Glowstone Technician
Glowstone Technician is a 5 Mana Cost Epic Paladin Minion card from the The Boomsday Project set!
Card Text
Battlecry: Give all minions in your hand +2/+2.
Flavor Text
"Windell! More light!""I'm givin' it all she's got, Kangor!"
Glowstone Technician Card Review
Handbuffs have already mostly rotated out from Standard. Doppelgangster is also no longer there. So would you really want to play this card?
Well, the main issue I have with it is that it simply comes out too late. Smuggler's Run was better, because you could e.g. play it on T2 or T3 and then flood the board with buffed minions. This comes down on Turn 6, so you need to keep all of your tokens and stuff until then, which doesn’t seem like a great strategy. Not to mention that a 6 mana 3/4 body is very, very slow. It’s even slower than the 5 mana Grimestreet Enforcer, which was already too slow most of the time. You pay one extra mana and get an even smaller body here…
I just don’t see enough synergies to make it work in Standard. Drygulch Jailor and Saronite Chain Gang are probably the only ones. But again, you would need to be holding onto lots of cards until Turn 6, which means that you wouldn’t be doing anything, and then dropping a super slow tempo play, so most of the time you would just lose the game by that point. It’s cool to see more handbuff cards, but it doesn’t look good.
Maybe, just maybe in some Even Paladin deck that wants to keep a high hand size and generate lots of small tokens from Drygulch Jailor.. but I’m not sure if it will be good enough.
Card rating: 3/10
While Paladin’s insistence of buffing every minion in its hand in opposed to Warrior’s and Hunter’s preference for doing it only one at a time made it the only class in which hand buffing worked at all, it was ultimately shown to be a little too slow to really make work.
Glowstone Technician will probably be another example of that. It’s body is worth only half of the cost of the card at best, so the remaining three cost is meant to be invested into it battlecry. It may only take hitting two minions with its effect to make this functionally fifteen stats of value, but it really needs to hit at least three to eventually make the tempo loss of playing a six mana 3/4.
A slower Paladin deck that wants to curve into massive seven, eight, and nine cost minions may want to play this, but I can’t really think of a whole lot else at the moment.
Ya know, I thought they were giving the Grimy Goons classes mechs to atone for the Handbuff mechanic not being good for basically the entire standard life of MSoG. But apparently we haven’t seen the last of it. Oh boy.
People are SEVERELY underestimating this card. If this lands on just two minions in your hand, it’s a 6 mana 7/8 in stats. Now, as we’ve seen in the past, this isn’t quite worth it, because handbuffing is effectively a net tempo loss, but hitting 5 or more minions with this should be a piece of cake, and at that point this card is borderline broken.
In which deck this fits, you ask? Why, Even Paladin of course. This has insane synergy with cards like Drygulch Jailor, and you can easily fit good draw like Loot Hoarder into your deck, plus we got a lot of good even cards for paladin with this expansion.
Is this enough to make Even Paladin good? Possibly. When you look at the deck’s winrate, Even Paladin is already one of the most underrated decks at the moment, the playrate is not nearly what it should be when you look at the actual winrate. It’s easily tier 2 and yet sees next to zero play.
We’ll have to wait and see, but keep an eye out for Glowstone Technician.
You need to have a hand to make use of this card. If you don’t have the jailer you will either have no cards to buff by turn 6. Or you can buff them, but you will lose to the massive tempo loss of not playing much to contest the board.
Upon a hill, you see him. The man from your dreams. He sits in a ratty old goblin car and smokes a cigar. He also has two heads. And a lot of teeth. Wait that’s don han cho.
But this is not that man, this is some random gnome in his back street lab.
Anyway after that mess hand buff returns with a below the power curve card
1.5/5
Insane value!
5/5
Insane crap!