Hearthpwn

1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9... I'm pretty sure there's 10 classes in Hearthstone now. I feel like I remember a 10th one, anyway. Pretty sure I've seen it. I... may have even been playing it! But, yeah, it has zero place in the meta, so I guess there are only 9.

 Weird. I have the quest, but I can't access the adventure. It's not showing up in the Solo Play list along with all the other adventures.

This, exactly. I'm F2P because I'm not giving Blizzard any more of my money (and don't have any to spend right now even if I wanted to.)

Yeah, I've seen it. Thanks. Kibler and Chump are the only people I regularly watch on YouTube, so I see most of his creations. Only problem is, I took a break from the game and just go back in as of April. I have a lot of dust (since I scrap everything I get from the other classes), but I haven't been willing to pull the trigger on a few parts of that deck (Zephyrus, DQ Alex, Lurker Below) because I generally don't care for Highlander decks and I don't want to drop 3200 or 4800 dust for one deck.

I'm having a decent time with a couple versions of Zoo, Darkest Hour, Pure Libram Paladin, Murloc Paladin, and Totem Shaman, so it's not like I don't have things to play. I just thought it was funny that they listed seven classes for "hot meta decks" and none of the three I play were listed.

And the only classes I play are Paladin, Shaman, and Warlock...

Predicting that Sac Pact becomes "minion only" to open the way for Jaraxxus again. If it becomes "friendly minion only", the card might as well be removed from the game, however.

I don't think it's Extra Arms as much as it is Divine Spirit/Inner Fire. As long as those two cards are in Basic/Classic, they have to really restrict Priest buffing cards because they're often an OTK.

So, my experience with the deck so far has been universally poor, not necessarily because of the design, but because Making Mummies can't compete in any way, shape, or form with the other quests. I played games against Rogue, Mage, Druid, and Shaman. In every case, there isn't enough board removal or protection from minions to either survive long enough to complete the quest and find Undatakah or create enough of a board to threaten them before they complete their quests and begin doing all the wonderful things that said quests can do. The Mage game can probably be dismissed as random chance, since he was also playing the new Yogg spell (multiple Blizzards), but the others take advantage of the main problem with all of these Reborn minions: by and large, they're too fragile to be useful.

A bunch of two Toughness minions is not that much of an obstacle for most of these decks because they're not that much different in Reborn state from the way they started (1 Toughness.) I had similar issues with a more aggro/midrange version of a Reborn deck, using mechs. Opponents can either run past them or remove them with minimal effort (Lackeys, etc.) and they don't do enough damage to threaten your opponent before they draw another 2-in-1 spell (Druid) or multiple Battlecry (Sandstorm Elemental) or similar multiple Battlecry (Spirit of the Shark.) The other downside to Reborn minions is that they don't change the game state when they arrive. They're just vanilla guys that you occasionally have to kill twice.

Admittedly, I'm not a real fan of combo decks, which this is, so maybe it's just not for me. But, again, the real problem I'm having with it isn't the concept. It's the quest. As I feared when I saw the preview, it's just not as good as the others because it takes too much setup time to too little effect.

Finally! A board clear for Warriors.

Worthless Imps are the cards you get when you Sense Demons and don't have any demons left in your deck. Vanilla 1/1s.

So, after watching the designer's video guide and trying this deck over a couple dozen games and then watching others' comments flow by about reactions to the deck and their various alterations, I'm still convinced that Blackguard just isn't viable. Believe me, I want the card to work and it was the very first thing I built a deck around when Knights was released, but it simply isn't viable. It's an anti-tempo card when you play it, as it's a 3/9 that does nothing UNLESS you have a Truesilver loaded or a buffed Paragon on board or a Chillblade in hand or a Djinn on board that survived for a turn. None of those sound particularly likely, right? That's because they're not. Blackguard works in very conditional circumstances and then usually only once per turn because you'll almost never get healed for multiple times/turn. Add in the fact that it's an RNG effect (i.e. you can't target it unless you can reduce your opponent to only one minion) and it's even worse.

How do you compete with Even or Odd Paladin decks without Consecration? How do you stop Cubelock without Equality? How do you beat Taunt Druid without Equality? How do you stay alive against Paladin decks without being able to reliably clear their board (i.e. Consecration, Equality, Pyromancer)? You can eventually clear their board. Slowly. Once per turn with Blackguard. While the rest of their board runs past the Blackguard and beats your face in.

Mind you, I have won a few games. But they've almost all involved playing Keleseth on 2. That's not a reliable strategy. And yet, the designer's mulligan "guide" is "hard mulligan for Keleseth." That's it? The whole point of the deck is to make sure you get 1 card out of 30 in your opening draw or make sure you set up the optimal circumstances for Blackguard? If you fulfill either of those, you're set. If not, you lose. Is that it? Because, if so, I can't say it's very reliable and I really, honestly, wish that it was.

Mildly OT, but the funniest thing to me about Cube is that the one deck you would think would automatically benefit from it, Quest Priest, doesn't at all because Awaken decks lack what makes Cube so good: Burst damage. They're still stuck with slow Deathrattles that don't enable a finish. In the end, they're still just 40 more health waiting to die.

Yep. And just as useless.

I don't think that's true at all. Paladin has some of the best midrange/control cards in the game in Aldor Peacekeeper and Truesilver Champion, plus Equality, Consecration, and one of the best legendaries in the game in Tirion. Shaman, similarly, has Flametongue Totem, the best single-target removal in the game in Hex, Mana Tide Totem, Doomhammer, and Fire Elemental, one of the best minions in the game by any estimation. Priest has nothing to compare to any of that. Shaman's problem has never been its base set. It's the mechanics of the class (RNG hero power and Overload) that held it back until they piled so many cards into improving those mechanics (Thing from Below, Tunnel Trogg, etc.) that the class became dominant.

Priest has never been dominant except for one brief phase during beta when Mind Control was still 8 mana. It has 1 1-cost base set minion with an ability that only benefits from other minions. It has 1 2-cost base set minion with no attack value. It has no base set 3-cost minions. Basically all of Priest's base cards below 4 mana are situational or subpar compared to other classes and the only 4-cost card that isn't is Auchenai Soulpriest. The lone exception below that is PWS. Priest's hero power is also neutered by the limits of the health pool (you can never heal more than 30; Warrior's armor can theoretically be infinite and also benefits other key cards like Shield Slam) and the requirement of actually maintaining a board to be of any use, unlike most of the other hero powers in the game.

But improving the base set is paramount if we don't want to be seeing card like Drakonid in every release to make the class barely playable.

Dragon Priest was never as powerful as they hoped because Priest's base set is awful. Priest decks will never be as powerful as they want until that problem is resolved. It's the only class that has to rely on getting OP cards every set in order to make up for the deficiencies of its base. Adjust/rework a few things and that problem goes away. Unless Priest was intended to be the only class that doesn't have good early cards in a game based entirely on tempo...