Well, if you play this the turn before or after Aluneth, you’re giving up two turns you could’ve affected the board. Without Ice Block in the format, such risks are probably impossible for Mages to take without all but guaranteeing a loss.

Jade Druid still lost to Aggressive decks, token Druid was also far from insurmountable during Un’Goro, Big lost to most anything aggressive and probably wasn’t as good as Big Priest, and Malygos Druid with all of the anti-aggro tools the class as accumulated still loses to aggressive decks like Zoo and hardly has any noteworthy match-ups that are heavily slanted in its favor.

Balancing cards is difficult to do when you only have seventy people working on the game at any one time as Team 5 does for Hearthstone. Even assuming all seventy of them work on balancing in the tail end of a set development cycle, the number of games they can test in over the course of a month would hardly be what the community plays in one hour.

As such, I think it would be correct to assume given the tribal themeing of MSoG, they though Patches would give players not interested in playing value oriented decks an aggressive option that could compete with them rather than dominate them all.

I would like to refer you this is article written by Mark Rosewater of MtG about balancing cards: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/when-cards-go-bad-2002-01-28

Say what you will about Trump, but he is a big enough voice in the community to at least have some credit and he is the first person I can think of who said such a thing (https://youtu.be/KOaJqtOJkU8?t=1h19m26s).

There is a difference between saying a card could be good enough to see play and it not and saying a card being definitely good enough to see play and it not. It probably won’t be good enough, but if anything the Mech tag just might take it over the edge into barely playable.

There are hardly any other poisonous minions this cheap that are stated this well. While I am going out on a limb here by saying this, Venomizer could honestly be Hunter’s Shielded Minibot. It may not have the two for one potential Minibot had, but few cheap minions can trade up anywhere near as well as this can. It also needs to be answered given how Magnetic works as soon as it is played no matter when it is dropped on the board.

It is probably the strongest card to get a reveal after the final card stream.

That’s only one particular card. If they’re only running one copy, they’re going second, and they just know you’re going to play Upgradable Framebot into Bronze Gatekeeper so they hard mulligan to it, they’ll only see it about twenty-five percent of the time if I remember the math for Keleseth correctly.

Most of the time, it will work you in your favor.

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.

Yes. Thanks for the correction.

Disciple of C’thun was probably the best neutral C’thun buffing card generally since it did something other than just buffing C’thun and it saw extremely consistent play in C’Thun Warrior, which was great for control styled decks.
It was often said during that time if Disciple of C’thun had nothing to do with C’thun, it might still see play and the same went for the 4/2 with Divine Shield. Now we can see if that’s true and it probably will be.

The issues with such an idea would be that it’s slow, doesn’t affect the board instantly, and it only seventeen stats for ten mana. It’s sticky and would require minions be rammed into it. However, Soggoth the Siltherer would basically be the same thing, and that never saw serious play.

Harbinger Celestia has some applications, but those applications would only come about if either you’re playing against an idiot or you’ve timed when you’re opponent would need to play a Lich King level card perfectly.

Either that or Spell Hunter is everywhere.

Soul Tapping before playing Nethersoul Buster makes it a three mana 3/5, which is pretty good as seen with stuff like Tar Creeper and Blackrock Technician. Playing it on turn three won’t happen often, but there should be enough ways to damage yourself as a Warlock that it can become a three mana 5/5 or better.

Just Soul Tapping before playing Nethersoul Buster makes it a three mana 3/5. Zoo Warlock will use this as something for the later turns.

Crystallizer is a card that enables both low health and armor synergies for one mana and it comes with a 1/3 body. Plus, decks with a lot of healing effects will probably see this battlecry as simply “Gain 5 armor.”

This will absolutely see play in something at some point.

The four damage this deals is rather steep, but it is cheaper than Shadow Bolt. Additionally, Warlock is a class that does have a fair amount of healing to make up the difference, and there have been times playing Even Warlock that I wish I could enable Hooked Reaver faster.

If this card existed in an environment with the pre-nerf Sacrificial Pact, this would have easily been part of Cubelock and it might see play in Healing Zoolock as is to help clear taunts.

I don’t think calling this utter trash because of the health cost is warranted.

It comes out a turn earlier and Warlock has always been a class that does self harm for powerful effect.

Weapons Project is a better combo disruption tool than Warlock’s project at least as long as Twig of the World Tree enables them, but it also kills stuff like Aluneth while also healing yourself.
Additionally, the armor gained through this card will be more useful to a Warrior than any other class.

There is hope for this project.

Glow-Tron is one of the few Magnetic Minions that could be better as a minion than a buff. That isn’t to say a one mana +1/+3 buff spell wouldn’t be playable, but stuff like Dire Mole has proven to be generally good in the sorts of decks Paladin has been interested in playing lately.

Deathrattle/N’zoth Paladin has been a successful deck in the past, but it was a Control deck that needed N’zoth to work well. Many of the Control Paladin tools have rotated out in the last year as well.

If this card sees play it will see more play in Wild than in Standard in the forseable future unless curving into Spikeridge Steed and magnetic minions become extremely popular.

Almost guaranteeing your four drop to survive is a powerful effect in a buff centric tribe like Mechs. Even with that, I’m unsure if Coppertail Imposter will see play unless it turns out there are not any other decent four drop mechs.

Now Druids will have a mini Cenarius to play around with. While Cenarius hasn’t seen play in a few years, it was a lot later of a play than an Aggro Token Druid would want to play. I would actually like to see a world where both the aggressive and current iterations of Token Druid exist at once since I like both personally.
As far as this seeing play in either, I can see it at least in the current version, not really in the aggro version though. It is another way to both produce tokens and buff them and it can’t be summoned by Oaken Summons.