Looks like I was right. Togwaggle, Lazul, Hagatha and Boom are playable, and finishing in under 40 mins isn’t hard; finished in 26 mins and change as Dr. Boom, though having 3 copies of the Hand of Rafaam treasure probably helped.

Sounds very cool. Here’s my thoughts:

Blackrock Crash Week 1: Sounds like Dungeon Run. Dungeon Run was actually fairly challenging, whereas the more recent Dalaran Heist was much easier. I expect this will be more like the latter, so it shouldn’t be too hard to finish in 40 mins for a veteran player. “Play as different members of the League of E.V.I.L.” sounds like you can play as King Togwaggle, Madame Lazul, Hagatha and Dr. Boom.

Blackrock Crash Week 2: Sounds underwhelming. Same as week 1, but instead of having 4 characters and decks to choose from (if I’m right), you play through the same content as Rafaam.

Community Challenge: Meh. Sounds like they’re testing the waters for whether future Community Challenges can drive engagement. Cards will be revealed soon enough regardless.

Fireside Gatherings: Fireside Gatherings are a good place for potential new players to get into the game, so Blizzard really wants to promote them. Teaming up against a boss means you’ll do better if you have a large gathering that lasts a long time, which translates into a lot of total play time.

Legendary Quests: Better clear your quest log! If you pay attention, we can get 3 Saviors of Uldum packs, and up to 7 older packs. This seems designed to feel good because we get to open lots of packs, while still only giving us a few Saviors of Uldum card packs so we’ll be hungry to buy many more with both gold and real money.

Closing thoughts: The cadence of content updates has been positively blistering compared to the past. New expansion early April; figuring out the post-rotation metagame takes a while. Single player content comes out throughout May. Then we get a nerf patch for Rogue and Elysiana. Then there’s the Rise of the Mechs event early June IIRC, with card buffs and Snip-Snap. Then there’s a Hall of Fame rotation plus new cards being added to the basic and classic sets to replace hall of famed cards. And now there’s a 3-week long event which lasts until we’re 1 week away from the next expansion release. Reminds me of League of Legends, which strives to keep the game fresh by delivering balance and content updates once every 2 weeks.

Looks like this might work for control-style shudderwock play, but not for combo-style Shudderwock Mecha’thun, and definitely not for any kind of aggressive deck. I think it’s pretty bad right now and needs a lot of support to be good, maybe we’ll see some of that further along the reveal schedule. 2/5

Priests healed their own face after psychic scream because they weren’t trying to fight for the board, to play for tempo. Those Priest decks were trying to kill you with something like Zerek’s Cloning Gallery OTK combo or Mecha’thun combo.

This is very different from, say, Dragon Priest, for whom it was actually pretty important to clear the board with Duskbreaker and have a 3/3 left over, as well as being able to develop the board further if they had mana left over. That’s because Dragon Priest cared a lot about board development and tempo.

When you say that Priest is not a class that depends much on mana, you’re assuming that Priest runs a combo win condition whose approach to tempo is “try to stall and not die”. I don’t think that will be true for Priest with Saviors of Uldum, or at least not for all Priest archetypes; I think Priest will have decks that care about tempo, either in the form of aggressive decks that try to win with early board control, or Midrange or Control decks that try to win with board control later on.

Looks like the 50 dollar bundle went back to giving a golden legendary card. The Rise of Shadows 50 dollar bundle came with a non-golden legendary.

Pretty sure we won’t be getting legendary weapons this expansion. It’s standard now for there to be two legendary cards per class; in some expansions, both legendary cards have been minions (Witchwood, Rastakhan’s Rumble, Rise of Shadows), while other expansions have mixed it up and gave us 1 minion and 1 quest (Un’goro), 1 minion and 1 hero card (Frozen Throne), 1 minion and 1 weapon (Kobolds and Catacombs), or 1 minion and 1 spell (Boomsday).

With the announcement already out that every class will be getting a legendary quest, it’s safe to assume that the second legendary card each class will get will be a minion. Unless one class gets a hero card, I suppose.

Slower decks end turn with some unspent mana fairly often, especially against other slow decks. So the question is: Is the effect good enough?

I’d say, it definitely is. Ancient of War as a 7-mana 10/10 Taunt sounds good to me. Starfall, Nourish, Loti, Cenarius, Ancient of Lore- they all become really good. With this being a quest, you’re guaranteed to start the game with it, so you can absolutely build your deck around this effect.

Against aggro, you’re probably not going to complete the quest early and maybe you just mulligan the quest away, but this can be really good vs. slower decks. 4/5

I think this is really good in a Control Warlock deck. Plot Twist helps you complete this a lot faster, and the reward lets you draw cards from your hero power without the life cost and with a powerful extra. 5/5

Auto-include if you’re playing your Quest. 5/5

This is not as good as Arcanologist because it doesn’t tutor a card: turn 2 Arcanologist into turn 3 Kirin Tor Mage + zero mana Secret was massive, whereas this usually won’t draw you something to fill out your mana curve. This never runs out of cards to play, but the battlecry doesn’t work if you play this after you already completed your quest. Still amazing though.

Please no more defensive cards for Warrior, they’re already really boring to play against. This is a Rumbletusk Shaker with Rush. 4/5

Looks like a meme card, but Yogg-Saron was good enough that it ended up getting nerfed. Maybe this is good enough to make it into a competitive deck, maybe not; it’s gonna take experimentation. 3/5

Effect is very powerful, but the mana cost is painful. Warlock’s Twisting Nether costs 8, so you get up to 2 mana left over afterwards- this is very significant if, say, you’ve already played Lord Jaraxxus. 2 leftover mana = 6/6 Infernal follow-up.

This effectively clears the board, but hands initiative right back to your opponent. Could be good in the right deck and right meta, but it’s not for every Priest deck. 3/5

Kind of like an EVIL Cable Rat. Costs less mana, but gives a worse-quality 1-drop in return. There’s a bunch of good 1-mana class minions this can give you: Acornbearer, Shimmerfly, Springpaw, Northshire Cleric, Sludge Slurper, Voidwalker, Eternium Rover. I think this is good. 4/5

Better than EVIL cable rat, it demands an answer or gives you extra value if it doesn’t get answered immediately. Then again, I’m kind of expecting lackeys to get weaker overall; new lackeys should be announced, and I expect them to be weaker than the current crop, because of the current power level of lackeys in Rogue. 3/5

Ouch

“Saviors of Uldum Quests seem to upgrade your Hero Power immediately (at least the two we’ve seen so far).”

PlayHearthstone clarifies that:
“What’s a hero without a quest? Nine all-new quest cards, once completed, will replace your hero power with a powerful new ability”

So, all 9 quests should change your hero power for something else immediately.

“The justification for rotating Mind Blast to Hall of Fame came from this new Priest class identity. The identity itself seems conflicted though, because the text part mentions shadow magic, but there is no shadow magic for Priest anymore”

The Holy / Shadow magic duality for Priest comes from WoW. In WoW, Priest had a bunch of Shadow spells, and less than half of them were damage spells. Shadow Word: Pain, Shadow Word: Death and Forbidden Words are pretty evidently not Holy spells- they’re Shadow spells. Mind Vision and Thoughtsteal are shadow spells too (there is literally a Shadow spell called Mind Vision in WoW). Shadowform, Surrender to Madness, Vivid Nightmare, Mindgames, Shadow Madness, Unsleeping Soul, Mass Hysteria, Mind Control… all of these are what I would call “shadow magic” spells for priest. Mind Blast too, of course, but it’s far from the only one.

I think Plaguebringer is quite strong. Rogue decks already tech in Walk the Plank against Mountain and Sea Giants and huge magnetized threats, and I think Plaguebringer is often a superior choice.

You sacrifice a 1/1 lackey or cable rat to kill the giant enemy threat, but gain a 3/3 body in return, at least when compared to Walk the Plank. It has a limitation (need a minion to bump into the enemy threat), but so does Walk the Plank (enemy minion must be undamaged).

Plague Scientist existed in a world where Frost Lich Jaina and Bloodreaver Gul’dan and Deathstalker Rexxar battled Togwaggle Druid and Quest Rogue. With that kind of power level and Rogue deck archetypes, it saw no competitive play.

Plaguebringer will be an evergreen card, which I think it could be teched into meta decks right away.

That is head and shoulders above the old Hall of Fame replacement cards, which are among the weakest cards in the game.