Hearthpwn

Nefarian Fight spoiler about mechanics (read at your own risk):

The thing to remember about this card is that a part of the Paladin's legacy is heavily conditional (Blessing of Wisdom, Divine Favor) or high tempo cost draw (Hammer of Wrath, Holy Wrath, Lay on Hands) as one of their weaknesses. 

Blessing of Wisdom, while not a terribly risky card, is simply too high risk compare to its reward to be useful. It often acts as a 1 mana cycle, and even then, it still has the condition that you have a minion on board who can attack. Divine Favor suffers from the rather severe condition of not working at all unless your opponent has more cards than you (so basically, it is poor to useless against aggro and face decks). Both of these cards do have the potential to be insane (paying 1 mana to draw 2+ cards over time or paying 3 mana to instantly draw 10 cards aka the dream) but Blessing of Wisdom is too slow and risky to be a card draw engine while Divine Favor only works in aggro Paladin decks and even then, performs poorly when against other aggro decks.

On the other side of Paladin card draw, you have the slow and mana inefficient Hammer of Wrath, basically a Darkbomb combine with a Novice Engineer without the 1/1 body; Holy Wrath which is even slower and gimmicky; and then finally, the saving grace of Paladin card draw (and finally a reliable card that is not a cycle) is Lay on Hands which is basically a Nourish and a Healing Touch squeezed into one card at the cost of it being a major tempo loss by costing 8 mana. LoH is so heavy that it's basically impossible to run 2 of them in any paladin deck and to run LoH as your primary heal effect is pure stupidity when compared to all of paladin's other healing options.

So looking at Paladin card draw options, it's pretty obvious that paladin's have very little in the means of reliable card draw and the singular card they have which is both reliable and efficient is so back-breakingly heavy that it requires you to basically have full board control before it can be "good". It's important to remember that almost every mid range and control Paladin does not play Lay on Hands because it's an OMGWTF OP fantastic card, they play it simply because it's the best option available to them as a means of card draw.

Into this quagmire of bad and mediocre card draw mechanics, you now throw Solemn Vigil. It is a reliable means of card draw with mana inefficiency (par for the course for paladin), but it also has a conditional modifier that is relatively easy to accomplish that can make it both tempo and mana efficient. The important things to note here is that Vigil is reliable draw that, even in it's worse case scenario of costing 5 mana, is still the fastest reliable card draw paladin's have. Every other form of card draw paladin's have that is "faster" is either not reliable or usable in control decks (Divine Favor) or a cycle Hammer of Wrath. Card draw for a Paladin, as a mechanic, is all about tempo (every time, 90% of the time). Because Paladins are a reactionary class, when a pally is drawing cards, it's not because they are digging for a finisher combo to use 6 turns from now; it's because they want access to the cards in their deck that are able (or better able) to deal with the situation at hand. 

And that is why Solemn Vigil is a "good card". Not because it has amazing potential to be super tempo and mana efficient but because, even in its worst case, it is the fastest reliable card draw mechanic paladins have access too.

It feels like they were trying to deliberately delay the onslaught of Dragadin from how cards are coming out, but man Volcanic Drake and Blackwing Corruptor are a serious powerspike. I'm curious about if Drakonid Crusher will be played (and to what extent).

EDIT: Another thought: Will paladin always be the last class challenge in every adventure?

Incorrect, the lava card back was for preordering, the heroic completion card back is called Nefarian and has purple scale, fur, and bone spikes/teeth. (LINK: http://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/File:Card_back-Nefarian.png)

I wish there was an indicator to show that decks contain Blackrock/Naxxramas cards so that the dust cost of decks does not actually reflect the true cost of the deck (since the gold/$ cost of each wing required isn't shown). Senfglas's warrior deck (which is a lot of fun, I highly recommend it) may only cost 700 dust for the cards you can craft, but it requires 4 wings of Naxxramas and 1 wing of Blackrock Mountain to actually create the deck. If you are starting from scratch which can be prohibitive to new players. I would suggest maybe using the Naxxramas and Blackrock symbols used in the deckbuilder to show decks that require adventure mode card rewards (when viewing lists of decks). 

Win trading? Justice demands retribution, etc.

Just going to point out a few things.

• Having a dragon in hand isn't a big requirement. It's already super easy and we are missing most of the great dragon adds: hungry dragons, volcanic drakes, Chromaggus, etc. I was also worried about this mechanic initially, but after having tried him out, I have found that with how late he comes out it's basically non issue. 
• Rend is not a 7 drop minion, he's an assassinate for 1 extra mana with a body attached to it. He's not played as a replacement for Doctor Boom or any other 7 drop minion you play as that's not his purpose. He's not a threat, he's an answer; so calling him inferior because his board stats are lower is like saying polymorph is worse than a yeti because its board stats are lower. It's apples and oranges.

I have had the most success with Rend so far by dropping him as a counter to Doctor Boom (i.e. clean up boom bots, and then kill Boom). Now the opponent has to deal with Rend as he's way too big to ignore which tends to be a big deal. It's true that he's not that hard to kill with removal cards, but the important part is that "they HAVE to use removal in order to remove your removal card" giving you 2 for 1 value the vast majority of the time.

I think the best way to treat Rend is as a neutral assassinate card that also destroy's 1 random removal/damage card in your opponent's hand for one additional mana. And if they have no removal card, deal 8 damage to their face until they do.

Overall I have found Rend to be much better than I expected him to be to the point where he might (and I will stress the might here heavily) be an auto include in dragon decks as he is devastating vs control decks (had a control warrior rage quit when I used Rend to kill his ysera), is perfectly fine against most mid range decks, and actually can be useful against the aggro decks that run Doctor Boom or as a desperate answer to loatheb (with the bonus of aggro decks having a tremendously hard time dealing with him).

 EDIT: Grammar error was bothering me.

Because it's an interesting and creative deck? /whiteknight

I can't wait for the trolden video where someone sprints forgetting about the Chromaggus they had played and ends up milling themselves.

But in all seriousness, that looks like a cool deck I'll have to try.

I have already won quite a few games against mech mage due solely to dragon consort into a turn 7 Drake+Consecrate combo (or, on one occasion, a turn 6 combo with coin). They also work well if you use hammer of wrath in the deck (which I do for now, since there are a lot of wholes in dragon decks). As a one of, it's almost an auto include in paladin dragon decks (and can easily be used as a 2 of as well) due to its versatility as in its worse case scenario, it's a 4/4 body (~8 points) with draw a card (worth ~2 points) for 5 mana making it still basically a break even card if you somehow can't use it for dragon synergies as well as never getting to use the spell damage.

It helps old free to play players like me as well.
I still miss couple of lower tier classic legendaries and i feel bad to buy old packs or "waste" dust on them. Maybe i will get super-lucky with that one pack :D

I don't think so, but Iron Juggernaut mine should.

...(reads card text again)

Oh wow.

I has teh dumb.

not really, poison seeds also kill the minions, so if you posion seeds + starfall 5 minions, you have killed a total of 10 minions!