This is a decent–not amazing–Rogue arena card. Warrior and Paladin might consider drafting it.

Constructed? Ehhhhh… it could potentially be decent in Rogue or Warrior. Play it on turn 4 and then use the last swing of your weapon, and you just played an on-curve 5/5. You can’t always line that up, so a lot of the time this would just be an understatted vanilla minion. Doesn’t seem Constructed-level good.

Unless it gets buffed while in your hand. Then it could be pretty strong.

Agree that this card has a “soft taunt” effect, but I would say it’s on the Scalebane itself and not the buffed minion. The buffed minion isn’t getting any better, but the Scalebane will keep buffing things. So your opponent will want to kill the Scalebane ASAP. It might force a removal or a sub-optimal trade. That’s one of the reasons I think this card is “decent” and not “bad.”

As Dude mentioned (thanks, Dude!), the problem I pointed out is that your opponent gets to decide how to deal with your Scalebane + Buffed Minion before you get to use the buff. It’s the same reason Scaled Nightmare is a bad card–yeah, it has the potential to be really scary, but it’s pretty easy to trade with a 2/8 on turn 6 or 7, so most of the time it dies before you can swing with it.

If you’re looking for reasons to discredit me, that means you have no response to my arguments. Your rant doesn’t make any sense, you’re just yelling about a card game for no reason. If Hearthstone makes you this angry, maybe you should take a break.

That would be pretty good tempo if you’re lucky enough to draw all those things when you need them and there’s nothing else you need to deal with on your opponent’s board. Oh, and assuming your opponent doesn’t kill the Wagon on his turn. Or worse, Hex it or something.

For all the luck it would take to make that work, you end up with:

3/3 + 4/4 Adapt*2 + 5/5

That’s better than playing a 4-drop and then a 5-drop, but not by that much. And it’s a pretty fragile combo–if you happen to not have all of the cards you need, you’ll have an awkward turn.

It has some glimmers of potential, but I don’t think it will be constructed-viable in Standard.

I’m trying to follow the thread of your rage here.

1. This card steals Tyrion so it’s great.

2. This card can target 4-attack minions, so it’s great.

3. Everyone who says it’s bad is stupid.

4. You find this mechanic (stealing peoples’ things) annoying.

5. Only 4 of 10 priest cards revealed and you’ve concluded they won’t have any support for other mechanics. (Oops, except for resurrection and AoE/Lifesteal.)

6. Stealing things is something they’ve done a lot so you’d prefer they do something new like healing, auchenai, and velen. (Except priest already has a lot of those things?)

7. You’ve gazed into the mind of Ben Brode and determined that Drakonid OP is keeping Priest from getting more dragon support. (Yeah, Brode is definitely afraid of buffing a Tier 3 deck.)

If these are the kinds of things that make you angry, you will spend your entire life angry.

It doesn’t say “copy.” So like Y’shaarj, it should pull the actual minion out of your deck.

CONS: This card looks great on paper (8/5 of stats for 5!), but remember you have to already have something on the board. If you’re playing from behind, it’s just a vanilla 5/5 for 5, which won’t do much to help you swing the board. Also, the stat buff happens at the END of your turn, meaning your opponent will get to choose how to trade with whatever got buffed.

PROS: Your opponent has to kill this ASAP before it can snowball, so even though the card is kind of mediocre it might force removal or a sub-optimal trade. That’s pretty decent against midrange and control. And if the board is in contention, this could help you lock it down, I guess. It’s a decent Arena pick, and since it’s common you’ll see a lot of it.

I don’t think this will see much constructed play except for in Dragon decks. Specifically, I think Dragon Priest could run one copy, maybe two, alongside Drakonid OP to fill out the 5-drop slot. Dragon Priest’s minions are low-attack but sticky, meaning you’ll likely have something on the board for this to buff, and the +3 attack will help shore up Dragon Priest’s lack of offensive momentum. Turn 4 Twilight Drake or Twilight Guardian (Wild) into this could be pretty strong tempo.

Mmmmmmmayyyyyybeeee… but I still think it’s crippling for Zoo to spend its entire turn 4 playing a 1/4. Even if it gets you an egg, you spent turn 4 playing a minion that has no board impact, to get another minion that has no board impact, that you hope you can maybe combo with a Pterrordax or a Reveler.

Chillwind Yeti is looking pretty good right about now. 🙂

Very interesting concept and I think Hearthstone needs more of these kinds of wacky combo cards. One thing I miss about MTG is that wacky-combo decks can actually be viable. Silence Priest is kind of like that, but it’s struggling in the meta.

That being said, I don’t think this will help much to make more combo decks viable. I would guess the odds are 5% that someone builds a deck that completely breaks this, and 95% that this just stays a useless card.

Why is this useless? Well, on paper it sounds pretty good to buff this and then get a “”””free”””” (heavy, heavy airquotes) minion with 3 or 4 attack. Some things to keep in mind, though:

• It’s a 1/4 for 4, so it has almost zero board impact and it costs almost nothing for your opponent to trade into it. Shredder is amazing because it’s a pretty good on-curve play. This doesn’t have that going for it.
• It’s slow. Unless you pull some crazy shenanigans to kill it the turn it comes out, you will have to wait at least one turn to trigger its deathrattle. Meanwhile, pirates are going apeshit on your face.
• It pulls any random minion with less attack. Even if you buff it to 12 attack, it could still pull an Argent Squire.
• If you buff it to get something more powerful, you’re spending at least 2 cards (and maybe multiple turns) to maybe summon a 4- or 5-drop. You could accomplish the same thing for less by just playing a good 4-drop instead of this.
• It is completely awful if you don’t draw a card to buff it. Same reason Buffadin is a garbage-tier deck: don’t depend on 2-card combos, because there will be plenty of times you don’t draw them together.

You would definitely pick one or the other. If you have the quest, you don’t need this at all because your hero power is infinite value.

If you want to play Control Warrior without the quest (I dunno, maybe Control Warrior gets a boost in Knights and Taunt Warrior won’t be as good), you could consider running 1-2 of this if a lot of your games come close to fatigue.

I say “close to fatigue” because you don’t need to run out of cards for deck-restocking to have an effect on the game. When you have < 10 cards left in your deck, adding 4-5 powerful cards can greatly improve the strength of your draws.

I dunno if I’ve had a weird streak of luck, or it’s peculiar to the stretch of the ladder I’m on right now, or the meta is getting weird right before Knights, or what… but I’ve been playing against a lot of slow control decks lately. Control Priest, Control Paladin, Control Shaman. More of my games than usual have been going to fatigue.

You’re saying this card is complete garbage and would never be useful. I think that’s an extreme thing to say. I’m saying there are specific, real matchups where this card would be powerful, and it’s a matter of weighing the frequency of matchups. Whether you run zero, one, or two of this will depend entirely on what the Knights meta is.

Agree. It’s not going to do much against aggro, but it could be a big setback for midrange and could draw out removal vs. control. Love the design of this card.

I think you’re exaggerating the downsides of this card and focusing on extreme scenarios. The most useful way to play this card would be to run one copy–you’re unlikely to draw it in short games and very likely to draw it in long games, which is exactly what you want. One card slot is a pretty fair price to pay to shore up your fatigue matchups, IMO. Obviously you would have to do some napkin math to figure out if it’s worth it–how often do I lose because my deck isn’t heavy enough, vs. how many aggro/midrange games would I lose because I drew this?

Yeah, if you draw it against aggro, it’s awful. It’s a dead card. But so are all of the standard control finishers like Ysera, N’zoth, etc. Clearly those are still worth the risk because overall they improve your chances of winning.

In fact, if you run 1x Dead Man’s Hand, you might be able to run fewer finishers and gear more of your deck toward aggro/midrange.

There are other “shuffle ____ into your deck” effects in Hearthstone, and when they put multiple things in your deck they’re separate cards. Elise is the exception and specifically says “shuffle a sealed Un’goro pack into your deck.” There is no wording like that here, so I see no reason to expect that Dead Man’s Hand would shuffle a “pack” of your hand into your deck.

(Also, a card doesn’t have to be amazing against every archetype to be a strong card.)

It’s a strong tempo play that can also get good value against slow decks. VERY good against midrange and pretty solid against control. I would strongly consider adding it to any Druid deck except aggro. Even then, maybe the buff would be good for Aggro Druid. 8/10

The more minions you put in your deck for Hadronox to rez, the less likely you are to get him with Barnes.

Grabbing a taunt with Barnes and then getting to rez it later makes Hadronox slightly better. Doesn’t solve the main problem of Hadronox being very very slow.

Just sayin’.

Yes, there is potential for infinite combos if you draw two of them. That might improve your odds against Jade Druid, but I don’t think it will happen as often as you might think. Against other decks it’s completely unnecessary–even one deck-restock will probably seal the game in fatigue.

Obviously a card you would put in a Control or Fatigue deck and not in anything else.

Vs. Aggro: Useless. Drawing it could lose you the game. 0/10

Vs. Midrange: Useless unless you’re running a TON of card draw and get very lucky. I dunno, I’m sure we’ll see a Trolden clip of someone shuffling something crazy into their deck and immediately drawing it off an Acolyte. 1/10

Vs. Control: Incredible. Will win you games by itself. Now you don’t need to sacrifice anti-aggro tools to improve your odds in control-vs-control matchups… just run 1 of these for when games go to fatigue. Even restocking 3-4 mediocre cards is a huge advantage in a game that goes to fatigue. That’s 3-4 cards they need to find answers for… they would need to get 3-4 two-for-one plays to make up for that. 10/10

Overall: 7/10. Run one in your deck, maybe two if you’re facing a ton of control. Once in a while it will lose you a game against aggro, but it will make up for it by crushing control decks.

The problem is that those are the only two reasons mages run Unstable Portal. 🙂 It synergizes with Flamewaker and Mana Wyrm, and the mana reduction means they can sometimes make huge tempo plays. It’s rare to see Portal played outside of tempo mage.

I think Zerus could be pretty decent in a control deck, where you can afford to wait until he becomes something amazing. But I don’t think this will be seeing a ton of play.