Hey, the stats for the Sandwasp are finally out! Now I can review this card. This is similar to Druid’s Acornbearer. It’s worse than Acornbearer in one very significant way: The initial body costing 1 mana starts your aggression right away, and if your hand is otherwise slow and awkward, then you can play both squirrels to save your turn 2.

The upside is, where Acornbearer gives you 4 attack and 3 health worth of total stats, Sandwasp Queen gives you 7 attack and 3 health worth of total stats. Better yet, you can have them all at the same time: Sandwasp Queen’s ability is a battlecry, where Acornbearer’s is a deathrattle.

So, is 3 more total attack across all the bodies worth the extra mana cost on the base body? I’m gonna say… no. Turn 1 Acorn Bearer is just that good, and fills your early mana curve perfectly. More attack is nice, but coming online one turn later gets you closer to the turn the control deck just AoEs your stuff away. One turn will sometimes be the difference between getting one attack off with your minions, vs. getting no attacks off.

So, this is not quite as good as Acornbearer. There’s a lot of room for a card to be worse than Acornbearer and still be good. 4/5

Don’t be so sure. Everyone thought the Paladin quest would somehow support 1-health minions.

“Wow, it’s basically a 1 mana 5/5!”… not. By that logic, Dreampetal Florist is a 0 mana 4/4. Now, let me tell you: if Dreampetal Florist was ACTUALLY a 0 mana 4/4, Token Druid would be all over it. Of course, Dreampetal Florist is not a 0 mana 4/4, just like Scarlet Webweaver is not a 1 mana 5/5.

For starters, you need 6 actual mana to play it, so you can’t play it on turn 1. Best case scenario is playing this on turn 6 and then playing a follow-up Tundra Rhino or Stranglethorn Tiger at no extra cost. Problem is, Midrange hunter runs a ton of cheap beasts: the most popular version of the deck runs six copies of 1-mana beasts, three copies of 2-mana beasts, and one 5-mana beast. The curve is low on purpose because there’s plenty of reload in cards like Marked Shot, Master’s Call, Unleash the Beast and Zul’jin… this card doesn’t mesh well with the Master’s Call game plan.

You could run this in a deck full of bigger, more expensive beasts… until you realize you’re playing Hunter and you don’t have the best defensive tools to play for the lategame value wins. Card shows potential, but I don’t see a home for it right now. 3/5

By itself, this is pretty bad, a 2/5 stars card that I’d describe as “needs a lot of support to be playable”.

Druid quest is just that support. Summoning a 6/6 taunt minion AND restoring 12 health for 6 mana can be really good. If you end 4 of your early turns with unspent mana to complete the quest, aggro decks will beat you up- but taunting up and getting healed is a pretty good way of recovering from that.

Synergy with Keeper Stelladris isn’t fantastic, but this is close to auto-include in a Druid Quest deck archetype. 4/5

As a baseline, this looks good; playing this on turn 2 and then killing it off will give you +1 net cards in hand, same as a life tap, but with the bonus that instead of losing 2 health, you get a 2/1 body on board.

There’s more upside: instead of drawing a random card from your deck, you get an extra copy of your most expensive card, which is great if you have Mountain Giant. Getting extra copies of Dr. Morrigan rolling is also really powerful in a long game.

There are some drawbacks though. When you discard a card, you tell your opponent which card it was; maybe they play no minions and leave your Expired Merchant on the board instead of letting you cash it in for two early Mountain Giants. Maybe it gets silenced, or worse, stolen through Shadow Madness. It’s also very unlikely to discard High Priestess Jeklik, chances are a Handlock will have more expensive cards in hand. 4/5

Great if you care about the reborn mechanic, great if you care about the Murloc tag. 5/5

Hero power is very strong in combination with Crystalsmith Kangor (4x healing boost), Mechano Egg and Mechanical Whelpling. Since you need to play 5 reborn minions to complete the quest, you’re gonna have a bunch of those in your deck and they could make great targets for this hero power too.

Whether a deck built around this quest is good or not will largely depend on the quality of reborn minions on offer, but the potential value offered by this hero power is a Control Warrior’s worst nightmare. 5/5

Sure, he’s basically a Chillwind Yeti that costs 2 more mana in exchange for having 1 more health. If you want him to be more than just a 6 mana 4/6, you have to build a Highlander deck around him, and you get a battlecry that’s comparable to that of Meteorologist. As far as battlecries go, it’s a powerful one to be sure, but it’s not something worth giving up your win condition for. If you try to build Cyclone Mage with 1 copy of Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Mana Cyclone and Mountain Giant and Sea Giant and Conjurer’s Calling, you’re basically losing your ability to win the game.

I feel like what this card asks for in terms of deckbuilding limitations is way more than what he offers in return with his battlecry. So, compare this to Brann: For 7 mana, Brann offers 8 immediate damage to face, plus an 8/8 body, plus a 2/4 body. For 6 mana, Reno offers 10 immediate damage to your opponent’s board, plus a 4/6 body. If damage to face and damage to board are equivalent (and there’s a good case to be made that damage to face is worth more), then Brann deals 2 less immediate damage and costs 1 more mana but gives you 6 more total power and 6 more total health. It’s not a good tradeoff for Reno.

Easily the strongest of the 4 League of Explorers titular character cards. Good body AND a very powerful battlecry makes me think you might want to build a Highlander deck around this guy even without additional support cards for Highlander decks. 4/5

Stats are good enough for its cost that you could just run her as a 5 mana 5/5 with a powerful bonus if you draw her late, by when there are no more duplicates left in your deck. Or even in a Highlander deck if there’s more support for those. 3/5

For this kind of payoff, I could see a Highlander deck being viable. I imagine there might be more support for Highlander decks coming, but with the information we have now I’ll give this 3/5

Hot garbage. 1/5

Yeah, you’re right about how Overkill works. Otherwise, killing Darius Crowley or Ironhide Direhorn or Ticket Scalper with minions would be absurdly painful.

I think Hearthstone should not be looking to MTG as inspiration, honestly. I find some of MTG’s basic design to be incredibly flawed and dated, from land cards that lead to every other game being decided by one of the players getting mana screwed or mana flooded, to defender’s advantage during combat leading to stalemates where neither player wants to attack.

Of course Hearthstone wouldn’t be the game it is without the countless lessons drawn from MTG, but I find those lessons have been learned, assimilated and implemented by now. I’d much rather see Hearthstone try to learn from other, newer card games: maybe a Slay the Spire-style single player adventure, or try and implement some new mechanic from a game like Shadowverse, Mabinogi Duel, Elder Scrolls Legends or Artifact.

MTG:A may be more successful than many if not all of these other competitors, but it’s not where I’d go to look for new ideas.

Sacrifice cards usually only offered me ways of killing my own guys T_T

Oh man, Rafaam sucks. Beating this as Rafaam was harder than beating it with Lazul for me. You have a perpetually clogged hand, and most of the cards you’re offered are no good. Would you like to choose cards from the pile that makes you draw even faster, while inching you closer to death from Fatigue? Or maybe you want from the Control pile, with cards like Rin that you will absolutely never be able to fully play out? Or from the Swarm pile, with a bunch of buff cards like Power Overwhelming and Grim Rally yet typically offering two spells and only one minion?

At least the Lazul deck is functional if you just go all in on Old Gods.

You’re right: Bronze Keeper and Hecklebot look better if you give them +2/+2. All minions look better if you give them +2/+2!

I’m skeptical about this card because handbuffing has historically been very underwhelming. Bronze Gatekeeper is a bad card as a 1/5; I don’t think holding it in your hand until after you buff it (turn 7 at the earliest) makes it substantially better. For the most part, I think you won’t want to add taunt minions beyond Zilliax to your deck just because this card exists.

There’s plenty of mechs with taunt you can get from Omega Assembly and Dr. Boom’s hero power- 6 in total, as you mentioned. Is that enough support for this card? I don’t think so. Omega Assembly comes online at turn 10; the critical turns when you wanted a beefy taunt against a deck like token Druid or Murloc Shaman are long over by then. Getting anything valuable out this + Dr. Boom Mad Genius will take even longer, on average.

Having the extra stats for the late game is nice, but it doesn’t contribute directly to the win condition of either Control Warrior (fatigue) or Bomb Warrior (bombs).

If you look at the most played cards, the most played taunt card after Zilliax (which is the #1 most played card) is… Mirror Image, which ranks at #48. The most played taunt minion which is available to Warrior is Bronze Gatekeeper, at #61. After that comes Rotten Applebaum at #175.

As wary as I am of Warrior’s power level, I wouldn’t worry too much about this card. I doubt Warrior will become stronger by replacing Dyn-o-Matic and Omega Devastator with Bronze Gatekeeper and Rotten Applebaum.

We have one successful example of handbuffing, and it’s Mech Paladin with Glowstone Technician. Compared to that, this card has the advantages of buffing minions in your hand every turn until answered and it has better stats for its cost. However, it has the disadvantages of only buffing Taunt minions and that the best cards to handbuff are magnetic cards like Wargear and Skater Bot which aren’t taunt minions (works just fine with Zilliax though).

Taunt minions are not very good right now and this card is not good enough to make you want Taunt minions. 2/5

Completely agree. Hearthstone is fun as an interactive game, and it’s un-fun when it’s uninteractive. The most un-fun deck I’ve ever played against is Dead Man’s Hand Warrior as a Control deck; by turn 15, you know you’re going die to fatigue 20 turns later and there’s nothing you can do about it. Going through the motions feels awful; nothing you do matters, all your minions will get removed instantly, the game drags on forever, and in the end you will lose.

Probably the most fun deck I’ve played against is Midrange Paladin, ages ago. You had to try and play around Aldor Peacekeeper and not overextend into an Equality clear and the games were generally back and forth.

Dragon Priest is the only fun Priest deck I can remember playing against. Priest decks that contest the board are more interactive and fun; not just that, but it’s the only way to get meaningful use out of Priest’s defining class identity, healing. Healing and armor gain seemed to be roughly equivalent back at Hearthstone’s launch, with Armor having the advantage that more armor was always better since there was no armor cap, while healing had the advantage that Priest could heal his minions, which could lead to value trades and make a Priest’s board control tough to contest.

Today, healing is, for the most part, strictly inferior to armor gain. Combo druid decks were really powerful during the Year of the Raven, in no small part, due to armor gain cards like Ferocious Howl and Branching Paths… whereas today’s healing-synergy Druid often suffers the same pains Heal Paladin suffered before: you can’t use your healing-synergy cards if you’re at full health and there’s nothing to heal. I’d like to see some good minions and heal-synergy cards for Priest in Saviors of Uldum.