Armor based control seems to be something they are pushing. I could see weapons that play into that, with outrider’s axe being a draw engine and possible future weapons giving armor or helping build defensive boards.

It’s totally a guess, but I’d be happy to see some more weapons that aren’t made for just attacking. That hammer that forced minions to attack neighbors was a great example of a control weapon, and this new set in particular seems to be trying to be very innovative. Both New keywords are very different, though they also add a lot to the game. If they keep up their innovation, especially their move away from relying on RNG so much, I can see them taking weapons back to the drawing board, and even giving them something like minion/spell types. Having “swords matter” alongside holy paladin, or “axes matter” in an Orc heavy set isn’t out of the question.

This game got caught up with RNG effects for too long with all the innovative stuff they can do outside of it as a digital card game. There’s still a lot of WoW attacks, items, and abilities that they haven’t touched. How would a Mage’s Blink work as a card? Why haven’t we seen the Druid forms as actual spells that grant you abilities, and stats for two or three turns? How about Hunters being able to “tame” enemy beasts?

So much room for both fun and strong cards.

This could be a hint that weapons are coming back as a major theme for warriors. As of now it’s mediocre and has a place in casual decks that just want to run a theme, but I can see the next year or two having enough “weapons matter” cards to make this playable.

We still haven’t seen much of what Warrior is getting for this set, with Naga getting a “spells matter” theme for the most part, it’s possible that we get something similar with warrior and weapons. “If you played a weapon while this was in your hand, do X” and “If you played X while this weapon was in your hand, it also gains X”.

I know they seem focused on control and pirate warrior, bit it seems likely that this year won’t be three related sets, so we may be back to getting very different themes in each set, with only slight overlap.

That used to annoy me, because we would be a few cards short of a playable archetype, but it appears that Team 5 has improved with keeping consistency and not throwing in so many cards that just loosely hint at decks that never make it into standard. At the same time, more of those cards seem to have utility in wild and often get backed up by the mini set if Blizzard wants it to be.

I’m still waiting for demon tribal to become a Standard deck. Or at least old-fashioned zoolock.