Scholomance Academy – Announcement Analysis & Early Impressions

Hearthstone’s upcoming set has been announced by the developers last week, promising an exciting tenure in the Scholomance Academy for aspiring adepts from all across Azeroth. How does the first batch of card reveals and the announced mechanics stack up to what we’ve seen before in the game? Read on to find out more, including copious snarky references to Magic: The Gathering…

Learn more about Scholomance Academy in our expansion guide!

Back to School

Though the set’s theming was a cause of consternation for many World of Warcraft veterans – without getting into too much detail, the stories around Scholomance were one of the darkest in the history of the game and certainly don’t mesh well with the sugary early-Harry Potter-books atmosphere evoked here – the idea of academic learning and specialization is one most of us have first-hand experience on and can be flawlessly transferred to the sort of keywords and ideas we’ve seen so far in the set. It also continues the trend of Hearthstone using WoW’s lore as a starting point and offering its unique alternative take on it, much like the disco inferno of One Night in Karazhan.

We’ve also got Transfer Student as a funny little pre-release toy to play around with, much like Archmage Vargoth or Volcanosaur in the past. Its effects were pretty quickly compiled by the community and the end result was a card that’s a little bit too good for the joke-y purpose it’s meant to fulfill. Pizza’s taken a Zoo deck to high Legend with two copies of the card and it’s quite possible it might see actual play in certain tempo decks if there aren’t enough, well, non-random two-drops to fill the requisite slots. It’s a fun little thing to have around but certainly not the sort of card that should ever be anywhere close to competitive.

The Duality of Man

It’d be a stretch to call the set’s dual-class cards anything more than a rehash of existing mechanics. Of course, Hearthstone itself has already straddled this line in the past – think of the tri-class cards from Mean Streets of Gadgetzan, the cross-class Discover options or even pseudo-class cards like Secretkeeper which only make sense to use for a select few heroes –, the most self-evident comparison comes from Magic: The Gathering, where multicolored cards have long been a staple of the game. In fact, the first such cards were printed in 1994’s Legends, the third expansion set of the game. (For some eye-popping context, April’s Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths is its 84th).

It just goes to show how Team 5 works to keep Hearthstone’s level of complexity to a minimum, at least on a keyword level. Even concepts like Twinspell or Rush are fairly self-explanatory and don’t fundamentally change how the game operates beyond their obvious resource considerations. Whether this is an exciting enough addition to carry the expansion remains to be seen – but from a gameplay perspective, this seems like a much healthier and more viable approach than the old tri-class cards used to be. Locking three of the (then) nine classes into a specific mechanic which may or may not be viable in the first place risks rendering a higher portion of those cross-class cards dead on arrival with little experimental value. Instead, the cross-class cards are likely to be radically different depending on which two classes are sharing the card, which also makes it less likely that a specific class will miss out on any playable cross-class option.

This is, of course, a deckbuilding challenge, which Hearthstone has struggled with as of late: the proliferation of data and high-level competition coupled with some egregious balancing failures (see also: Galakrond Shaman and Everything Demon Hunter) makes the theorycrafting part of the game a lot less exciting than it used to be. Flavor-wise, the combinations make sense (Beasts for Druid/Hunter, healing for Priest/Paladin, weapons for Paladin/Warrior and Warrior/Rogue, spellcasting for Mage/Shaman, et cetera) but it remains to be seen whether this will be different this time around, but for a large feature with such limited gameplay implications, it’s quite possible that cross-class cards won’t be exciting enough to carry the expansion.

A Burst of Inspiration

We all remember those caffeine-filled evenings just before an exam, no doubt the experience the Spellburst keyword is meant to convey. No? Just me? In any case, Spellburst serves as a one-time bonus effect which triggers after you cast a spell, essentially allowing you to pay an extra mana cost for your spell to gain it alongside a small-sized body on the board. Once again, it’s the sort of effect which can be challenging and skill-testing to play with but a source of utterly infuriating “should have played around it” moments on the other side of the board. Would you cast a five-mana Lightning Storm if you got another one in hand from it and left a River Crocolisk on the board? That’s the sort of choice Diligent Notetaker offers. Wretched Tutor is a neutral AoE, which seems like a terrifying proposition for multiple reasons, especially with 0-mana spells and cost reduction options also coming into play with the set.

Study serves as another way to play around with Discover, one which also reduces the mana cost of the next card of that type played later in the game. Though we haven’t yet seen all Study cards, the Druid one revealed in the announcement would certainly work well with Spellburst shenanigans at unexpectedly early points in the game. They are both flashy and dangerous keywords and all eyes will be on the balancing team to see whether we’re looking at yet another day one patch including some of these effects.

Scholarship Grants

Beyond the… erm, standard Standard set of cards, other goodies are also coming up over the course of the next few months. No doubt Battlegrounds will also continue to receive attention, with the datamined eight-player lobby system serving as the biggest source of excitement for fans of the game mode. With BGs’ massive success likely catching even the devs off guard, any sort of extra resources they may have dedicated to its development will probably only see fruition now, so this should be a very exciting period for a game mode that’s technically still in beta.

Even more importantly, a new mode is also expected to launch over the course of the next few months, supposedly involving Wild cards and some sort of limited format. Expanding the possible ways to play Hearthstone could very well turn out to be a seismic shift over time, so keep an eye out on these developments!

Arena also exists.

Scholomance Academy launches on August 4, and there’s no doubt it will shake up the game again, if only because of the late-breaking nerfs of the previous cycle guaranteeing an unsettled meta. It will certainly be a nice change of pace in Constructed, and one I’m very much looking forward to.