? Play a pirate rogue, use shadowstep to complete the quest and cast gang-up on patches-the-pirate. Mill rogue? Why think small when you can be in charrrrrrge with an army of crazy 5/5 chargers? This is the most fun think, in my opinion, that you can do with the-caverns-below. While fun, this quest won’t have much of an impact on the wild meta.
The Marsh Queen
This is another well designed quest. the-marsh-queen gives you an amazing reward while not forcing you to play a specific deck archetype like the first three quests do. Note that in order to complete this quest you will need to play minions, not summon them, so as much as I would love for this to work with unleash-the-hounds that is not going to happen because that will be broken beyond belief. At first glance I thought that this card was made to help aggro hunter because aggro hunter is the deck that uses the most 1 cost minions so completing the quest should be a piece of cake but lately I have seen people talking about using this card in a combo hunter deck, something that we’ve haven’t seen since the closed beta, and after reading a bit more into it I must admit that I’ve grown to like that idea despite still believing that aggro hunter is going to be the way to go for running this quest. Why aggro hunter? Why combo hunter? What is the reward for completing this quest? Feast your eyes upon her majesty, queen-carnassa!
queen-carnassa fills your deck with raptors. Raptors are a 1 cost 3/2 minions with ”battlecry: draw a card.” which makes the combo deck possible. Before I go into the specifics of the combo deck I would like to make a list of good 1 drops that you’ll probably end up using in order to get queen-carnassa from the quest. abusive-sergeant, argent-squire, leper-gnome, clockwork-gnome, mistress-of-mixtures, secretkeeper, worgen-infiltrator, alleycat, fiery-bat and webspinner are all viable 1 drop minions for different types of hunter decks. What is the first thing that we notice in this list? Most of these are ran in aggro decks and the quest wants you to play seven 1 drop minions. If you’re going to try to make a combo deck than let’s see which of these minions can you run in a non aggro deck? webspinner, mistress-of-mixtures, secretkeeper and alleycat. Is it worth to run some of the worst 1 drops on this list? I don’t think that it is. Yes, playing thundra-rhino with raptors to deal crazy amount of damage to your opponent very fast is a nice idea but you first need to get seven really good 1 drop minions, find a way to fit them into your deck, and then you’re probably stalling while waiting for the combo to work. At best you can deal 17 damage for 10 mana. Ask yourself is this really what you want to be doing? I don’t think that it is. How about running an classic aggro hunter where you don’t need to bend over backwards to fit seven viable 1 drop minions into your deck and having the raptors deal with one of the biggest problems of the deck, card draw. I think that it is far better to use the quest this way despite it being played in a *brainless aggro deck*. Will the quest have any huge impact on the wild meta? I think that it will. I think that thanks to the quest reward people are going to either run it in an aggro deck and we’ll see more aggro hunters on the ladder or they will try to make a combo deck work so we’ll see more of that. Either way the quest will surely be played and even if the deck doesn’t end up being the most viable deck I think that we can safely assume that it will stick around for much, much longer than murloc shaman quest oriented deck.
The Rest
Now that we’re done talking about the revealed quests it is time to check out some other cards. At this point in time there are 44 revealed cards and, much like with quests, not all of them are equally good and not all of them are going to have an equal impact, if any impact, on the wild metagame. While it is too soon to say which individual cards are going to completely shake the metagame it is not too hard to assume which cards are at least going to see some play in the wild metagame.
The New Elise
elise-the-trailblazer is the second version of the night elf explorer elise-starseeker and, much like its previous version, it seems to be a card made for control deck. Seems to be? Scratch that. This is a card made for control decks. However, how good is it? For those of you that don’t know how the card works, allow me to explain. elise-the-trailblazer shuffles a sealed Un’Goro pack into your deck. What is a sealed Un’Goro pack? It is a 2 mana spells that acts exactly like a pack of cards except that it doesn’t let you keep the cards in your collection because that would just be crazy. The cool thing about the pack is that it acts exactly like a normal pack which means that you can get cards of various rarities, although I think that it was mentioned that the pack will have a guaranteed epic and/or legendary card, and the cards that you get come from various classes. This is the most important thing about the pack because you can get good stuff from other classes that you normally wouldn’t have access to. This is extremely important because, and I assure you of this, your opponent won’t be able to predict which cards did you get out of your pack and, because of that, he or she won’t be able to play around those cards. However, how does elise-the-trailblazer compare to elise-starseeker and will she take her place in control decks? Yes, in standard control deck and no in wild control decks. I’ve seen people discuss this on the internet, which version of Elise to run in their control warriors, and I want to make this perfectly clear. You can and you should run both! There is no reason not to. They are both amazing tech cards for control vs control matchup and I’m sure that elise-the-trailblazer will leave her impact on the wild format.
The Elemental Package
kalimos-primal-lord and his friends are going to have a huge impact on the wild metagame, even more so than on the standard metagame because ragnaros-the-firelord is being moved to the wild format. kalimos-primal-lord is insane because not only is it a really powerful 8 drop with a potentially game ending effect but more importantly because you can choose which of the four spells to pick. You can choose them and that makes this card completely insane. For those who don’t know, the spells are invocation-of-air, invocation-of-fire, invocation-of-earth and invocation-of-water and each one of them is pretty good. invocation-of-air is the most talked about one because it acts like a less powerful, but free, flamestrike and it is probably going to be the most picked one and that is ok. It is easy to see which one appears to be superior to other. invocation-of-water is great because it heals for quite a lot and you get the 7/7 body on the board so that is nice. invocation-of-fire is good at first glance but it would have been way better if it had let you choose your target. invocation-of-earth appears to be really bad though I wouldn’t count it out yet because there is a very good chance that we will get a card that either costs less based on the amount of elementals that you have on the board or buffs all of your elementals and if any of that happens than invocation-of-earth is going to be amazing.
The next part of the slowly forming elemental package is stone-sentinel which is not a bad card. It costs 7 mana which means that it fits your elemental curve perfectly. First you play fire-elemental (remember this card?) on turn 6 to remove something, than you play stone-sentinel on turn 7 and you get the taunt minions because you’ve played an elemental on the previous turn and because there is no overload attached to stone-sentinel you can immediately play kalimos-primal-lord on the upcoming turn. I like this idea and I think that elementals are going to see quite a lot of play in both wild and standard format though they might just be a little bit better in the standard format because of less decks that could counter them thought that doesn’t need to be the case. Either way we’ve just scratched the surface of the upcoming elemental package and what we saw so far looks absolutely amazing! Except for the mage legendary, pyros. That card is just bad and I would advise dusting it to craft something better…like kalimos-primal-lord 🙂
Conclusion
We’ve reached the end of the first ”Running Wild” article that focuses on the upcoming cards. There won’t be a ”Running Wild” article next week, most likely, but I’ll write something else regarding the upcoming expansion and a week after that I’ll get back to writing ”Running Wild”. There has been an announcement today which is that all of the cards will be revealed on the 31st of March, next Friday, so we will have enough time to analyze all of the cards and speculate on the future of the wild metagame and what decks might arise now that we’ve seen all of the cards. It is still too early to predict the future of the metagame because there are only 44 cards that have been revealed so far but I think that we can all agree that the cards that will have the most impact on the wild metagame are the new quest cards because most of them are forcing you to build completely new decks around them and whatever forces players to build more decks has a huge impact on the metagame…naturally. I know that I’ve been talking about the quest cards a lot in this article and that it might seem like not many other cards will have an impact on the wild metagame but that is because it is much harder to shake a metagame of an eternal format. Their metagames are usually fixed into stone and refuse to have huge changes which is perfectly fine because that is the nature of the format. It offers stability.
So, what do you think, what cards are going to shake the wild metagame? Are you excited to try the new Elise or the elemental package? Leave your feedback in the comment section below! As always if you’ve liked this article do consider following me on twitter https://twitter.com/Eternal_HS. There you can ask me all sorts of Hearthstone questions (unrelated to this article) and I’ll gladly answer them as best as I can!
Published: Mar 26, 2017 06:27 am