Introduction
And so, after a couple long articles, we finally caught up with the spoiled cards, yey!
Now we start to review cards as they go, without the need to make separated “first impressions” and “in-depth” reviews.
This week we had quite a few “unimaginative” cards that were shown to us by Blizzard, which doesn’t surprise me as they usually show a bunch of good cards, then some horrible ones, then they start to build in the hype with good cards until the expansion is released.
The reason I am making this article now is that there are already a couple of cards that I believe shall have an interesting impact on the game and will require some couple hundred words spared into them.
Let’s start with the super anti-climatic cards so we can move on to the actual cards we want to talk about:
Blowgill Sniper
So we start with this little guy right here: blowgill-sniper, which is a somewhat downgrade of elven-archer(HOW IS THIS EVEN POSSIBLE, BLIZZARD? YOU DOWNGRADED ELVEN ARCHER!!). Remember my text about kooky-chemist back in part 3 of my in-depth talk? Well, it completely applies here, as the card is simply a bad filler card.
Backroom Bouncer
So backroom-bouncer is quite the bad 4-drop. Maybe it helps making ironforge-portal less of a horrible card, but outside of that this card is simply…. Meh. Sure Blizzard has to make bad cards in order to fill in the void that there need to be in expansions: you can’t have all cards be good in an expansion otherwise it is either going to be very small, or likely unbalanced. But even then….. Errr, I guess it is ok to have this card being bad.
Oh oh, flesheating-ghoul downgrade!!! You did it again, Blizzard!
Dopplegangster
So dopplegangster is the obvious desperate try at making the “Buff a card in your hand” ability seem less bad. I don’t think it actually managed to do what it aimed to.
Thorium Knuckles
thorium-knuckles is quite the bad/useless weapon. Once again, Blizzard managed to downgrade a Classic card (sword-of-justice), yey!
Don Han’Cho
And talking about bad and unimaginative cards, Blizzard kind of went too far here:
“Well, we make cards that buff cards in your hand!”
“Sure, but we need to make a whole gang of cards”
“Just make the small buff less, the mid buff ok, and the big buff a lot!”
“Hey, I just finished 1/3 of the expansion!”
And stuffed in the middle of those cards was don-hancho. A high costed card that buffs a card in your hand for a lot (because it is a Legendary!), super creative!
The amount of Tempo-loss you are getting for playing a card like this seriously gets me worried. I mean, sure: Bad cards have to exist, and so do bad legendaries, but did it have to be one tied to three classes at once?
I kept thinking about this card, and how I would want to include it in any deck I would do, and mostly all of the things that came to me were related to soggoth-the-slitherer (hehehe), but still I have no idea how to run a card like this one when aiming at deck-building. I mean, you can’t possibly want to put a card like this in your deck only to buff a specific card that you want to have in hand, in the meantime having this buff stuff would not only mean a huge Tempo-loss, it would also mean that you are committing yourself heavily (two turns entirely) on not getting “two-for-one’d”, and don’t get me wrong – Getting two-for-one here has high chances of meaning you instantly lost the game. The important point is that this card’s high cost plus the fact most Midrange decks won’t always have cards in hand means we are highly likely to want to run this on a Control deck, which heightens the chances of getting two-for-one’d.
The lack of creativity on this card is what gets me worried, a lot more than the card itself not being great. I mean, if the game has only been around for like 2-3 years and Blizzard already has no idea what to make of their cards, I fear for what might happen in the next years of Hearthstone.
Knuckles
I think Knuckles used to be a 3/6 or 3/5 4-mana card that was said to be too good in the playtests and got nerfed into a 5-drop.
A lot of people have been discussing this card in the internet forums, and the feedback was quite positive about it: People think this is going to be a legit viable card.
Well, I hate to disappoint but this seems like a pretty weak 5-drop in general. I just can’t see many situations where you would want to play this over stranglethorn-tiger, and that card isn’t even that great to begin with.
For a Vanilla card at 5 mana, we at least need its stats to be overwhelming. Sure, you can deal damage to the enemy face and trade, but I am not quite sure if this is enough to justify taking another card out of your Hunter deck.
Having only 3 attack also means this will sometimes easily get traded into, netting you zero value out of a card that, in a class like hunter, should have a semi-bomb status (See: savannah-highmane and the Tiger himself).
Being a Vanilla card (no effect on the board when played nor snowballing effect or anything like that) is another another big reason why I believe this won’t see any kind of play at all.
Grimetreet Protector
The way I see this card is that it is a huge “win-more” card without much upside. If this was a 6-drop it would’ve been ok I guess but I also believe it would’ve been played on every Paladin deck so Blizzard decided to make this a 7-drop instead.
As to the card’s viability, I don’t think I would want something like this in any of my Paladin decks. It feels a lot like a 6,5 mana card and not a proper 7 mana card, the ability as said before also makes it so even if this card was somewhat better (let’s say 6/7) it could still not make the cut simply because it is not something we look when building a deck.
Question: Is the Grimetreet Protector the lawyer, or the bulls standing (protecting?) behind him?
Grimy Gadgeteer
This is an actual decently designed “Buff stuff in your hand” card. The +2/+2 could be useful, and the fact this costs only 4 mana while having an ok effect and a playable body could mean something.
To tell you the whole truth, I hate this mechanic and don’t believe it is going to be playable (with a few exceptions I will get to the point later this article), because of how “anti-tempo” it feels. However, this card does seem like one of the few with the highest possibilities of seeing play, regardless of how I feel about the whole mechanic.
Just note that a card like this fits a lot more into decks like Tempo Warrior and Dragon Warrior than ones like Control Warrior. Maybe this could be a very useful tool in Taunt Warrior decks!
Smuggler’s Run
This card competes highly with grimestreet-outfitter because I don’t believe we would want to run two of these effects in our “Tempo” deck as it seems like an easy way of losing games due to inconsistency.
At this point we can already start seeing a Paladin Aggro deck filled with 1-drops and cards that draw cards and stuff that buff stuff in your hand. What we have to decided though is how much we want to commit. At this point I think the Outfitter seems like a better fit than this card simply because it has a body that can be buffed itself. The reason I don’t think we would want to run two of those effects (3-4 cards instead of only two) is that the fact we are playing a lot of 1-drop minions means that we are highly likely to have dropped our whole hand by turns 3-4.
This effect, however, feels so needed in a deck such as Goons Aggro (I NAMED IT!) that we could maybe consider running 3 of those? Let’s start our playtests with 1-1 (one of each) and then move the cards accordingly, shall we?
Dirty Rat
So this is another one of these cards everyone has been talking about recently.
This dude is a pretty good buff to wild piloted-shredder, but I am still not quite sure if it is anything else other than that. I heard a lot of comments about it, on how it is going to make opponents lose strong and important Battlecry cards like alexstrasza or malygos but the truth is that we don’t always have ways to deal with these cards, this also would never be a playable early game card, and this also would be horrible against Aggro because the average damage a bad aggro card could do here is two, leaving this a 2/4 taunt which is still “meh”, but the good rolls (getting 3+ drops versus aggro) would completely destroy you and out-tempo yourself in the process.
However, despite being a bad card, it comes out of good design, which is something that has been lacking lately in the cards revealed, I will give Blizzard this bonus right here.
Rat Pack
An incredibly powerful Deathrattle beast that adds to the Hunter arsenal of sticky minions. Rat Pack, though, seems quite the powerful one and can be abused by so many things it gets unreal.
Let me just tell you, right now, that the simple fact this card exists makes it so trogg-beastrager becomes a much viable 2-drop.
Getting your board filled with 1/1s is no joke, especially after an enemy sweeper. We all know how the game gets when there are a lot of consistent sticky minions on it (just look at post-rotation Secret Paladin and Wild Secret Paladin) – it becomes a curve-fest!
Now, the card is indeed a well designed card simply because its effect is different, playable, and can lead to different strategies in the future, but I am slightly worried about the meaning of this for the competitive Hearthstone in the next year where all the sticky Hunter minions will not rotate and we’ll be able to play them for about one year and four to five months.
As for building a deck with a card like this, I am still quite unsure how to proceed regarding abusive-sergeant but I believe I wouldn’t want to play him. Rat Pack feels like a card that would benefit the most from “Buff stuff in your hand” cards like Trogg Beastrager, but I wouldn’t want to commit myself a lot to this card, to a point that I think running only Troggs and houndmasters would be ideal.
Dispatch Kodo
Another very powerful 4-drop that gets buffed by cards that Buff stuff in your hand is Dispatch Kodo. This time, the Kodo makes shaky-zipgunner a better card rather than making trogg-beastrager, but I still don’t know if I would want to run this card over infested-wolf.
The 4-drop slot in Hunter just got some serious competition, as it now has Dispatch Kodo, Infested Wolf and Houndmaster. The fact we have so many Beasts (and Rat Pack!) makes it so I would never want to remove Houndmaster from my deck, but how about the other curves? The problem, though, is that in order to run Dispatch Kodo we would need to add at least one Zipgunner to our deck, which would add even more cards to an already super crowded 3-drop Hunter slot, in the meantime we would still be lacking on the 1-2 drop department which leads to awkwardness in our deck-building.
This card, despite being a good one, feels like it is quite worse than rat-pack and it makes it so our deck-building has high chances of not including this card in the long run.
Closing
And this covers up all the revealed cards up to this very moment!
A lot of very dissapointing cards were revealed this week, but I still see a lot of potential and cards we are likely to want to play in many different decks revealed, so for a 140~ expansion card, I will call this a win!
I hope you guys have been enjoying the reviews so far, and we’ll be back later with more discussion regarding the latest revealed cards!
Hope you all enjoyed this, and we’ll see each other again very soon!
Cuddles,
Nuba
