In theory, you only need about 6-7 total mana cost in spells in hand when you play this to get a reasonable result, though given how powerful things can get in constructed late game, you probably want twice that, spread across at least 3, preferably 4 or 5 spells. It’s not going to be your win condition on its own, but I think it’ll be included in any deck that generates spells or includes many high cost spells that tend to be saved for endgame.

Agree with the crowd saying this is among the first nerfs. Maybe if Priest sucked to begin with it would be enough to bring it back into the meta, but I don’t think that class is particularly underpowered now.

Zilliax 2.0

Probably mostly an Arena card but could fit a generic Tempo Rogue archetype if there’s no dominant Rogue archetype specific to this set’s mechanics

Has the potential to be really annoying in Arena. Probably won’t see Constructed play.

This is probably going to lead to some extremely annoying Fatigue concepts.

Will probably see play in Arena. For constructed, you’d need some kind of value multiplier… a way to duplicate the minion for 4 mana or less or a Zul’jin type effect. I don’t think normal Paladin mechanics do enough to support this especially when it has to compete with Magnetic cards in the currently popular mech paladin archetype

It’s probably alright for a Beast Hunter deck like the one I’m running now… only problem is that it comes just two sets after Headhunter’s Hatchet, and they both fill very similar roles. Spear costs one more, but you don’t already have to have a Beast in play to get full value from it.

If you happen to have something like Timber Wolf or Leokk out, the extra value you get from Spear is nice. Likewise synergy with Scavenging Hyena. Between that and being able to split your attack in a meta that contains several token decks I think this has the edge. Only big downside is that with Beast Hunter you very often want to be playing Animal Companion on turn 3, whereas there’s no equivalently dominant 2-drop, since Dire Wolf Alpha, Hyena and Henchclan Hogsteed are all more situational.

My question is: Do spells from Yogg’s Puzzle Box count? If so, we may see a new archetype here… a quest that you don’t need to complete gradually. You could hold the Quest in hand or even mulligan it if your completion objective is just to get it in play at some point and then play the Puzzle Box. That’s only two or three deck slots (three if you run two copies of Puzzle Box) that could give some midrange Mage concepts an alternative win condition for games that run the distance.

Yup exactly. Strictly better than Multishot except I guess in the fringe case that the opponent has a Taunt with 4+ Health and something with <= 3 Health behind it that you're hoping to kill. Also better than Fireball for removal purposes.

Plus, unlike spells, it syngerizes with all of Warriors "when a minion takes damage" effects.

I think that’s what’s going on here. Blizzard doesn’t generally like must-includes, so for this to be in here, I’m guessing they found most Quest decks underpowered in testing and decided rather than tweak them individually, they’d put in a card that gives them an obvious buff across the board.

Also, since Quests are making a comeback, many people will be spending their Turn 1 on that, which makes it that much more likely that if you drop it on 2, you’re either going to get 2 Lackeys out of it or force your opponent to spend a card and a turn removing it with a spell.

People saying you have to get more than one out of it to be better than EVIL Cable Rat because of the stats are ignoring the fact that the rat doesn’t force a response; it’s just a token once its Battlecry has taken effect. If the opponent can kill it with a minion, that is at least a soft-Taunt effect, which is about balanced with Rat, but if they have to use a spell, or spend 2 Mana on a Hero power to kill it in conjunction with a 1-Attack minion, then you’ve gotten much more out of the card than with Rat.

Problem with Gorehowl is that unless you have the Coin and have saved it the whole way, you can’t play it alongside Kor’kron Elite like you can Leeroy.

Leeroy can be 6 on turn 5+ or 10 on turn 9+ with Kor’kron, while Grom is 12 on turn 10+ with Taskmaster. Gorehowl without any 2 or 3 cost option to go to the face is only ever going to be 7 damage. It’s more flexible than Leeroy for sure, but so is Grom, who can be used for removal on turn 8+ while threatening lethal the following turn, sort of like Gorehowl.

If you’re only going to have one finisher, I think in this specific build Grom is it. But if you take him out, maybe you don’t need Taskmaster, and if you don’t have Taskmaster you’re not going to run Amani Berserker, so that’s four slots in the 2-3 range you could work with to find something to pair with Gorehowl for the finish. Heroic Strike?

Maybe 4 is closer to average as we’ll usually have one Upgrade or Cap. Greenskin to go with our Wrenchcalibur. Still works out about the same, that we can probably count on one bomb to go off by turn 10, but are relying too much on luck if we’re looking to win before then.

Makes sense. My thinking was that Leeroy can be played earlier (alone, or with a weapon, or Kokorn Elite, whatever) if we see an opportunity to finish, whereas Grom+Taskmaster has to wait for turn 10, but I guess in this deck, finishing early is a bit of a “win more” thing as we need our opponent to be unlucky to hit one or more bombs before then. If they’re getting unlucky we should be winning anyway, so we pick our clincher to come out at a point in the game we expect to win when we’re running closer to average…

With only Clockwork Goblin and Wrenchcalibur to add bombs, average is probably 3 bombs added and one drawn by the opponent by turn 10, so I see how that’s the point in the game we’re looking to top out.

I like the Rush version and agree with your reasons for why the Control version probably isn’t going to be the thing for the meta this season (deck replacement, the fact that it would mostly work against Combo, which is leaving, etc.)… I’d add that with many of the cards in this set it looks like fatigue concepts are going to make a comeback, and a lot of health restoration along with them. I may be wrong, but I’m guessing that this will mean that being able to deal lethal in a burst is going to be important, rather than building up damage over the long term.

For the same reason, what about including Leeroy in the Rush version? My intuition is that deck is going to win a lot of games by waiting for a bomb or two to hit and bring the opponent within range to finish with some combination of Charge, weapon attacks, etc. so Leeroy would seem to fit.

Sorry if I’m being presumptuous, obviously you know much more about the game than I do, but do these guesses make sense to you?

Sorry, that was a brain fart. My bad.

A vanilla copy of the Magnetic minion is what’s left behind. So, not the Pogo-Hopper.

My experience with Pogo-Hopper Rogue has been that it fails when it’s your only win condition, but does better as part of a larger Shadowstep/Battlecry concept. For instance, Novice Engineer, Edwin VanCleef, Spirit of the Shark and Gurubashi Hypemon all work well in conjunction with Pogo-Hopper in a deck where the focus is on playing tons of Battlecries and the Pogo-Hoppers are just one of win conditions.

My experiments with it weren’t *great* mind you, but they were considerably better than 40% win rate at Rank 20.