Hearthstone: Saviors of Uldum Reaction #2

 Boy, card reveal season came pretty hard and fast, and here I am not really paying all that much attention to the hubbub and discussion about all of these new cards. Again, as a mainly wild-slash-arena player, my definition of what makes a card 'good enough for constructed' is honestly very skewed, which is why, again, I make these segments as 'reactions' as opposed to more informative reviews. There are also a lot of these cards, which is why I'm going to be going pretty hard and fast, and will put a lot of the less interesting non-legendaries after the break.

Note: this article was briefly taken down and reposted because of me misreading a lot of the cards revealed later on. Really have to stop making articles half-asleep.


High Priest Amet: Okay, this is an interesting one. A 4-mana 2/7? Pretty powerful statline, especially for a Priest. That 7 health's going to be useful for Inner Fire/Divine Spirit shenanigans. But the effect is that Amet is going to set the health of everything you play while he's on board into the same thing as his current health. So play Amet and a Nortshire Cleric together on the same turn, and the Cleric will be a 1/7, meaning your opponent has to deal with multiple potential Divine Spirit/Inner Fire recipients. And the downside is pretty interesting, too, because as Amet gets his health reduced, he's going to potentially debuff your minions to have low health too... but, y'know, you're a Priest. You can heal him up. Honestly, Amet looks like such a great combo enabler that I can totally see him being one of the breakout legendaries of the set. If not becoming the backbone of a powerful new legendary deck, then he's going to be something everyone experiments with.


Anka the Buried: Originally, I saw this Rogue legendary minion as cute but I'm not sure where she goes. A 5-mana 5/5 that changes all deathrattle cards in your hand into 1-mana 1/1's? That's like a weird variation of the Bwonsamdi gimmick, and we knew how that flopped on its face. But then I look at the deathrattle cards out there... and I remember Mecha'thun is a deathrattle card. And then I remember Rogue has a reliable way to kill their deck with Myra's Unstable Element... and suddenly, a combo deck that features Anka the Buried, Mecha'thun and Unstable Element doesn't seem that far-fetched. Again, I'm actually going to look forward if this is going to be something genuinely powerful and reliable, or if it's going to be a weird janky deck. And that's without Anka herself being honestly pretty neat on her own, generating instant discounts to the cards in your hand. Jury's out if that Mecha'thun Anka deck is going to work, but man, I do like this card a lot.


Dark Pharaoh Tekahn: Hooolee shit, Dark Pharaoh Tekahn! Tekahn's dourness has made him easily my favourite of the playable Lackeys in the Dalaran Heist, and the Neferset themselves have always had a special place in my heart, Warcraft-lore wise. And Tekahn's basically that old Rogue quest reward in minion form. 5-mana 4/4, and he will permanently turn all your Lackeys into 4/4's for the rest of the game, which is insane. Warlock currently only has two Lackey generators -- EVIL Cable Rat and EVIL Genius, and depending on how many more they will get in this expansion, we might actually really see a powerful Lackey Warlock deck come to fruition. EVIL Recruiter is another one that's going to make this potential tempo Warlock deck work, too... and honestly, it's going to depend on how many Lackey cards we get in this expansion and the next. Good stuff!


Hack the System: the Warrior quest is... interesting. You have to attack 5 times with your hero, and the reward is a 2-mana summon a 4/3 vanilla minion that gets refreshed every time you attack. And... I dunno. It just feels underwhelming, y'know? 2 mana 4/3 minions once or twice every turn isn't anything to sneeze at, but the 'refresh' is a lot less interesting than Shadowreaper Anduin's, and attacking five turns before you can abuse the 4/3 generator seems to be pretty steep. It's usually Aggro Warriors that want to attack a lot with weapons and whatnot, but that quest reward is more tempo or control oriented? I dunno, I can see a Wild deck with something like two N'Zoth's First Mates to fulfill this Quest and ditch the 2-armor hero power entirely, but in the same vein, I don't think such a gimmicky deck has enough power level to survive the Wild meta.


Colossus of the Moon: 10 mana neutral legendary 10/10 with Reborn and Divine Shield. He's going to meet the same fate as Soggoth or Tyrantus, basically... that statline and keyword combination is surely impressive, but no one's going to put him in their deck. Recruit, Rez Priest or Y'Shaarj decks have better options, but he's going to be devastating in Arena and one you'll cheer for when you play cards like Evolve or Conjurer's Calling. Pretty neat card to have in the pool, even if the Colossus itself probably won't see a ton of play.


Cloud Prince: Secret tempo mage decks might be a memory of the past for Standard, but it's never really left in Wild. One of the more consistent tier-2 or tier-3 decks, it appears that Secret Mage's going to get a whole lot of new toys to play with, and one of the more powerful ones is Cloud Prince. A 5-mana 4/4 that deals 6 damage (it can go face!) if you control a Secret? That's freaking Fireball, for one mana more, and comes with a 4/4. It's Medivh's Valet's bigger brother, and this is definitely going to be the mid-game card that Secret Mage never knew it needed. Easily going to be one of the most powerful cards in Secret Mage in Wild, and honestly, might very well single-handedly shoehorn the return of Standard Secret Mage. 


Arcane Flakmage: Flakmage is another pretty powerful card. A 2-mana 3/2 that basically nukes the enemy board for 2 damage, every time you play a Secret? Shit, with multiple ways to make Secrets cost less (again, particularly in Wild), the Flakmage honestly looks like a pretty damn powerful tool to help Secret Mage control the board and keep their own minions alive. The fact that it triggers every time you play a Secret is unfortunate because the Flakmage herself could be removed in the meantime, but honestly, the cheap cost of this minion, as well as the 2-damage board nuke, is pretty damn powerful.


EVIL Recruiter: Heralded by many as one of the star non-legendaries of the set, the EVIL Recruiter is a godsend for zoo Warlock, a 3-mana 3/3 that destroys a Lackey to summon a 5/5 extra body. That's essentially a net 4-mana 7/7 divided into two bodies, plus the inherent battlecry you get from the Lackey. And one of which is a Demon, which isn't always relevant, but a nice bonus for Warlocks. You'll always want to play Recruiter at turn 4 to guarantee the Lackey surviving to be killed by the Recruiter, but honestly, that amount of stats is just pretty damn impressive, and the drawback is basically "did I draw a Lackey generator in the first three turns?" Honestly, while I'm not sure if we're getting more Warlock Lackey-generators, I actually do think that this is going to be a pretty powerful consideration for zoo or general tempo Warlock decks, even if that Tekahn Lackey warlock deck doesn't work out.

Riftcleaver: While perhaps not making as many waves as EVIL Recruiter, the Riftcleaver is a far, far better removal option than something like Impbalming. It's basically the Lich King's Obliterate spell attached to a body. And honestly, a 6-mana 7/5 demon body is not the worst it could've been attached to. It draws a lot of comparisons to Illidan Stormrage, sure, but a powerful removal ability is nothing to sneeze at as compared to Illidan's Violet-Teacher-lite ability. Honestly, I do really think that Riftcleaver's going to be a pretty powerful asset for Warlocks.


Bloodsworn Mercenary: Another pretty powerful card, this time for Warrior, the Bloodsworn Mercenary is a cheaper version of a Faceless Manipulator with infinitely more upsides packed into it. It's 3 mana instead of 5. It also comes with a 3/3 body, and summons an extra copy. It can be doubled with battlecry-synergy effects. All for the cheap, cheap requirement of having your minion be damaged, which is laughably trivial for Warriors to do. Sudden Genesis weeps in comparison to this card. Honestly, probably a pretty damn useful all-purpose cards in Warrior decks. It's not going to be the one that suddenly makes Warrior super-powerful the way something like Dr. Boom Mad Genius does, but it's definitely going to be a powerful tempo-swing tool for a lot of Warrior decks.

Hearthstone: Saviors of Uldum Card Reaction #1

 The card reveal season has started for Hearthstone's upcoming expansion, Saviors of Uldum, and I... I've been following the card reveals, but haven't really been looking at potential decks or archetypes or whatever. I'm basically exclusively a Wild player at the moment, too, which means that since a significant amount of the Hearthstone player base plays Standard and only cares about Standard, I kinda feel like my reviews aren't as informative before... which is why I'm removing the "review" bit from the post title, and why I waited for so much more cards to be revealed before I did one of these.

I'm honestly unsure if I am even qualified to do a "look back at my old scores" for Rise of Shadows, for the simple reason that I probably played like three or four games of Standard for the total time that Rise of Shadows was the newest expansion, and in Wild, there weren't that many new cards that were used. We'll see, I suppose. I could always go and look at the sites in fan-tracker sites, but that's work, y'know?

Anyway, as of the time of writing, these are all (or, well, most) of the cards that have been revealed, courtesy of playhearthstone.com.


Of course, some of the more hype cards are the Quests, and while the Druid one seemed... all right in my books (although probably too weak for wild), Corrupt the Waters, the Shaman Quest, is a lot more interesting. Playing six battlecry cards is definitely not a huge ask for Shamans to do, because, well, as Shudderwock decks proved in the past, even without the infinite combo (which you can still do, albeit harder, in Wild) the battlecry shaman decks are kind of on the cusp of playability. Playing 6 battlecry cards is definitely going to be easy, but is it enough to sacrifice the turn one tempo? A hero power that you have to use isn't the best thing out there, unlike, say, Druid's passive hero power, but causing all battlecries to trigger twice for two mana is pretty powerful. It's equivalent to having a body-less Brann Bronzebeard on call. Overall, I can actually see this one working out, even if it probably won't dominate as powerfully as Caverns Below did.

Some people theorized that you could combine both Corrupt the Waters and Unite the Murlocs in Wild, but I'm pretty sure that it's going to be way too unwieldy. I like the design of this one, though. It's neat.


I guess Reno Jackson's a Mage now for some reason? Process of elimination, I wager. Raid the Sky Temple is interesting. Casting 10 spells is something that basically all Mage decks will do anyway, and I don't think Tempo Mage decks really have a solid one-drop anyway (unless you're in wild, at which point you have Kabal Lackey)... and the reward is a hero power that basically gives you a randomized version of Primordial Glyph. Which is pretty dang powerful, of course, but at the same time, I'm not sure if losing the Fireblast hero power is going to ever be worth it for Mage, because holy shit, the Fireblast hero power is very useful. I could kinda see a more tempo-oriented Mage deck that switches to value/control in the late-game maybe panning out in Standard (which mostly stems from my admitted lack of knowledge about the Standard metagame), but probably not in Wild.

People have also said that you could combine this with Open the Waygate in Wild, by finishing this quest first while playing tempo mage, and then switching to finishing Open the Waygate completely with the upgraded hero power, before killing the enemy with the Arcane Giants or Antonidas combo if you can't kill them with the tempo mage deck, but I think that's a bit too cute to work. I would love to play it if it worked, though.


Granted, the old Paladin Quest was kinda poo, but Making Mummies... doesn't seem that powerful either? Playing 5 Reborn minions is going to be something I hold off on until we see the full range of Reborn minions, but even if they are all on the power level of Reckless Mummy, you have to play five... and then you swap your hero power with one that summons a 2/2 copy of a friendly minion. If you're playing a Making Mummies deck, presumably more often than not they're going to be a Reborn minion... which honestly isn't still all that powerful since sometimes the hero power will kind of be dead if you don't have a minion on-board. The miniature replication is interesting, but... I dunno. I kinda get Herald Volazj vibes from this. It is admittedly cheaper, but I'm not sure if it's going to be super good. Again... I'm not going to call this card trash or anything until I see all the Reborn minions, but the reward honestly makes me think that this is probably not the best quest in the set.


All the League of Explorers characters basically show up with battlecry/Reno effects that sort of demand you have a Reno deck... and, historically, Reno decks have all been control decks for the simple fact that Reno Jackson himself is one of the most oppressive and powerful Reno tools out there. And while in Wild I don't really see any one of these four panning out (well, maybe Elise), in Standard it's a bit more interesting because you can potentially build your deck in completely different ways without the obligation of "well, of course I have to include old Reno and Kazakus, they're powerful!", which in turn, will lead your deck into a very Control-oriented one.

Also, these are all class cards, which, of course, limits their usage a lot. Reno the Relicologist is a 6-mana 4/6 that unleashes a 10-damage Arcane Missile machinegun on your opponent's board. Which basically makes him kind of a C'thun-style board clear, of sorts. 10 damage is pretty impressive, I suppose, but not that impressive. Again, particularly in Wild, where it's going to be pretty piddling. A tempo deck that can deal 10 damage to the board on turn 6 while summoning a 4/6 is interesting, I suppose, but it's certainly not going to be the powerhouse in your deck, just... maybe more equitable to Meteor?

Dinotamer Brann is still 2/4, but costs 7-mana, and summons King Krush for free. Which is just oodles of value, and you can summon two King Krushes in Wild with old Brann. I don't have a whole ton to say here... control Hunter has historically not been great, so while the effect is pretty neat, I really don't think Dinotamer Brann will work out.


Elise the Enlightened takes the statline of Trailblazer Elise, and is a 5-mana 5/5... and it will duplicate your hand, which is probably the most powerful effect out of these four. People are whispering about Malygos decks, which I can totally see working, but the simple value of her basically being old Nourish with a body attached to it, and the potential for duplicating some legendaries is nothing to sneeze at. I'm too lazy to think up of specific examples, but I can totally see combo decks making use of Elise.

Sir Finley of the Sands have apparently leveled up since League of Explorers, now a 2/3 instead of a 1/3, and... you discover an upgraded hero power. Which means Sir Finley of the Sands is kind of almost completely worthless in Wild since Baku or Genn are always strictly better. And even in Standard... as powerful as the upgraded hero powers are, how powerful are they really going to be that you'll want to build a Reno one-off deck just to accommodate it? In particular, you're never guaranteed to get the Paladin upgraded hero power, and even if you do, the Silver Hand Recruit synergy cards are all one-off in your deck and you're not always going to play Finley on turn 2. I dunno. Probably the weakest out of the four Explorers, methinks.


Armagedillo is a hilarious card concept... but I dunno. It's a hand-buff card, and even with the buffs done to things like Glowstone Mechanic they're all still kinda unplayable and way too slow? Armagedillo is a 6-mana 4/7 Taunt, which is... decent if not spectacular body, and it's a continuous effect that gives all Taunt minions in your hand +2/+2. It's probably one of the strongest hand-buff cards out there if you assume all the cards in your warrior deck are Taunt cards (not hard to achieve, and probably doable in Wild with Fire Plume's Heart)... but even then, you probably get one shot at buffing your hand before Armagedillo gets killed. It's comparable to Grimstone Enforcer in the past, which is still pretty powerful but also didn't make handbuff Paladin great. My gut instinct says that unless we're getting some extreme hand-buff-taunt support, this onis going to be a whiff.

For non-legendaries, click after the break.

New Hearthstone Expansion: Saviors of Uldum!

 A new expansion! Saviors of Uldum! Apparently, the League of Explorers are coming back to fight the League of EVIL at Uldum, which is neat -- they've got a very catchy tune, too, in that trailer. I felt like there's such a short buildup to this expansion, like essentially just a brief Togwaggle animation before we get the full trailer and reveal. It's weird.

Anyway, we've got a bunch of neat little card reveals, and apparently we're getting the return of Quests. Okay, then! We get to see two of them, the druid and the warlock one, and it's... interesting? It seems like the quests for this expansion is going to be an interesting twist on the old formula. Instead of the rewards just being a card you need to cast, the quest rewards this time around seem to be replacing hero powers? And it's certainly interesting and makes these quests work faster, but I'm not sure about some of them.

The druid quest, Untapped Potential, is perhaps the weaker one of the two, although I won't be giving ratings yet until we get at least half or three-fourths of the expansion's cards revealed. Untapped Potential is a quest where you have to spend four turns with any un-spent mana, so you need to have at least one mana left over, and... I dunno. You're definitely going to waste turn 1 to cast the quest, so you have to waste a mana in the next couple of turns? That means that Untapped Potential will complete the fastest at turn 5, and you'll start seeing the benefit from the new hero power, Ossirian Tear, at turn 6... which, granted, a passive hero power where both Choose One effects would certainly be useful. But is it worth it to get rid of the regular druid hero power? And to waste the tempo in earlier turns? I would say no, because glancing at the current batch of Choose One cards, the only one that's going to benefit from Ossirian Tear that much would be Jade Idol in Wild, and that's not a nightmare I'm looking forward to dealing with. Still, neat concept.

Also, since Elise is assigned to Druid from the quest, I guess each League of EVIL and League of Explorers character is assigned a class, then? So, uh... we have hunter, paladin and mage left over? Which one out of Finley, Reno and Brann even fit the mage class? Eh. Anyway...

Warlocks get Supreme Archaeology, which looks pretty damn impractical outside of a specific deck. And, yes, maybe Plot Twist can finally find a home now! Supreme Archaeology wants the Warlock to draw 20 cards, and the reward is replacing the hero power with 2-mana, draw a card, it costs 0. But by that point in a regular deck, you get this effect, what, four, five times total since your deck's probably run out? So clearly you want to play this on a Plot Twist deck where you constantly re-shuffle and re-draw cards from your deck to quickly check off Supreme Archaeology's quest requirements. And honestly... I can actually see this working out quite well!

We get a new keyword, "Reborn", where the minion with the keyword will return to life exactly once, with 1 HP, before dying permanently. Interesting keyword, don't think it needed to be one, but the one they showcased, Reckless Mummy, a 4-mana 3/2 warrior card with rush and reborn, is certainly a fine card! At worst it's equivalent to a Piloted Shredder, but with its full potential, it's a 4-mana 6 damage removal that can go through divine shields, can hit two targets, and sometimes you're left with a body. It's a neat card and a neat keyword. I like it.

Questing Explorer is a 2-mana 2/3 card that draws a card as a battlecry if you control a quest, which is a nice card for sure! A lot of the drawbacks of old-school quest decks is that you really lose out on the tempo of sacrificing your first turn, which is why the only real successful quest decks are the priest and warrior ones who really don't care all that much about early game tempo. Questing Explorer helps to be a simple but probably pretty effective card to give you advantages when you take the inherent disadvantage of sacrificing your turn 1 play essentially doing nothing but set up the quest. Neat!

Puzzle Box of Yogg-Saron is a 10-mana mage card. It's just old school Yogg-Saron, minus the body. It's funny, but probably not going to be good. I miss old school Yogg-Saron.

Plague of Death is a card I've seen a lot of times in like, custom cards or whatever, so there you have it. A 9-mana Priest removal spell that silences everything before casting Twisting Nether. When you want the entire board DEAD. It's easily a replacement for Psychic Scream, and one that's a lot more devastating, for sure.

Jar Dealer is a 1-mana 1/1 that adds a random 1 cost minion to your hand. Not as good as Lackeys, but she's not a bad card, and one that's definitely fun in arena.

EVIL Totem is a shaman 2-mana 0/2 that... is both a totem, and also generates a Lackey every turn. We've seen just how powerful Lackey generation can be, due to the sheer amount of tempo these tiny 1-mana cards carry. We're reportedly getting a bunch of new Lackeys in this expansion, even if we haven't seen them. On paper, EVIL Totem's pretty damn powerful and could definitely be a powerful asset for Shaman decks. On the other hand... we kinda need to see if the new lackeys are anywhere as consistently good as the original five.

Oh, there's also your typical expansion pack deal with a hero portrait tied to it, this time Elise the druid hero. These are always nice, giving people some bang for their buck. I've personally never bought any of them, and I skipped out on Rastakhan, Mecha-Jaraxxus and Lei Shen, but it's always nice to see these.

In addition to the expansion announcement, a while before I posted this post, we got Patch 14.6 going live, which adds the Hall of Fame stuff, the Neo-Classic cards, a bunch of new card interaction fixes and whatnot, including one that's going to take me a while to get used to -- Forked Lightning, Multi-Shot and Cleave can now be casted if there's only a single target on board, which is interesting. There are a couple of bug fixes, a couple of wording changes (Pilfer in particular)... and something that got everyone in a bit of an uproar is that a bunch of card artwork have been changed! And considering the only time this was done was with Witchwood Grizzly and its bizarre beast tag, it's interesting why they decided to do this.

(Meanwhile, Stampeding Kodo's artwork still doesn't show an actual Kodo Beast)

And the biggest consensus is that the cards were done for censorship reasons? We did just give Jaina Proudmoore an undershirt despite her rocking that cleavage since 2002, so I'm going to assume that it's some weird censorship laws somewhere... but it's interesting that these cards are actually straight-up given new artwork instead of just being edited.

Like, sure, they edited away the blood splatters in Eviscerate, keeping the same artwork (and the blood-stains on the victim's clothes), but for Headcrack and Bite, we're getting entirely new artwork? Like, I'm not complaining, but it's kind of weird. really always did like the old Headcrack artwork, too. Is this one of those "video games can't show skulls in China" weird censorship dealies? Deadly Shot's artwork was changed into some dude firing a ballista, instead of a tauren being impaled with a gigantic bolt, so I guess it's a violence thing. I dunno. I could think of a couple more hearthstone cards with bloodier or more violent artwork.

Something that caused a bit of a controversy is the fact that Secretkeeper, Mistress of Pain, Succubus and Windfury Harpy all receive new artwork. And the gut instinct is to be angry because they're censoring sexy ladies... but honestly, Windfury Harpy is still pretty scantily clad (and looks mostly the same), and Secretkeeper is still rocking a bodice that shows off her cleavage (and belly, which she didn't show off before), so I'm genuinely not sure what's going on. Is there some artist licensing problem going on? Or is it just Secretkeeper's huge secret keeping bum that caused the censor hammer to come down? At least for the minions, the replacement artwork still looks recognizably like their original counterparts.


More interestingly are the cards that actually got modified, and it's the two succubi in the games. I guess there was a reason why we never really got more Succubus cards added into the game, huh? Although... I dunno. The Mistress of Pain became the Queen of Pain, and her artwork still kinda looks like a Succubus, just more cluttered and detail-heavy. While the regular Succubus just straight-up got replaced with a Felstalker, which... I dunno. Something's going on about censorship or something. Again, at least they replaced the Succubus with another basic WoW Warlock demon pet instead of just shoehorning a beholder in there or something.

Overall, I think people are kind of making a bit too much of a deal about it? It's not like they're going around editing every single cleavage or instance of blood in the game... Whirlwind, in particular, has both. I dunno if the pretty drastic name changes for some of them is necessary, but... eh, whatever?

Anyway, looking forward to the Saviors of Uldum stuff!

HEARTHSTONE CARD GALLERY: Saviors of Uldum

Last edited 1/2020 for Mogu Fleshshaper nerf.
Last edited 8/2020 for new weapon borders. 

Last edited 03/2021 for the Big Spell Tag and un-Nerf update (Dinotamer, Bloodsworn). Uncollectibles updated.

Druid Cards:

Hunter Cards:

Mage Cards:

Paladin Cards:

Priest Cards:

Rogue Cards:

Shaman Cards:

Warlock Cards:

Warrior Cards:

Neutral Cards:

Uncollectible: New Lackey


Uncollectibles:

Hero Portraits:

___________________________________________

Solo Adventure: Tombs of Terror:
Playable Cards:






Bob's Tavern Cards:


Bob's Treasures: 


Boss Cards: