by stormraige23 - 3 years ago     show comments

It’s exactly as I predicted back when United in Stormwind was first announced… we’re going to VC! Yes. It’s VC. It’s not DM!!! It’s VC. Why? Because in vanilla WoW there was both the Deadmines and Diremaul both of which could have been abbreviated as DM, so instead players took to calling the Deadmines VC in honor of the boss Van Cleef. If you call it DM YOU ARE A NOOB! Okay either is fine. You’re fine. It’s not a big deal. I’m just more right the way I say it.

This cinematic movie absolutely slaps. 100% a certified banger. It definitely is in the top 10… POSSIBLY the top five. I’ll need to listen to it roughly one hundred times more before I know for sure. If you haven’t listened to it yet… LISTEN NOW!

Hearthstone Cinematic Video.

Anyway… let’s get to the cards!

The set releases in just a few days November 2nd. It will cost either  2000 gold or $14.99. If past minister are any indicator it is likely the best usage of your gold until the next full set releases.

Crow’s Nest seems like a fine board clear option early on, but I don’t know if it does enough. Versus a token taunt druid this doesn’t outright kill much from their board and the body itself can be easily traded. This is one of the more underwhelming cards so far. It could be powerful in arena where any removal is valuable, but in standard I think you want to look elsewhere.

Defias Cannoneer is much more on the power level that I expected from the set. It is a pirate so it slides right in to that sweet sweet quest warrior. It seems fairly easy to equip a weapon before this card gets played especially after the quest itself is activated. At any time in the game this is valuable. I’m a big fan. GIVE ME ALL THE PIRATES! What do Defias and myself have in common? We all have a great booty we don’t want anyone else to see.

Brilliant Macaw is one of the delightful parrots. I can’t tell from the drawing if these are giant parrots or very normal sized parrots, but it is far more engaging to think of them as giant parrots so let’s go ahead and do that. This GIANT parrot is insanely strong. There are a lot of powerful battlecries in shaman right now whether a simple cage match custodian, to instructor Fireheart, to primal dungeoneer, there’s a lot of possibilities.

Another GIANT parrot that seems to be insanely strong on first thought. You can combine this with a blessing of authority for a 4 mana 13/14… doesn’t seem too bad. There aren’t a ton of minion spells being run right now, but there’s also Blessing of Kings and even Hand of A’dal is good value of a 4 mana 5/5 draw a card.

Amulet of Undying is a fascinating card that I hate. It’s a priest card that generates an insane amount of value. The negative is that it is deathrattle minions rather than just general minions. It wouldn’t shock me if this was insanely powerful in Wild… this could go into a Weasle Priest for ALL THE MEMES! Late game it can grab a GoldenLightshower Elemental, but I’m not sure where else it can go.

The third of the GIANT PARROTS (This one is definitely giant), but possibly the most engaging. One of the weakest portions about death rattles is that often your opponent gets to interact with them and can deny value… but when you switch it to a Battlecry it’s all on you. It could draw a card, could heal, could summon more beasts, there’s a lot of possibilities!

Gross. Cool card. Really cool. Really gross. If the team is wanting to slow down the meta (as apparently everyone on Reddit will tell you they NEED TO) then this is the kind of card they need to print. I hate it. I like my metas as fast as… well… me… on the track field of course. This will slow things down quite a bit.

Well this brings quest warlock BACK ON THE MENU! Or… maybe a Zoolock? Late game it obviously doesn’t apply to the Quest, but it can apply to any game state for a Zoo deck. Flame imp plus this on turn two? A pretty valuable play. I expect this will see a decent amount of play as warlock LOVES to smash its own face.

I think this feels like is one of two cards that I doubt sees any play. It COULD clear at five mana, but if you have enough beasts on board it might not matter. It could just be a finisher for face hunter as it can go face if the enemy board is empty… but it just seems a bit too slow.

GIVE ME THE CHOICES AGAIN! One of the things I have missed about Druid is the lack of “choose one” cards. Please bring back Fandral while we’re at it. This card is really strong removal or a solid taunt. Either way this card has a pretty insane amount of value at just 1 mana.

Woah. WOOOOAAAAHHHH. I love it. It’s super slow, but here are some spells it COULD cast right now. APEXIS Blast (meh since you likely have minions in your deck if you’re running this), Refreshing Spring Water (pretty good), Flamestrike (nice), Mask of C’thun (Good if you can pull it off, but seems unlikely), Grand Finale (Okay… okay maybe here), and Deep Freeze (Decent value). None of these are crazy powerful, but I can see a world where a card is printed later on that turns this into crazy nuts.

I ACTIVATE POT OF GREED TO DRAW TWO MORE CARDS! Any fan of the greatest show on a duel disk YuGiOh will see the similarities, this is a weird card. 3 mana draw 3 is great. 5 mana draw 3 is terrible. A very unique method to use tradeable and I like how they are exploring this space. This likely slides in to quest demon hunter as almost all tradeable cards CAN go in that deck, but I don’t think it’ll be needed or go anywhere else.

The Shadows come close…. The Defias Leper is a very powerful card. In shadow priest I think it’s safe to assume you’ll typically have a shadow spell in hand which makes this a 2 damage on a stick. I love this card. I really want to see this version of priest and I think priest is at its best when it has BOTH a control viable deck and a more mid range deck. Right now the only viable shadow spells are: Thrive in the Shadows, and Voidshard, and maybe Raise the Dead. I am expecting to see one more damaging shadow spell in this set.

Power creep thy name is Hearthstone. I don’t hate on this. I get it. Games have to evolve, but comparing this to Nesingwary of a 5 mana 6/3… this is just straight up better, AND you can run two of them. The downside? This is super meta dependent and these are typically my least favorite cards. I think they are just too punishing for the player who runs the beast and too punishing for the player running this card if they don’t have beasts.

This is nuts. An absolutely bonkers card. A one mana 2/2 weapon on it’s own would be enough to get me interested. Add that in with tradeable and spell reduction? It’s a lot of cool effects together. I expect rogue will be playing A LOT of this card.