Introduction
It finally happened! Yesterday we had the full Journey to Un’Goro card reveal stream and it was amazing. We’ve finally got to see the remaining quest cards, remaining legendary minions, several new deck archetypes being played on the stream and we’ve got the official expansion release date which is, unsurprisingly, the 6th of April. Only 5 more days (6 for EU) until Journey to Un’Goro arrives and introduces us to a whole new and whole different (hopefully) metagame. Before this page gets flooded with card reviews, metagame predictions and deck ideas, I’m going to do a quick full reveal roundup, giving you a quick opinion on the new secrets and which cards excite me the most (and, in my opinion, will see play in the upcoming metagame).
Sit back, relax, and let’s dive right into this! 🙂
Remaining Quests
Let’s start this article off with what I consider the most exciting part of the upcoming expansion, the quest cards. So far we’ve been shown 6 different quest cards, some better than others, but we were missing warrior, mage and druid quest cards. We’ve not only got to see them during the live stream but we even saw the warrior one in action. I know that a lot of you are super excited to play with the new quest cards, I myself am looking forward to that, and all I can say that 2 out of 3 revealed quest cards were absolutely amazing with the last one probably going to become 400 dust at some point. Can you guess which one is that? I’ll give you a moment to guess.
If you’ve guess ”the warrior one” than you are absolutely correct. These articles are usually about 4000 words long but not even 4000 words would be enough to express the hatred that I feel for this card. Some players can’t stand cards like jade-idol, tunnel-trogg, dr-boom or even mysterious-challenger. I can’t stand fire-plumes-heart. Can’t even stand it. Here is why: as I’ve mentioned in previous articles, my favorite deck to play in the entire game is my wild control warrior. I absolutely love that deck and warrior is by far my favorite class to play (don’t worry, I can’t stand the pirate version). As someone who has the most games with warrior I can assure you that taunt warrior doesn’t work! It doesn’t work. It didn’t work in any of its previous versions and it won’t work now. So, what did the warrior get as his quest cards? Was it to accumulate a certain amount of armor? Was it do use a certain amount of weapons? Was it probably to play huge minions? No, no it wasn’t. It was to play 7 taunt minions! What? Why? Ok, maybe there are players out there who like playing taunt warrior and are looking forward to it. I’ve thought that, if anything, maybe the reward is decent enough to warrant playing such a horrible deck. Nope, completely wrong again. sulfuras basically makes you ragnaros-the-firelord which can also attack. Some might see that as a good thing but I don’t like it one bit. This is similar to the paladin quest but while paladin quest says ”play a horrible deck and get a game ending reward” this one says ”play a horrible deck and get a decent at best reward”. Ugh, next quest!
Now this is more like it! open-the-waygate is one of those quests that appear to be a little bit harder to complete but are in return extremely flexible since you don’t need to build the entire deck around them. The reward is time-warp which is the first card that we’ve ever received that gives you an extra turn. This is amazing, I like this one a lot! time-warp is a super flexible card which will without a doubt spawn a combo deck on its own (which combo deck is yet to be seen). From what I’ve gathered so far you can play a bunch of spell and then play two arcane-giants along with time-warp, gain an extra turn, on the following turn play alexstrasza to set your opponent’s health to 15 and bash them with your arcane-giants for 16 damage to the face! Sure, a single taunt minion completely ruins this combo but there will most certainly be ways to go around it. All in all, I really love this card and I can’t wait to test it out. Next card!
jungle-giants is my favorite quest card of them all! The reward is barnabus and its effect is absolutely crazy! I love playing late game decks that play huge minions, hence why control warrior is my favorite deck of all time, and ramp druid is something that a friend and I have been trying to make great again for years but with no luck. We both play Magic: The Gathering and we’re both into insane ramp decks so it is only natural that we’re gravitating towards the ramp druid deck. However, the deck itself has a huge issue which is that it is extremely slow and midrange minions nowadays handle it with ease. It is better to play several smaller minions than one big minion and when you’re trying to make a deck which should be focused on playing big minions…well, you see a problem here, don’t you? barnabus offers a solution to this. One of the biggest problems that big minions have is that, well, they are expensive, but if you can play them for free than you can find a way to play multiple big minions per turn and when you can drop something like ancient-of-war and ysera in a single turn your ramp deck becomes a force to be reckoned with. All in all, this is my absolute favorite quest and I can’t wait to start experimenting with it.
High Potential Cards
Now it is time to check out the other non legendary cards that were revealed yesterday.
dinomancy is one of those cards that have potential to make a certain deck archetype amazing. Beast hunter is nothing new but so far the deck has always been underwhelming. The developers have, over the course of a few years, been trying harder and harder to push hunter into the direction of a control deck, to not have it remain as ”the aggro class” forever, but they have never managed to nail it. This is why dinomancy shows so much promise. One of the biggest reason why control hunter doesn’t work is its hero power which is just not suited for a control deck. Control decks are slow and their hero powers usually contribute to that play style but hunter’s by itself can end the game much quicker than any other control deck can. Changing that power into a buffing power may not suddenly make control hunter completely viable, it is too soon to tell, but it is without a doubt a step into right direction. The best part of this hero power? You get to choose which beast do you want to buff. This is, in my opinion, huge and you can expect to see a lot more beast hunters appearing on the ladder once the expansion launches.
Here comes the card which is going to make elemental shaman decks unbearable to play against! C’mon, don’t act all shocked, we knew that this was coming at one point or the other. fire-plume-harbinger is a 2 drop, elemental, which is a one time emperor-thaurissan for all elemental minions that you have in your hand. This is crazy because of the way that elementals work. Usually you’re going to need a perfect curve to be able to get their effects to trigger but when you can lower the cost of elementals that are currently in your hand there is a reasonable chance of adjusting that curve at the later point in the game. Besides, a 1 mana discount is never a bad thing. A part of me is hoping that I’m misjudging this card and that it is actually completely bad but I think that it is amazing because I’ve been traumatized by shaman so much over the last year so all I can see is potential in new shaman cards, even if there might not be one. I can tell you that if any class is going to play a full elemental deck then that class is going to be shaman. How will that turn out? Probably extremely powerful, thanks to fire-plume-harbinger, but let’s just hope that I’m wrong 🙂
Honorable Mentions
There are two cards out there that I want to talk about for a bit.
The first card that I want to talk about is the newest taunt minion for warrior, the ornery-direhorn. Now, some of you might think that I’m crazy if I’m seeing potential in this card but hear me out. There are no really good taunt minions for a quest warrior deck and when it comes to taunt minions, ornery-direhorn is amazing! Let’s go through the options, shall we? If you get the deathrattle adaptation the card is pretty good. A 6 mana 5/5 taunt minion which gives you two 1/1 minions when it dies is pretty good. +3 attack option is not really that bad. An 8/5 taunt minion for 6 is significantly worse than a 5/8 taunt minion (which is a different adaptation) but it is still not completely bad. ”Can’t be targeted by spells or hero powers” is never, ever a bad option on a decently stated taunt minion. Divine shield makes it a better sunwalker, +1/+1 makes it a bit better taunt minion but nothing too great and poisonous is always great to have on a taunt minion. When it comes to ornery-direhorn I think that some people are seriously underestimating this card and that it will without a doubt see play in a warrior quest deck.
I’m finding myself gravitating towards this card more and more and I’m not completely sure why but I can see some weird potential in it which is why I’m going to put it on this list. sudden-genesis is a far superior version of blood-warriors if you don’t care about battlecry effects (and blood-warriors didn’t do all that good). The only deck that I can think of that player blood-warriors was that weird arcane-giant warrior deck (if anyone remembers that one). The reason why sudden-genesis is far better is because it summons copies of your damaged minions instead of putting them in your hand which is a huge advantage because it saves you a ton of time and mana. I think, I hope, that I’m not just saying nonsense and that there is some real potential in this card but we’re going to have to wait and see how will it do in the upcoming weeks.
The 4th Best Minion In The Game
For those of you who play the wild format I’ve decided to include this card in the article. spiritsinger-umbra is the 4th best minion in the entire game. What are the first 3? In no real order, nzoth-the-corruptor, brann-bronzebeard and fandral-staghelm. Why are those the best minions in the game? Because of the way that their effects are tied into certain keywords there minions will not only never ever going to be bad unless they are nerfed but they will instead become even stronger whenever a new deathrattle, choose one: or battlecry card is released. These are the only 3 cards in the game which will consistently grow in power whenever new sets are released. spiritsinger-umbra is now on this list because of the nature of her ability which is very similar to brann-bronzebeard but for deathrattle minions. This card will never be bad and will only keep getting better over time. It is one of those 4 eternal value cards which I highly recommend crafting if you’re into playing the wild.
Conclusion
This brings us to the end of today’s article. We will soon start covering the rest of the set and the theorycrafting phase is about to begin. You won’t want to skip what is coming next. Next week I’m going to build 9 decks that revolve around quest cards so be sure to stop by if that is something that you’re interested in. What do you think about this expansion as a whole? Which quest is your favorite? What are your hopes for the future meta? Leave your feedback in the comments 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!
