Introduction
The new Hearthstone expansion has been announced! One Night in Karazhan will be launching August 11th. As usual, the wings will be 700 gold or $6.99 USD, or $19.99 for the entire expansion. The expansion will feature 45 new cards. Of those 45, seven have been released. Without further ado, here are the upcoming cards.
The Cards!
Enchanted Raven is good, obviously. With one exception, one drops have been limited to a total statline of three in the past, while this is four. However, it also loses the abilities that make the other one drops good. Abusive Sergeant is better in most scenarios, because it pushes more damage and dies to most of the same things. The other issue is that Druid never even ran Zombie Chow, and this card is almost entirely worse. The bright side is that this may signify more Beast Druid potential down the line.
Well Kindly Grandmother is an obvious Red Riding Hood reference if nothing else! This looks like the new Haunted Creeper. It is slightly easier to remove, however, it synergizes extremely well with Hunter. Not only does Hunter have a ton of new Deathrattle synergy, but both sides of this card are also Beasts. I will be very shocked if this doesn’t make it into several Hunter lists.
This card looks really strong at face value. However, there’s a lot of potential for it to go wrong. When you start looking through five mana cards, most of them have battlecries or synergies. If you remove the relevance of those, most of them aren’t worth their cost. Frankly, I’m very disappointed that this card was printed, I think more RNG is the last thing Hearthstone needs. However, I have a difficult time seeing it being overly powerful. The cost is too high and the damage is too low. Time will tell on this one.
I think Ethereal Peddler is really cool. Initially I saw the effect and thought it wasn’t strong enough to make the card good. However, the statline itself is actually incredibly strong, the ability is just there as an added benefit. At the moment it only synergizes with Burgle and Undercity Huckster. However, since the statline is excellent, it may end up seeing play with just Undercity to grant potential upside.
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I’m glad that Discover is persisting. That’s my biggest takeaway here. Realistically I’ll be surprised if this sees play, apart from a few niche decks. The problem is that you have to choose an immediately useful spell, or to heal. Antique Healbot was a 3/3 for 5, this is a 4/4 for 6, so they have similar statlines. Healbot healed a static eight, which was amazing. This has a maximum potential of healing ten, but then the card it gets is fairly useless. In some scenarios this is amazing, in many I don’t see it quite being enough. I expect Ivory Knight to be quite strong in arena, but just not quite make the cut in constructed.
Barnes is a neat idea. I like the whole 1/1 copy deal, it adds a lot of potential to some odd cards. However, once again, I strongly dislike the random aspect. The first time my opponent plays this and pulls out a 1/1 Ragnaros, or Cairne, or Tirion, I will be extremely unhappy. You’ll need to throw this in a Deathrattle deck most likely, but I think the potential value here is a little too high. I believe Barnes will be niche but extremely powerful.
This is one of the most interesting cards I’ve seen in a while. Unfortunately, I have to believe it’s incredibly unplayable. The problem is that it doesn’t fit with any of the archetypes it pulls from. This means it needs to be an odd deck that runs all of those things. For example, a Control Warrior deck with Alexstrasza, Sir Finley, and Mukla, Tyrant of the Vale. Being able to draw so much value sounds good on paper. However, in Control decks you really don’t want to thin your deck by so much. This card only works with tempo-styled decks, but it loses too much tempo to actually play it.
Conclusion
I think there are some really neat cards coming out of this expansion so far. My favourite at the moment is Ethereal Peddler, for the idea of an upside but not a massive downside. I think a lot of these cards represent interesting ideas, but many are over-reaching. I do like the direction that the set is going, and I look forward to seeing the rest of One Night in Karazhan!
