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And... enter a minion that will keep aggro Paladin in check: www.hearthpwn.com/news/5272-new-warlock-...-reveal-lord-godfrey

Not like Warlock needed the help, really.

Ya. I think that Warlock legendary is the most obvious auto include they have shown. Hagatha looks to be a meme card for Toast and the like to stream with. I doubt it sees competitive play. It reminds more of “casino mage”where you build a deck full of discover cards and try and cobble together a plan than Lyra one turn and done.

I am dying to see what Dragons they put out this set. Everyone is pointing out loss of Operative, but Netherspite flexibility was pretty big deal. It was pointed out on reddit that the card with all tribal synergies is also susceptible to Dark pact, crabs, the dragonslayer, basically all the tribal hate cards.

There was a really interesting game in semis of the Oslo tourney Old Boy vs Viper. Big priest vs Combo. Some super high level stuff in there that I never thought about before playing either deck. It was all about big priest keeping two taunts up which eventually he could no longer do. Big priest didn’t want the steal otk used on him and was super conservative how he put his minions out. With maybe 7 ish cards left he played something and lost. Turns out his winning line was to do nothing and go to fatigue. He was Anduin at that point and was keeping up with killing off minions as they hit the board.

Yeah, Netherspite was the reason really big dragons like Ysera didn't get played in Dragon Priest, because you could almost always rely on getting one from your two Historians. It also enabled 3 or 4 Drakonids and/or Duskbreakers per game. That's all going away now. Going to be a weird time for Priest, but I know there's a lot of hidden gold in having things like Vivid Nightmare and Mirage Caller in the same meta. It's the same thing they tried to do with Herald Volazj in Whispers except far more efficient. One would think that they could both contribute to Awaken decks, too, but that deck is going to take a hard hit from losing N'Zoth, so I dunno.

The same old defenders are coming out for both Hagatha and Apprentice on Reddit. These are the people that continue to insist that Overload is a viable mechanic, despite it never being competitive without OP cards like Totem Golem and Trogg. Like I said, Donais says the new spells will make the RNG worth it, but I think the roll of the dice is just too much. I didn't like Yogg decks, either.

Oh, also, FYI: The packs from quest completion are random. They're coming from any current Standard set that will be in the rotation: Classic, Un'Goro, Knights, Kobolds, Witchwood. I've gotten a Classic, Witchwood, and Kobolds pack for finishing three quests today. Everyone speaking up on the Reddits seems to be getting a Witchwood pack for the 2nd quest they complete, but there's no way to tell if that's consistent.

Jackwraith wrote: Like I said, Donais says the new spells will make the RNG worth it, but I think the roll of the dice is just too much.

The spell power level is only one of the issues with Hagatha. The other is that the hero power is just too slow. I suppose an average rando Shaman spell is better(?) than a rando totem, but you only get one per turn. If you get something bad then better luck next time.

Contrast that with Lyra. No one play Lyra for the spells, they play her for the value with hopes of lucking into something good. A quick perusal of Priest spells shows that they have 18 spells that cost 2 or less, and that number improves if you can get a Radiant Elemental to stick before your Lyra turn.

In board game terms, Donais thinks giving us a few d8's is the solution when it would probably be better if we could roll a d6 several times, if that's the route we're going.

SebastianBludd wrote: The spell power level is only one of the issues with Hagatha. The other is that the hero power is just too slow. I suppose an average rando Shaman spell is better(?) than a rando totem, but you only get one per turn. If you get something bad then better luck next time.

? "After you play a minion, add a random Shaman spell to your hand." It's anytime you play a minion. Yes, given that playing Hagatha Hellfires the board means you probably don't want to play a deck full of weenies that can get you a hand of RNG Shaman spells on turn 9, so you'll probably be playing larger minions that will only get you 1 or 2 spells per turn. But it's not a once/turn thing. You can get as many spells as you have guys to play in one turn.

Oops, right. Well, that's a little better but not much. Unlike Lyra, Hagatha's hero power isn't self-perpetuating. If you play a spell with Lyra you get another spell with the possibility that it's cheap enough that you can cast another, etc. Not so with Hagatha. Additionally, not only does Shaman need better spells, they also need a minion with a battlecry that adds minions to your hand for Hagatha to be somewhat viable.

Most people think that Echo is going to be the key there, like the 2/4 Taunt with Echo for 3. Cast 3 times, put up a small wall in front of you, get three spells. Speaking of which, Thijs just revealed an excellent Hunter card: Hunting Mastiff: 2/1 for 2, Echo, Rush.

And in the waning days of the Mammoth, we learn that Freeze/Overload Shaman CAN win a game or two, but typically in Casual against people playing mildly disorganized midrange decks... like other Shamans: hsreplay.net/replay/gsBXyzpyR8grAY6GXQZGbm

Snowfury Giant with the maxed-out Sapphire Spellstone. Timmy heaven. And complete bullshit on a competitive level. Kinda doubt anything will change, either. Do they have to keep reprinting cards like Eternal Sentinel in order to get people to even try Overload? Lava Shock didn't get used, either, mostly because you never have it when you need it. What about a totem that replaces Searing and eats Overload? It's still the RNG that Team 5 loves, but it might even serve a useful purpose.

Which one is Rush? Hits face or doesn't hit face? I never remember. Does the card Charge literally give Rush if the latter? That's a laugh.

Hagatha's issues from my small musings on her:

• Her cost (8) doesn't interact well with her best gameplan (playing cheap dudes) to maximize her utility. Even on turn 10, you'd get 5 armor and a spell, right, and that's only if you'd played a 2- or less drop. Turn 8 is laaaaaaate game in Hearthstone. Maybe less so in Standard when a bunch of gas leaves, but you hear me. Echo, I know. She makes deckbuilding schizophrenic. You want cheap minions, and you want to play an 8-mana Hero? How many resets do you have?
• She gets worse as Standard goes along. The RNG aspect of the hero power means as more spells are released the pool of spells she draws on has more chaff in it. They print things like Finders Keepers and Primal Talismans. Runespear is unplayable and that lets you DISCOVER a spell.
• Shaman has some of the best "Summon minions" spells in the game (e.g., Ancestral Spirit, Feral Spirit), but these don't trigger Hagatha's Hero Power, which is only on "Play." It makes it seem like playing good class cards is discouraged.

jeb wrote: Which one is Rush? Hits face or doesn't hit face?

Rush hits minions only.

Also, good point about Runespear in relation to Shaman's spell pool.

As for Hagatha's hero power... Spirit Echo, maybe, to refill your hand with weenies on the turn you play her? But after you play a bunch of totems/weenies, Spirit Echo them, play Hagatha (clearing most of them, presumably), and start playing the weenies; you're left with a board full of the same garbage, you have a hand full of random Shaman spells....and you're probably at 4 Life, if not outright dead. Plus there really isn't a win condition, and hoping to luck into some burn doesn't count.

I also looked at Quest Shaman decks for a few reasons: 1) Lots of low-cost minions, 2) It already runs a copy of Spirit Echo and 3) It's only losing Devolve (not inconsequential but ALL Shamans are losing it so it's more a general Shaman problem rather than a problem specific to this deck), Call in the Finishers, Jade Lightning (see Devolve comment above) and Finja.

Unfortunately, Megafin fills your hand, as does Hagatha, so the best option might be to run a non-Quest Murloc Shaman deck with Spirit Echo x2 and go from there. It might be somewhat consistent with a full Murloc package where stuff like Primalfin Lookout, Tinyfin and/or Corrupted Seer are added.

SebastianBludd wrote: Also, good point about Runespear in relation to Shaman's spell pool.

Yes. Huge point, since the introduction of Discover has largely satisfied the two sides of the RNG debate; between players who don't want utterly random shit that's either useless or destructive and Team 5 who seems to think that that's what makes the game exciting. That said, I still have people debating me on Reddit about the usefulness of Runespear. It's like the converse of the Bad Beat syndrome, wherein people usually only remember the seemingly impossible losses, rather than the equally valid number of impossible wins. These guys discover a Lightning Storm when Murloc Pally has gone all in and they think Runespear is amazing. Yet they don't remember all the times they're staring at 3 Doomguards and the best card they can discover is one Frost Shock.

SebastianBludd wrote: As for Hagatha's hero power... Spirit Echo, maybe, to refill your hand with weenies on the turn you play her? But after you play a bunch of totems/weenies, Spirit Echo them, play Hagatha (clearing most of them, presumably), and start playing the weenies; you're left with a board full of the same garbage,

Welcome to the world of Shaman Totem decks, where you can constantly refill the board after the third or fourth time your opponent clears it, but you're refilling it with crap. And random crap, at that.

SebastianBludd wrote: Unfortunately, Megafin fills your hand, as does Hagatha, so the best option might be to run a non-Quest Murloc Shaman deck with Spirit Echo x2 and go from there. It might be somewhat consistent with a full Murloc package where stuff like Primalfin Lookout, Tinyfin and/or Corrupted Seer are added.

Decent idea to try to fuse the two, but the stopping point here is Hagatha's Battlecry. Murlocs are a multiplicative tribe. You don't want to lose any of them because they magnify each others' power. If you're on turn 8 with an empty board, you've probably lost that game, anyway, but if you don't have an empty board, the last thing you want to do is Hellfire it in the name of dropping more frogs that will hopefully hand you the Shaman equivalent of Pyroblast (Donais said they'd be "above average", right?) In my experience, Finja is negligible to the deck's success, but Call in the Finishers is often huge. The deck isn't even seriously competitive now (although I tend to win with it whenever I feel like finishing a daily.) Losing that card and adding X number of turns to competing the Quest on a regular basis? Hm. Dunno.

I wonder about the team's declaration about enhancing various archetypes that haven't succeeded. Quests are obviously one of them, since none but the Rogue and Mage quests were ever really successful. But Shaman needs so much help with basically anything but polyglot midrange (Class identity?) that I just can't fathom how they're going to have room to improve anything but maybe one or two. Hagatha signals a nominal boost to a control, spell-heavy thing, but then they threw in the even-only Phoenix/Gator. There's also Elementals, Totems, Freeze, and Quest. They just don't have the space. Maybe that means that only a couple things get attention with Witchwood and more will be coming in the next two sets, but then you tread pretty closely to a couple of those only having a couple months in the sun before the next rotation. They said they deliberately undercosted Drakonid OP because BRM was rotating out and Dragon Priest had never been a thing. Dragon Priest is now a thing that's here to stay, even with OP departing the scene, so perhaps being concerned about how long said archetypes will be viable is misplaced. However, Priest was so bad that 9 of 10 cards in MSoG for Priest have become staples in multiple decks (I think the next closest is Druid with 5.) Shaman is in not quite as bad a spot as Priest was and the three cards we've seen so far make me doubtful that the remaining seven will have anything close to that kind of transformative effect.

@jackwraith. I feel bad for you that you have limited yourself to few classes and Shaman is one of them? Why? I never liked it much. I have only seen Runespear on ladder as much as twig, warrior one, or dragon soul. Which is almost never. I don’t expect to see Hagatha either above Rank 15 It’s just one of their fun with a capital F cards for when you feel like screwing around and don’t care about climbing.

Looks like odd hunter is a lock with the new neutrals reveal. 3 mana 3/4 refresh hero power and 5 mana 4/4 mech double damage/heal of hero power.

I can't fault rolling with Shaman--Shaman was the most fun Hero circa Naxxramas for sure. Reincarnate is a goddamned party and I won't hear otherwise. Even Spikes can be forgiven because Shaman was the BEST hero for like a year--it wasn't even close. But, as noted here over the last couple years, it's in a tight spot. There are thematic issues that limit its success in the design space, sadly. Totems as Hero Power are just not as good as pinging shit or dealing two damage. The Freeze idea is a misstep, perhaps, if only because other Heroes have themes like "Blowing Shit Up" and "Getting Things For Free."

MacDirk Diggler wrote: @jackwraith. I feel bad for you that you have limited yourself to few classes and Shaman is one of them? Why?

Because my main in WoW was an Enhance/Resto Shaman. When the Beta started for HS, it's the class I gravitated toward precisely for that reason. My secondary was a Priest. My tertiary was a Warlock. My quaternary was a Paladin (Tauren Sunwalker; didn't start him until Cataclysm.) The lore of those classes appeals to me and, for the most part, the mechanics have, as well. Shaman is the glaring exception here, since it's burdened with the only RNG hero power and Overload. So I actually spend most of my time playing Priest and Paladin (I was a control player in MTG, too) and I just screw around with Shaman to see if anything will work. My misfortune was that I was totally off the game for the year that Shaman was utterly dominant. I don't think I picked up League of Explorers until Whispers was almost out.

You would think with
a) the utter absence of Shaman at the highest tiers;
b) the similar absence in competitive tourneys;
c) the lack of diversity in Shaman decks, with Evolve the only major mechanic; and,
d) the avoidance of both of Shaman's other major mechanics (totems, Overload; and, uh, Freeze, I guess) in any current Shaman decks with the exception of obviously too-good-not-to-play cards like Thing from Below and Jade Claws

that major changes would be coming. But all we know so far is that Hagatha (and her Apprentice) is a reinforcement of the RNG-fest and there is no support for any of the major themes (Overload, totem, Freeze.) We still have seven cards to go and any number of neutrals that might help (What's the only deck that still uses Corridor Creeper? Shaman, of course, with Evolve.) Guess we'll see.