You can’t consistently have three or more spells in hand?

Small Spell Mage will 100% be a thing with this set, and that’s an archetype that specifically builds a large board presence using spells.

You can’t judge this set’s cards by the current meta, because set rotation always means a giant drop in overall power, and Blizzard has made it clear that this year’s sets won’t be as OP as Year of the Mammoth.

Dunno why this is being rated low. With two spells in hand you get a 3/6, which is average for 4 mana. Any more than that and you’ll get good value. Seems like it should be a good fit for any spell-heavy midrange deck with card draw, such as small spell Mage.

Spend turns 1-3 developing your hand. Turn 4, play this to bait out removal. Turn 5, go nuts with Questing Adventurer or whatever.

Seems like it could be a decent alternative win condition for a midrange Shaman along with the Windfury spell. If they let you build a board with many smaller minions, you get them with Bloodlust + Windfury. If they use all their removal to prevent that and you can drop a big minion on turn 9 and have it stick around, you win with Windfury + this.

This is interesting. Certainly helps with board clears… Arcane Explosion becomes a 3-Cost Flamestrike, for instance. True, the net cost of Kirin Tor Tricaster + Arcane Explosion adds up to 7, and costs you two cards, but then you still have this minion on the board. If your opponent then has to burn a card to remove it, it works out the same, and if he can’t, then next turn you’re threatening 18 Damage to the face with two Fireballs, say.

Confirmed Implock is the new Odd Paladin.

Oh sure, NOW you make The Marsh Queen viable, as it’s rotating out.

Yup, I know what I’m playing come April 9…

Much better than Street Trickster, both because it costs 1 less and because Elemental works better with Spell Damage than Demon. Still not going to see a lot of play, I don’t think.

Yeah, there were a lot of cards just announced in the last hour that benefit from this card and Unsleeping Soul.

This could be a good finishing move for an Aggro Token Warlock kinda concept, especially if you can find a way to get some Spell Damage out as well to help clear any Taunt minions in the way.

Never mind. I thought you were talking about Ancient Watcher, but just saw Arcane Watcher and Unsleeping Soul. Guess Self-Silence Priest will in fact make a comeback.

That on its own isn’t enough to make a deck with this though… need something else akin to Humongous Razorleaf to bring back the self-Silence deck concept.

Good card. Insane value for 1 Mana, compensated for by the fact that you can’t play it on curve.

That’s sort of what I mean by redundant, though. If you’re only going to run two “make copies of minions cards” anyway, there’s not that much difference between 2x Ripper, or 1x Ripper plus this.

Everything is broken in Wild.

Think of it like a combination of Evolve/Devolve. It doesn’t go up or down a tier in mana cost, but that’s not actually the real point of those effects.

For your own board, you want to use this on either low-statted Battlecry minions, or ones that you’ve managed to leave with 1 Health remaining after using them to remove an opposing minion. Both of those are high value plays that should leave you with much more in stats on the board than you started with.

Using it on an enemy minion is usually going to be bad, but it is effectively a Silence effect. That’s not going to be its primary function or the reason you include it in a deck, since you’d rather Polymorph for that… but the fact that it can serve this secondary purpose in a pinch increases the card’s overall value.

Also, when you say you’d rather just run another 3-Mana minion, you’re ignoring that this has Twinspell. That increases the card’s value significantly (based on other Twinspells, I’d say that keyword is probably worth 1 Mana in most cases). If you’re casting it on turn 6 or later, it also reduces the RNG component, since if you get a bad result for one of the copies you can just cast it again.

Yeah… it might be tricky to build around in constructed, but I think it’ll see a lot of play in Arena due to its versatility. Can use it on Battlecry minions to increase value on your own board, but it can also be used for a Silence-like effect if the opponent has cast a big spell on a low-cost minion, especially if you can follow up with some AoE on the same turn.

Also, like the Shaman’s Evolve effect, there’s an underrated aspect to it in that it can work kind of like a heal… that is, if you can make a trade that leaves one of your important minions at 1 Health, you can cast this on it to get two new bodies which will be at full health. That’s also really high value.

Evolve… Mage?