DISCLAIMER: The following is intended for players who opened Moorabi, ideally f2p players, who want to get some milage out of the card now or after a future expansion. I understand the stupidity of crafting Moorabi, but to me, it was worth the dust to experience this god-awful card first hand.
So I crafted Moorabi last week. I HAD to experiment with this card and see if there was some way to make him work. I mean, Blizz can't be entirely incompetent when it comes to card design, can they? There had to be some reason for making him so terrible statwise. There had to be some game changing, undiscovered, (unicorn even) wombo combo that pushed his value generation past his poor stats. /s
I hate to break it to you, but Moorabi will, IMO, never be viable. Obviously, he belongs with a Freeze Shaman archetype, but since there were next to no cards supporting that archetype until Frozen Throne, and because those that were released were garbage (I'm looking at you Avalanche), Freeze Shaman will not be potentially viable until a later expansion.
That said, even if Freeze Shaman becomes a thing, Moorabi will still not be in that deck.
Any potential value that you can generate from Moorabi is meaningless due to the massive tempo loss from playing him. Compare him to The Mistcaller. Both cards sacrifice tempo for potential value generation. IMO, The Mistcaller has the better effect, corroborated by Prince Keleseth's recent addition to aggro Warlock and some niche Shadowstep Rogues. The Mistcaller never saw play. Why? Because 6 mana for a 4/4 is unforgivable, unless the effect is bonkers. Moorabi has an effect that in no way justifies his poor stats. Honestly, I could see this effect being balanced on a competitively statted card, that's how bad the effect is. You have to get 2+ card generations off of this effect to be considered "worth it", but even if you managed to pull that off, you did so to the deterioration of your deck, by replacing actually good cards with Moorabi and a few crappy Shaman freeze cards. Considering that, you'd probably have to get 6+ cards off of Moorabi to make up for putting him in your deck. So considering what became of The Mistcaller, despite its "better" effect, my money's on Moorabi suffering the same fate.
So, here's my advice if you want to play Moorabi to the best that he's capable of:
If you want to add Moorabi to your deck, he needs to be supplemental, not central, to your win condition. That means putting him and a few Freeze cards in a more viable deck. Evolve Shaman is a nice pick, as you can maybe (maybe maybe) justify playing him, making use of his effect, and immediately evolving him into a 7-drop. Any random 7-drop can't be as bad as a 4/4, right? That said, you have to sacrifice a few card slots for Moorabi and a few Freeze cards, so your Evolve deck will be less viable than it was before, because Moorabi sucks. To compensate for that, Elemental Shaman can be a good pick because you can take 2x Glacial Shard, supporting a Moorabi combo without deviating too far from the elemental formula.
Second bit of advice. Never freeze your own minions to get value from Moorabi, unless it's for something big like a second Kalimos, Primal Lord. You have Spirit Echo for returning minions to your hand, and that card doesn't stall you for a turn.
EDIT: FedorWin brought up the following situation in a reply below. It's worth considering, depending on your situation (most likely, your need for card draw).
Never freeze your own minions to get value from Moorabi, unless it's for something big
You may occasionally consider freezing good 0-attack cards like mana-tide or flametongue totems, because freezeis irrelevant in that case. That is, if you can afford spending a card to get an extra totem to your hand, which is still a hefty price.
Last bit. Don't get emotionally invested in Moorabi. If you can't find a safe time to play him for 10 games straight, don't play him. He's cool, I'll give him that, but you have to be absolutely certain that you can get value off of him before you play him. A dead card in the hand is nowhere near as bad as playing Moorabi at the wrong time. Often, the appropriate time to play him (if there ever was a time) is when you are winning. This is for the memes, not for having a positive win rate. Never play Moorabi when you're losing. When you're losing, you are playing typical Evolve or Elemental Shaman, no exceptions.
Best of luck if you're running Moorabi, you're gonna need it.
Pulled this card day one as my first legendary. Freeze Shaman was the first deck i made. Couldn't even beat a Pirate Rogue or a C'Thun Druid - on day one of KFT - with the designated Moorabi synergies. Freeze Shaman might and hopefully will be a deck in the future, but Moorabi is a horrible card
I was actually fortunate enough to pull a golden Moorabi but haven't gotten around to trying him out yet. Unfortunately I've never read anything about him that was even remotely positive which makes me sad :(
Just like you sayd i came up with the same conclusion , morabii is a card generator that also requires a combo to have effect that being sayd the card may see play if some other card that synergizes with freeze come out , also i got no idee why Coldwraith was printed as a mage card instead of neutral when they want to introduse freeze archtype and they give shaman Cryostasis WHAT??? , if atleast this card was something like (freeze your minions give them 2/2) or (give frozen minions 2/2 )
Touché. Would serve you right for running Moorabi lol. Jokes aside, evolving Moorabi after making use of his effect is the best way to make him "worth" playing, from my experience. There are 30 7-drops in Standard atm, and while 7-drops are somewhat notoriously understatted, all of them, albeit Stone Sentinel, are better than Moorabi stat-wise. Have a few other minions on the board before dropping Moorabi for a freeze-into-evolve play, and you can get some decent value.
I could have told you all of that about Moorabi, before you crafted it, just by looking at it's stats. It is one of the cards that IS just as bad as it seems at face value... blizzard seems to be getting good at that.
TLDR Ι crafted Moorabi because i thought i would make it work while the entire community tried it countless times already with no viable outcome.
Freeze Shaman is a to-do archetype by Blizzard, they just introduced the theme and will finalize it during the next expansions.
Thanks bro. I didn't craft Moorabi because I actually believed that I personally could make him viable. I crafted him to experiment, which is something that the majority of this community of net-deckers could learn to do. And if you had taken the time to read my post, you'd know that half of it makes an argument that Moorabi will not see play even if Freeze Shaman becomes viable after Blizz finalizes it, and that the second half offers some advice to those who want to run him just for fun. Nothing in there about me thinking I'm better than anyone else. But I guess it'd be hard to figure that, cuz u know, TLDR.
Never freeze your own minions to get value from Moorabi, unless it's for something big
You may occasionally consider freezing good 0-attack cards like mana-tide or flametongue totems, because freeze is irrelevant in that case. That is, if you can afford spending a card to get an extra totem to your hand, which is still a hefty price.
Overall I agree with everything you said, trying Moorabi and full-on freeze shaman myself, most of the time it is a dead card in your hand, you never have enough tempo to play and don't lose. And when you finally do, you get one, maybe two cards which may not even be good for you, you just take what you can get.
Amm, OP, I don't want to be rude. but imho you could have come to the same conclusions even without crafting Moorabi. You just have to think of the possible combinations, the requirements he needs and how weak the current shaman set really is.
I'm not going to discuss whether or not freeze shaman will be a thing, because it WON'T. With or without Moorabi. Other users and I have discussed the disadvantages of those cards, I wrote my opinion on the legendary in the thread "freeze shaman, does it work" (btw here's a long comment about the freeze deck here). And all points lead to the conclusion, that A) he is a super slow and a weak card B) the freeze cards are bad, they take precious card slots in your deck just for some weak combos (not to mention shamans struggle at drawing cards) C) Lyra is miles away better than Moorabi D) why would you use the freeze cards, when you can use real removals instead etc etc.
Some of those things you have already mentioned in the original post. The point is - for me it was obvious, that this card is bad, that this card is not worth the craft. You don't need to spend dust in him unless, like you said, you care about having fun.
Never freeze your own minions to get value from Moorabi, unless it's for something big
You may occasionally consider freezing good 0-attack cards like mana-tide or flametongue totems, because freeze is irrelevant in that case. That is, if you can afford spending a card to get an extra totem to your hand, which is still a hefty price.
That's a good point. I'll add it to the advice part of the post. It still might be tough to justify a full board freeze though (Hyldnir Frostrider), because you'll often want to keep your other on-board minions active to defend those totems. And if you're ever in a situation where you only have flametongue or mana-tide on board, getting value from Moorabi is the least of your problems lol.
Amm, OP, I don't want to be rude. but imho you could have come to the same conclusions even without crafting Moorabi. You just have to think of the possible combinations, the requirements he needs and how weak the current shaman set really is.
I'm not going to discuss whether or not freeze shaman will be a thing, because it WON'T. With or without Moorabi. Other users and I have discussed the disadvantages of those cards, I wrote my opinion on the legendary in the thread "freeze shaman, does it work" (btw here's a long comment about the freeze deck here). And all points lead to the conclusion, that A) he is a super slow and a weak card B) the freeze cards are bad, they take precious card slots in your deck just for some weak combos (not to mention shamans struggle at drawing cards) C) Lyra is miles away better than Moorabi D) why would you use the freeze cards, when you can use real removals instead etc etc.
Some of those things you have already mentioned in the original post. The point is - for me it was obvious, that this card is bad, that this card is not worth the craft. You don't need to spend dust in him unless, like you said, you care about having fun.
I took a look at the linked comment, and your mentioned thread. Regarding the linked comment, I generally agree with the criticism made against the freeze archetype. The problem with that deck is that it's built around Moorabi (including quite a few low quality freeze cards, and Flamewreathed Faceless cards with the intention to copy them). But I think that's more of an argument against Freeze Shaman than Moorabi, for reasons B and D that you mentioned. If some never lucky f2p player opens Moorabi and is hell bent on getting some miles out of him, making him act as supplemental card draw in an already existing, more viable archetype is the way to go. Regarding your comparison to Lyra the Sunshard, I don't think that's really all that fair. The comparison to Gadgetzan Auctioneer in the linked post is more fair, as Shaman can actually run Auctioneer if they want. Lyra is clearly the better card, but since Lyra isn't competing for a 6 slot in Shaman, there really isn't a reason to compare her to Moorabi. Moorabi sucks because of his own merits (or lack thereof), not because he's a worse Lyra.
First off, thx for your time in reading the mentioned posts and trying to continue the discussion.
Let's begin:
Can you judge the person for including them, when (in my opinion) only Voodoo HexxerandGlacial Shard are the only good freeze cards to work with? Ice Breaker requires you to use roughly 2 cards every time you want to kill a minion (the weapon + a freeze card ≈ 1,33 cards per enemy minion). The Brrlock and the neutral 6 m 5/5 are just slow. I'm not even going to start examining the other freeze cards. Of course that person's deck is bad; if he only included the best cards, the deck wouldn't have been considered a freeze themed one. However I'm not criticizing him for making a deck around Moorabi in the first place, because you can at least gain something out of those weak cards. If you don't run him, you should also replace the clunky freeze cards too.*
If some never lucky f2p player opens Moorabi and is hell bent on getting some miles out of him, making him act as supplemental card draw in an already existing, more viable archetype is the way to go.
At the same time I agree with you, that building a deck entirely around him isn't a viable, nor a good strategy, but I just feel, how this package won't do any good to the deck-type, acting as a host. This hybrid deck will certainly be stronger than the themed freeze one, but unless I aim to have fun (or future freeze minions work well with the evolve mechanic), I would prefer to play the specific and clean deck-type instead.
Amm, OK, I admit I wasn't fair at comparing him to Lyra. This was just a reference to an old thread, where people constantly mentioned the priest legendary, and since then I've always included that example in my posts. As for Gadgetzan - nah, the gap between them gets smaller, but it's still the same case for me. The fact, that you have to "cycle" very specific resources, which can be used on minions only (some of which can only target the enemy ones), makes Moorabi even more clunky. Like you said: "Moorabi sucks because of his own merits (or lack thereof), not because he's a worse Lyra."
Note* - in this little paragraph I would like to express my thoughts on what cards should come, in order to make the freeze shaman better. First off, there should be a card, which changes the HP with the new effect of freezing stuff (maybe adding a slight ping as well). This way you don't have to use resources every time you perform some kind of a combo. A card, which freezes the whole enemy board (at best a cheap minion). A card, which destroys all frozen minions. And lastly, what comes to my mind, a minion, which has a continuous effect of constantly freezing a minion each friendly turn, which effect you control (not "at the end of the turn freeze a random enemy minion/character"). If you have other ideas, you can also share them.
Moorabi is terrible no doubt about it! Even in a Freeze Shaman deck he is the worst card. :( Here is my first attempt at Freeze Shaman. The deck went through multiple revisions JUST to get to 40% win rate! | Deck List
I want to say a quick thanks to OculusWindow for creating a thread which has been; humorous, original and ironically insightful. These are the kind of threads which keep me visiting Hearthpwn when so many others put me off for days. Cheers matey
Moorabi is terrible no doubt about it! Even in a Freeze Shaman deck he is the worst card. :( Here is my first attempt at Freeze Shaman. The deck went through multiple revisions JUST to get to 40% win rate! | Deck List
Watching you fight off that scum Jade Druid with a Freeze Shaman warmed my frozen heart. Moorabi definitely wasn't MVP though, lol. Surviving to the late game looks like a big problem with that deck. Were you able to make much use of Ice Breaker? I get that it's synergistic and has potential for big tempo swings, but I can't see that card working without more consistent sustain, like Jinyu Waterspeaker or Healing Wave in wild.
Can you judge the person for including them, when (in my opinion) only Voodoo HexxerandGlacial Shard are the only good freeze cards to work with? Ice Breaker requires you to use roughly 2 cards every time you want to kill a minion (the weapon + a freeze card ≈ 1,33 cards per enemy minion). The Brrlock and the neutral 6 m 5/5 are just slow. I'm not even going to start examining the other freeze cards. Of course that person's deck is bad; if he only included the best cards, the deck wouldn't have been considered a freeze themed one. However I'm not criticizing him for making a deck around Moorabi in the first place, because you can at least gain something out of those weak cards. If you don't run him, you should also replace the clunky freeze cards too.
Actually, IMO, the reason to judge that deck negatively is solely because of the focus on freeze cards. I think of Moorabi and Shaman Freeze in general as analogous to the pirate package: You can go all in with a full-on pirate themed deck, but you're better off with just a select few. Almost every aggro deck in the current meta runs Patches the Pirate + Bloodsail Corsair, just to activate Patches, for the sole purpose of early game tempo and having a more consistent deck. I consider those decks to be hybid, and they're still pretty fun to play. If a person want to make use of every Shaman freeze card, than by all means, run those cards. But if their focus is on Moorabi specifically, they should run only a small subset of freeze cards to compliment him. Going all in with freeze just makes Moorabi's faults even more apparent.
Amm, OK, I admit I wasn't fair at comparing him to Lyra. This was just a reference to an old thread, where people constantly mentioned the priest legendary, and since then I've always included that example in my posts. As for Gadgetzan - nah, the gap between them gets smaller, but it's still the same case for me. The fact, that you have to "cycle" very specific resources, which can be used on minions only (some of which can only target the enemy ones), makes Moorabi even more clunky. Like you said: "Moorabi sucks because of his own merits (or lack thereof), not because he's a worse Lyra."
I completely agree. The specificity of what you have to cycle to get value from Moorabi is what sets him apart from Gadgetzan Auctioneer. And honestly, card draw is usually always better than card generation, unless that card generation comes cheap, like off a battlecry. Because ideally, you should be running powerful cards and drawing into them, not relying on your opponent to have powerful minions to absorb.
Note* - in this little paragraph I would like to express my thoughts on what cards should come, in order to make the freeze shaman better. First off, there should be a card, which changes the HP with the new effect of freezing stuff (maybe adding a slight ping as well). This way you don't have to use resources every time you perform some kind of a combo. A card, which freezes the whole enemy board (at best a cheap minion). A card, which destroys all frozen minions. And lastly, what comes to my mind, a minion, which has a continuous effect of constantly freezing a minion each friendly turn, which effect you control (not "at the end of the turn freeze a random enemy minion/character"). If you have other ideas, you can also share them.
Blizz seems determined to give Shaman single-target freeze, so while a Frost Nova like card would help Freeze Shaman, I can't see them printing it. Plus there's the whole interactivity concern (which I don't see as a problem, personally I love Freeze Mage). It was a shame that Avalanche sucked, because I really like the positioning aspect of it, and it goes thematically with Shaman's targeting emphasis on freeze. This minion with the continuous freeze that you mention would be really cool if it went something like "At the end of your turn, freeze the enemy directly in front of this minion". One idea that I had was giving Shaman some better sustain that simultaneously provides a freeze effect. Something like "Freeze a minion and restore health to your hero equal to that minion's Health." That might make Ice Breaker more reasonable. Another, somewhat funny idea, is a card that gives your opponent a small 0/1 or 0/2 totem that has an effect like "At the start of your turn, freeze the minions adjacent to this card". That'd be pretty disruptive, and could guarantee some Moorabi value without as much investment.
In short - I agree with your thoughts. I will only add - you have nice ideas for the last part.
[edit] You can go all in with a full-on pirate themed deck, but you're better off with just a select few.
I didn't say anything against this statement. I remember saying, that the hybrid deck will be stronger than the pure themed one. I didn't express my thoughts that good, but in this sentence
This hybrid deck will certainly be stronger than the themed freeze one, but unless I aim to have fun (or future freeze minions work well with the evolve mechanic), I would prefer to play the specific and clean deck-type instead.
I was referring to the host deck. As in - the package slows down the host deck, I prefer to play it w/o the freeze cards, because they won't be that helpful.
I was actually fortunate enough to pull a golden Moorabi but haven't gotten around to trying him out yet. Unfortunately I've never read anything about him that was even remotely positive which makes me sad :(
You call pulling a golden moorabi fortunate instead of another golden legendary???
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Check out my Earth, Wind, and Fire - Elemental Shaman deck!
DISCLAIMER: The following is intended for players who opened Moorabi, ideally f2p players, who want to get some milage out of the card now or after a future expansion. I understand the stupidity of crafting Moorabi, but to me, it was worth the dust to experience this god-awful card first hand.
So I crafted Moorabi last week. I HAD to experiment with this card and see if there was some way to make him work. I mean, Blizz can't be entirely incompetent when it comes to card design, can they? There had to be some reason for making him so terrible statwise. There had to be some game changing, undiscovered, (unicorn even) wombo combo that pushed his value generation past his poor stats. /s
I hate to break it to you, but Moorabi will, IMO, never be viable. Obviously, he belongs with a Freeze Shaman archetype, but since there were next to no cards supporting that archetype until Frozen Throne, and because those that were released were garbage (I'm looking at you Avalanche), Freeze Shaman will not be potentially viable until a later expansion.
That said, even if Freeze Shaman becomes a thing, Moorabi will still not be in that deck.
Any potential value that you can generate from Moorabi is meaningless due to the massive tempo loss from playing him. Compare him to The Mistcaller. Both cards sacrifice tempo for potential value generation. IMO, The Mistcaller has the better effect, corroborated by Prince Keleseth's recent addition to aggro Warlock and some niche Shadowstep Rogues. The Mistcaller never saw play. Why? Because 6 mana for a 4/4 is unforgivable, unless the effect is bonkers. Moorabi has an effect that in no way justifies his poor stats. Honestly, I could see this effect being balanced on a competitively statted card, that's how bad the effect is. You have to get 2+ card generations off of this effect to be considered "worth it", but even if you managed to pull that off, you did so to the deterioration of your deck, by replacing actually good cards with Moorabi and a few crappy Shaman freeze cards. Considering that, you'd probably have to get 6+ cards off of Moorabi to make up for putting him in your deck. So considering what became of The Mistcaller, despite its "better" effect, my money's on Moorabi suffering the same fate.
So, here's my advice if you want to play Moorabi to the best that he's capable of:
If you want to add Moorabi to your deck, he needs to be supplemental, not central, to your win condition. That means putting him and a few Freeze cards in a more viable deck. Evolve Shaman is a nice pick, as you can maybe (maybe maybe) justify playing him, making use of his effect, and immediately evolving him into a 7-drop. Any random 7-drop can't be as bad as a 4/4, right? That said, you have to sacrifice a few card slots for Moorabi and a few Freeze cards, so your Evolve deck will be less viable than it was before, because Moorabi sucks. To compensate for that, Elemental Shaman can be a good pick because you can take 2x Glacial Shard, supporting a Moorabi combo without deviating too far from the elemental formula.
Second bit of advice. Never freeze your own minions to get value from Moorabi, unless it's for something big like a second Kalimos, Primal Lord. You have Spirit Echo for returning minions to your hand, and that card doesn't stall you for a turn.
EDIT: FedorWin brought up the following situation in a reply below. It's worth considering, depending on your situation (most likely, your need for card draw).
Last bit. Don't get emotionally invested in Moorabi. If you can't find a safe time to play him for 10 games straight, don't play him. He's cool, I'll give him that, but you have to be absolutely certain that you can get value off of him before you play him. A dead card in the hand is nowhere near as bad as playing Moorabi at the wrong time. Often, the appropriate time to play him (if there ever was a time) is when you are winning. This is for the memes, not for having a positive win rate. Never play Moorabi when you're losing. When you're losing, you are playing typical Evolve or Elemental Shaman, no exceptions.
Best of luck if you're running Moorabi, you're gonna need it.
Pulled this card day one as my first legendary. Freeze Shaman was the first deck i made. Couldn't even beat a Pirate Rogue or a C'Thun Druid - on day one of KFT - with the designated Moorabi synergies. Freeze Shaman might and hopefully will be a deck in the future, but Moorabi is a horrible card
- LePatron
Just like you sayd i came up with the same conclusion , morabii is a card generator that also requires a combo to have effect that being sayd the card may see play if some other card that synergizes with freeze come out , also i got no idee why Coldwraith was printed as a mage card instead of neutral when they want to introduse freeze archtype and they give shaman Cryostasis WHAT??? , if atleast this card was something like (freeze your minions give them 2/2) or (give frozen minions 2/2 )
Best deck i could come up wtih was
I could have told you all of that about Moorabi, before you crafted it, just by looking at it's stats. It is one of the cards that IS just as bad as it seems at face value... blizzard seems to be getting good at that.
TLDR
Ι crafted Moorabi because i thought i would make it work while the entire community tried it countless times already with no viable outcome.
Freeze Shaman is a to-do archetype by Blizzard, they just introduced the theme and will finalize it during the next expansions.
Amm, OP, I don't want to be rude. but imho you could have come to the same conclusions even without crafting Moorabi. You just have to think of the possible combinations, the requirements he needs and how weak the current shaman set really is.
I'm not going to discuss whether or not freeze shaman will be a thing, because it WON'T. With or without Moorabi. Other users and I have discussed the disadvantages of those cards, I wrote my opinion on the legendary in the thread "freeze shaman, does it work" (btw here's a long comment about the freeze deck here). And all points lead to the conclusion, that A) he is a super slow and a weak card B) the freeze cards are bad, they take precious card slots in your deck just for some weak combos (not to mention shamans struggle at drawing cards) C) Lyra is miles away better than Moorabi D) why would you use the freeze cards, when you can use real removals instead etc etc.
Some of those things you have already mentioned in the original post. The point is - for me it was obvious, that this card is bad, that this card is not worth the craft. You don't need to spend dust in him unless, like you said, you care about having fun.
I took a look at the linked comment, and your mentioned thread. Regarding the linked comment, I generally agree with the criticism made against the freeze archetype. The problem with that deck is that it's built around Moorabi (including quite a few low quality freeze cards, and Flamewreathed Faceless cards with the intention to copy them). But I think that's more of an argument against Freeze Shaman than Moorabi, for reasons B and D that you mentioned. If some never lucky f2p player opens Moorabi and is hell bent on getting some miles out of him, making him act as supplemental card draw in an already existing, more viable archetype is the way to go. Regarding your comparison to Lyra the Sunshard, I don't think that's really all that fair. The comparison to Gadgetzan Auctioneer in the linked post is more fair, as Shaman can actually run Auctioneer if they want. Lyra is clearly the better card, but since Lyra isn't competing for a 6 slot in Shaman, there really isn't a reason to compare her to Moorabi. Moorabi sucks because of his own merits (or lack thereof), not because he's a worse Lyra.
First off, thx for your time in reading the mentioned posts and trying to continue the discussion.
Let's begin:
Can you judge the person for including them, when (in my opinion) only Voodoo Hexxer and Glacial Shard are the only good freeze cards to work with? Ice Breaker requires you to use roughly 2 cards every time you want to kill a minion (the weapon + a freeze card ≈ 1,33 cards per enemy minion). The Brrlock and the neutral 6 m 5/5 are just slow. I'm not even going to start examining the other freeze cards.
Of course that person's deck is bad; if he only included the best cards, the deck wouldn't have been considered a freeze themed one. However I'm not criticizing him for making a deck around Moorabi in the first place, because you can at least gain something out of those weak cards. If you don't run him, you should also replace the clunky freeze cards too.*
At the same time I agree with you, that building a deck entirely around him isn't a viable, nor a good strategy, but I just feel, how this package won't do any good to the deck-type, acting as a host. This hybrid deck will certainly be stronger than the themed freeze one, but unless I aim to have fun (or future freeze minions work well with the evolve mechanic), I would prefer to play the specific and clean deck-type instead.
Amm, OK, I admit I wasn't fair at comparing him to Lyra. This was just a reference to an old thread, where people constantly mentioned the priest legendary, and since then I've always included that example in my posts. As for Gadgetzan - nah, the gap between them gets smaller, but it's still the same case for me. The fact, that you have to "cycle" very specific resources, which can be used on minions only (some of which can only target the enemy ones), makes Moorabi even more clunky. Like you said: "Moorabi sucks because of his own merits (or lack thereof), not because he's a worse Lyra."
Note* - in this little paragraph I would like to express my thoughts on what cards should come, in order to make the freeze shaman better. First off, there should be a card, which changes the HP with the new effect of freezing stuff (maybe adding a slight ping as well). This way you don't have to use resources every time you perform some kind of a combo. A card, which freezes the whole enemy board (at best a cheap minion). A card, which destroys all frozen minions. And lastly, what comes to my mind, a minion, which has a continuous effect of constantly freezing a minion each friendly turn, which effect you control (not "at the end of the turn freeze a random enemy minion/character"). If you have other ideas, you can also share them.
Moorabi is terrible no doubt about it! Even in a Freeze Shaman deck he is the worst card. :( Here is my first attempt at Freeze Shaman. The deck went through multiple revisions JUST to get to 40% win rate! | Deck List
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I want to say a quick thanks to OculusWindow for creating a thread which has been; humorous, original and ironically insightful. These are the kind of threads which keep me visiting Hearthpwn when so many others put me off for days. Cheers matey
Please don't tell my girlfriend about my card collection...
This garbage card might be viable when there's a card that freezes all minions on board that costs 4 mana or less...
Actually, IMO, the reason to judge that deck negatively is solely because of the focus on freeze cards. I think of Moorabi and Shaman Freeze in general as analogous to the pirate package: You can go all in with a full-on pirate themed deck, but you're better off with just a select few. Almost every aggro deck in the current meta runs Patches the Pirate + Bloodsail Corsair, just to activate Patches, for the sole purpose of early game tempo and having a more consistent deck. I consider those decks to be hybid, and they're still pretty fun to play. If a person want to make use of every Shaman freeze card, than by all means, run those cards. But if their focus is on Moorabi specifically, they should run only a small subset of freeze cards to compliment him. Going all in with freeze just makes Moorabi's faults even more apparent.
I completely agree. The specificity of what you have to cycle to get value from Moorabi is what sets him apart from Gadgetzan Auctioneer. And honestly, card draw is usually always better than card generation, unless that card generation comes cheap, like off a battlecry. Because ideally, you should be running powerful cards and drawing into them, not relying on your opponent to have powerful minions to absorb.
Blizz seems determined to give Shaman single-target freeze, so while a Frost Nova like card would help Freeze Shaman, I can't see them printing it. Plus there's the whole interactivity concern (which I don't see as a problem, personally I love Freeze Mage). It was a shame that Avalanche sucked, because I really like the positioning aspect of it, and it goes thematically with Shaman's targeting emphasis on freeze. This minion with the continuous freeze that you mention would be really cool if it went something like "At the end of your turn, freeze the enemy directly in front of this minion". One idea that I had was giving Shaman some better sustain that simultaneously provides a freeze effect. Something like "Freeze a minion and restore health to your hero equal to that minion's Health." That might make Ice Breaker more reasonable. Another, somewhat funny idea, is a card that gives your opponent a small 0/1 or 0/2 totem that has an effect like "At the start of your turn, freeze the minions adjacent to this card". That'd be pretty disruptive, and could guarantee some Moorabi value without as much investment.
In short - I agree with your thoughts. I will only add - you have nice ideas for the last part.
I didn't say anything against this statement. I remember saying, that the hybrid deck will be stronger than the pure themed one. I didn't express my thoughts that good, but in this sentence
I was referring to the host deck. As in - the package slows down the host deck, I prefer to play it w/o the freeze cards, because they won't be that helpful.
You call pulling a golden moorabi fortunate instead of another golden legendary???
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