Not even close to be playable

While the previous expansion seemed to go in the right direction, Priest has for a while been suffering from having a lot of conditional cards (class with the most cards with "if in them), a lot of random generation and, the worse of it all, having a lot of possible strategies or archetypes at half gas that while seemingly interesting, fail to muster any critical mass or significance, mostly meta reactive, not meta setting.

And to address that in the new expansion? Well, let's just scramble your deck with the opponent's deck strategy...

So, given I'm a priest main, I'm not saying "Delete Azalina", like the haters say "Delete Priest", but... Can we reroll its design?

Thanks

Lotus Troublemaker has got to be glitching because both of these cards were not put back into my hand. Only drawn. “While in hand or deck” yet the cards don’t reflect the same amount of damage.

Has anyone else experienced this bug/glitch yet?

I've been testing some Void DH lists after the buffs and the deck feels good and consistent. However, I might be playing the deck badly but I feel this card to be a trap. It's really good when it managed so re-summon the Voidscale, but the problem is that if you summon some deathrattle minions from the void souls, chances are it will summon them instead, making it basically a dead draw. In all of the games I've played, it hardly ever did his job and it only felt good when summoned from a void soul. I might be cutting it completely and put in something to better the matchup vs hunter, since it's his worse matchup yet. What do you think?

Alongside the Paladin archetype of buffing future Silver Hand Recruits, it came an update to show their statline in the Hero Power and cards that summon them.

Someone give a call to Pursuit of Justice, who may not have gotten the memo either.

https://youtu.be/_gszsQUnILY?is=pODsEmOX0mgzQVcY you can buy the standalone Hearthstone bundle for $25

I think the DH situation is more about DH getting the most substantial buffs. While cards like [[enthralled shade]] or [[Irida sinseeker]] or the DK cards needed it even more but got less. So yeah there's more work to be done.

Like I said DH weren't a mistake but I hope the struggling cards/classes get the same amount of love.

I'm a big fan of this direction, I hope they keep breathing new life into cards. Older sets too.

Edit: Moragg + Imp gang stooge buffs seem to be a succes aswell. The deck is both good and fun.

I am a F2P player but decided to craft Azalina. She is ungoldy fun. Just started playing her with that 40hp buff.

I have deathrattle junk'd demon hunters so that felhound can just summon more portals for me. Playing Void souls helps me quest too and its a very common deck now.

I have stalled games out against priests trying to OTK me and I win them.

I have beaten face hunters by just playing their own cards against them and having a free heal/card with imbue with Quel'dorei flecther.

I have beaten paladins by out aggroing them or stalling them out just enough.

Previously I only really had egg warlock (I am missing a single cursed chains for the deck too which is annoying). I haven't really crafted many cards and was sitting on 6k dust and egg warlock was enough, happen to get herald/deathwing by farming book of heroes and just enough for a warrior herald deck too.

It is IMMENSLY satisfying to just play someone's deck against them and showing some skill instead of opening packs and praying and waiting for cards that are good for a deck. Azalina just gives me 20 cards i wouldn't have in my collection and allows me to play those cards and just have fun. Needing only 20 priest cards by itself is easier for me as a F2P as well.

I even did this mage combo with the spell that summons 2 8-cost minions if you played 3 spells with it in your hand that turn, played that archmage dude that doubles summons. The mage just afk'd/rope'd me.

I genuinely think Azalina is fun if your f2p, I still see a lot of posts about how utterly garbage she is, and they are properly right but outplaying someone with their own deck is a high I haven't had in this game in a very long time.

Not to mention I added togwaggle (randomly got him in a pack) just to F with people even more.

I have had fun against every class and felt like I had a chance against them.

And before reading the dev comment, I expected the nerf to be done to prevent some infinite combo I didn't know about. But no, it's simply a pretty good card, too good in fact. Interesting!

What has just happened to that deck is very similar to what happened with the mini-set and Companion Hunter.

We had a meta that was widely considered to be stale beforehand. We had some content drop. The content only really made one deck competitive (Void Soul DH), while having a very limited effect on the rest. The result? People play that new deck in droves, the deck has absurd popularity, the deck becomes overhated and most likely the deck gets nerfed hard fast.

The truth is that the buffs just weren't enough. DH was the only one that was buffed aggressively, and I wanna say that this is a good thing. The problem is that no other decks were buffed as aggressively. To give some context, before the patch:

• No deck DH (Irida) was a 35% WR archetype. The Irida buff was +2 health.
• Blights DK was a 25% winrate archetype. The buff was +1/+1 to the charge minion, and 1 mana cheaper.
• Azalina was a 40% winrate archetype. The buff was 40 Health. This one might be decent, but I don't think Blizzard wants Azalina to be a serious deck, which is fine.
• Warlock is the other one that got decent buffs, but still is likely to land around T3. Before the patch, it was one of the lowest winrate decks in the entire game, around 25% to 30% IIRC, so they could have gone a bit harder still.

They keep doing this loop of nerfing stuff but not buffing enough stuff and just adding decks to the meta one at a time which creates a massive variety problem, which I'd say has been the main issue with the Year of the Scarab. Deck variety is simply too low with too many dead classes, so any new deck you add is just going to get an obscene playrate because there's just nothing else new to play.

They buffed the underused new cards and talked about diversity while completely ignoring the Mage. Right now, the only viable deck is Quest Mage, which is the deck I like playing the least. I much prefer Burn Mage and Leyline Mage

No Mage card from this expansion is viable except Skeleton Key which should've been a Warlock card to begin with

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It's interesting looking at the initial data coming in. Everything I'm about to review is subject to change as we get more information, but there are some interesting trends suggesting that the nerfs may not have been wise, knowing what we now know.

Here's the current matchup table and Meta tab: https://imgur.com/a/7qTn6P8

What got nerfed: Warptooth (Egg, Dragon, and Logash Warrior), Blazing Invocation (Mug Shaman), Vanessa and Troublemaker (2 and Herald Rogue), and Tolvir (Face/Contraband Hunters).

As of now, DH is currently massively popular (about 40% playrate), and putting up a rather solid win rate. According to our matchup table, its bad matches are:

• Face Hunter: about 47-49%, depending on rank.

• Godfrey (Big Demon) Warlock: about 42-45%, depending on rank

• Egg Warrior is about even.

Face Hunter getting nerfed no doubt made that match slightly worse for the Hunter, which could be serving as a stronger counter to DH. Egg Warrior getting hit with Warptooth could also have presented another option for the DHs.

Yet despite getting nerfed, Hunter is now winning more than before the patch. This is because (a) it is beating DH a bit, (b) it's beating Warlock a lot, (c) it's seeing far fewer Dragon Warriors, losing a bad match, and (d) it's of course beating up on a lot of bad Priest and Rafaam decks people queued up. But so is everything, so let's just disregard that last point.

The larger point there is an unnerfed Hunter could be beating up more on DH, helping to keep that in check, while also being checked itself by other things that got nerfed.

Like Mug Shaman. That used to beat Hunter rather well, and now the margins are closer to even. While Shaman was certainly a power outlier before, it just developed 2 new bad matches into...Warlock and DH. These decks could have naturally pulled down Shaman's win rate even without a nerf.

Egg Warrior is currently about even with DH. With an intact Warptooth, that match may well have been slightly favorable, helping to check DH more than it is currently being checked.

Dragon Warrior could have helped check Hunter, while also likely going closer to even with DH if it still had Warptooth power.

As for Rogue, Vanessa is now looking pretty bad. So while Rogues have to cut her, they get to cut the bad support cards they played for her, including Agent of the Old Ones, Backstab, and possibly Garona (still up in the air). This allows decks to be rebuilt in a way that might go more in on the 2-cost cards, boosting the power of Jade Guardians and Lotus Troublemaker. The net result may be looking more like a side-grade than a nerf. However, losing Vanessa seems to have hurt Herald more. So that deck which was already struggling might be even worse off.

Metas are pretty dynamic things. It's quite possible these buffs to Warlock and DH could have been more successful in the overall sense of things without the nerfs that hit at the same time.