It’s absolutely Nazjatar and in case there was any doubt, the preorder bundle was leaked and the hero skin was in fact Azshara for Mage. She was in her Night Elf form however, not in her Naga form.

Great work as always!! I had the same thoughts about a Pandaria expansion being teased this whole time, and it feels a long time coming.

I wanted to point out that for Mercenaries, the event only gave you Chi Ji. But you were able to get a significant amount of coins for the other celestials (Long’xin, Xuen, Niuzao, Yu’lon) as well, so it made it easier to craft them. But they are all only collectible from crafting and unpacking. Chi Ji was the only event one.
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I’m sorry if my tone came across as harsh in that tweet. It was not my intention. Since I posted that, I’ve had my adblocker working overnight to get rid of the ones that cut across the screen, so now they take up a card slot instead of the whole space, like so https://imgur.com/dM1QQQV

Thanks for your attention to this, I’m glad to say I’ve resolved this issue for myself, but I was curious to see if anyone else had the same issue, it might have been more unique than I expected.

Thanks so much for your hard work. This website is like the only one I care to check for news on Hearthstone and new deck content.

I’m all for ads to keep this website running. I appreciate all the work that goes into this. But can we do something about the ads that literally cut across the screen and cover up the content? For me, in the Druid and Mage sections there is an ad that cuts across, covers some of the cards and resizes everything to be extremely small in those two spaces, so I can’t see anything there. It’s just very annoying.

Vol’jin is a free legendary, but not part of the guaranteed legendaries from the prepurchase.

You will get 2 guaranteed legendaries on launch day, from the cards that have not yet been released from this expansion.

Cairne’s strong point is that he’s a sticky deathrattle minion, something that other deathrattle minions can duplicate.
However, you should try Thaurissan in this deck since you have space for him, he can really push this deck into a tempo direction that Rogue loves to do. Plus he works anywhere.

Hakkar + Togwaggle’s Scheme = you flood your deck with cards to avoid drawing corrupted bloods. Assuming your opponent is playing a draw-heavy deck you will almost definitely out-blood them or out-fatigue them

She’s invaluable in control matchups which this deck encourages. I was able to win through her in matchups like Reborn Paladin, Control Warrior, Quest Shaman, and mirror matchups. So I’ll admit I was wrong about her initially since people seem to hate matching up with quest druid so much they just concede rather than play the long game.

You get an uncraftable/non-dustable version for the duration of the event, even if you have the original card. So technically you can have up to 4 of each card and up to 2 legendaries.
The event versions will disappear after the event ends though, the originals will remain unchanged and unaffected by all of this

i do run elise in my version, but i actually don’t ever get to play her, and i’ve been considering cutting her.
In practice, there’s a lot that goes into playing Elise in this deck.
First, you have to achieve the highlander requirement. Elise is a dead card until that happens.
Second, you have to be mindful of your hand and have cards worth duplicating. In most cases, you won’t have an issue achieving this, but I’ve found that managing my hand size and trying to play Elise to get some value is proving challenging. The best comparison that comes to mind is Barista Lynchen in battlecry Shaman. You wanna get at least 2 half-decent battlecries with Lynchen to get value. In that same light, landing an Oasis Rager or a Starfall against a murloc/board heavy deck can be fantastic. But again, that vlaue only comes into effect when your deck has no duplicates, which is incredibly rng-dependent and might not happen until late into the game when Elise isn’t needed to close the game anymore.
Simply put, there’s a huge criteria that she needs to complete before she can be played, and I haven’t had the chance to play her at all thanks to that.
Zephrys is a completely other issue, his low cost and easier criteria makes him that much more useful as a flex card, while Elise falls into a win-more category, in my mind, since she duplicates cards in your hand at a stage in the game when duplicating usually won’t solve much. In a matchup against a murloc deck, Elise will be playable usually after you 1) used all your Starfalls, and can’t duplicate anymore and 2) exhausted the murloc player’s resources. In other words, it’s an easy win without the need for Elise to close the game.

Sorry, I’ll try concluding again. Her win-more style (requiring you to have decent cards in your hand that you didn’t play because you do’t need them, probably because you’re already winning) and the requirement to transition to Highlander during the game means that Elise’s requirements are just too steep to get any genuine value from her. She’ll probably work better in an experimental Highlander Druid deck, where duplicating your hand supplements the Highlander handicap, theoretically, again. Since if you have a good card in your hand that means you don’t need to use it, so having more copies of a card you don’t need sounds pretty null to me.

re: Murloc Shaman
I’ve noticed that there’s two variations running around: Aggro murloc and control murloc. Hagatha certainly fits into the control variation (see: Trump’s deck) but like you mentioned, has no place in aggro because the idea is to close the game asap. Kat’s version, which you’re using here, is a particularly weird one because it’s only using Hagatha as a late game value generator, and it’s very possible for Shaman to win off her back thanks to the sheer value her hero power generates and to the amount of minions the deck has. Otherwise, the aggro variation doesn’t really run any card higher than 4 mana besides Bloodlust.
Control version – I haven’t really tried since I’m more interested in the aggro version, but runs Swampqueen, as well as Hagatha and Scheme for obv maintaining board control and using the spare mana to build up a murloc board (not too hard considering murloc cards are incredibly cheap – also See: Scargil.)
I’m a bit uncertain about Kat’s version, if it’s the absolute Best version to feature here to showcase Murloc shaman, I feel like either Trump’s control or any other aggro (preferred) is a better choice to showcase.

Not to mention we’ve already had an Uldum-heavy content expansion in the League of Explorers adventures, I find it unlikely that they’d recycle this especially when there’s still areas in the WoW universe that haven’t been explored in Hearthstone

Sethrak and Vulpera were theorized potential allied races but there’s been no talk of anything like that anytime soon, so it remains to be seen.
I agree though they have interesting stories and their models are more than capable of being used for allied race purposes (aka being playable)

Yes, the blizzard article and this post confirm that 9 cards in total will rotate to the Hall of Fame:
-Baku and Genn
-Naturalize, Doomguard, Divine Favor
-Black Cat, Glitter Moth, Gloom Stag, Murkspark Eel
= 9
That’s because these cards lose any relevance or value in the standard rotation without Baku and Genn to support the even/odd archetypes. So it’s a hefty card rotation, if you own max copies of all of these cards the dust total comes up to
3200(Baku Genn) + 500 (2xDoomguard, Naturalize, Divine Favor) + 1900 (2xGloom Stag, Moth, Eel, Cat)
= 5600 dust

Exactly, I totally see where you’re coming from and that’s definitely always been a strength of Cairne’s. I’ve seen him almost exclusively only played in deathrattle decks SOMETIMES so it’s super interesting to see him synergize with Even Paladin. Excited to try out this deck variation

I don’t know why Cairne is being run here but I love him so I’m immediately adopting this decklist

Great read and as predicted! The nerfs targeted cards that caused heavy snowball effects that made these decks frankly unfun to play against. No one wants to lose to a 5/2 firefly on turn 4 but it happens, and we know it does.
Getting into these nerfs, I was excited to see them because I was hoping they’d make these archetypes more intuitive and a bit more balanced, and I feel like they did just that, it’s bizarre to me that people thought Cold Blood nerf would kill Odd Rogue, for example.

2 mana draw a card, destroying secrets is an added bonus in most cases.
Also with Hunter dominating the meta and Mage on the fringes, secrets are seeing a reasonable amount of play rn

Face collector is a tech-ish card that just had really good synergy with Tess, you can totally substitute it for some other Rogue tools without much worry about the quality of the deck.

As for hench clan thug, you’re not really using your weapon as much as you would in Odd, barely at all honestly, and I’m wondering why this decklist doesn’t run Spectral Cutlass because then you can justify hench clan but in this specific decklist he’s a huuuge no-no because the 2 mana spent on weapon are better spent somewhere else.
Remember that you’re stealing a lot of cards w this decklist so what you see here isn’t all that you’re gonna be playing.

Good substitute for legendaries:
Tyrantus: Any big beast minion, Charged Devilsaur can be scary when cheated out
Malfurion, Hadronox, Undatakah: No subs, Hadronox and Undatakah are key combo pieces and Malfurion is just too powerful
Malfurion CAN be subbed but the chances of your survival just Plummet
LK: Big beasts or taunts
Oondasta: Tough to justify but probably Devilsaur

Overall though the swappable legendaries are just Really good, highly recommend crafting Oondasta because it’s looking to be suuper promising overall.

Generally just look for big taunts and beasts (and big beast-taunts are the best) to make the Hadronox/Undatakah combo just that much more devastating

Hint: Running double Astral Tiger can be recommended if your opponent runs transformation removals like Polymorph or Hex, to keep the combo going, but don’t let more than one of them die!! that’s SUPER important