New Card Revealed: Necrotic Geist
A new card has been revealed by Lucius Hellsing.
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This looks almost identical to Scarecrow from IJ2.
Poor guy. Just because Lucius has a long, gaunt face, it hardly warrants calling him a scarecrow.
6 mana? is that some kind of bad joke? even 5 mana same everything would be dusted
You play this on a board with few minions before trading, if you get like 2 2/2s it's decent. Seems like an arena card.
I mean it's just a neutral common, which are mostly pack fillers/arena cards so people shoudln't have expectations for this card.
MAYBE in arena but my gut feel says that it'll be too slow or too niche to see play in constructed.
maybe can be an answer against big taunts, replacing your board, and keeping the preasure, but, board clears absolut destroy it
maybe if being a 3/5. or 4/4, combed with unleash the hounds, and is an options against taunts for agro decks, but, the 3 hp, literaly kills the card
PD, good or bad for evolve and devolve, It depends the context
To properly evaluate this card's value, let's say, conservatively, that a 5/3 body is worth about 3 Mana, and a 2/2 body 1 Mana.
To justify its cost, Necrotic Geist would have to summon 3 Ghoul tokens. That requires 3 friendly minions (not counting Necrotic Geist) to die while this is on the field.
We've seen effects like Necrotic Geist's before, in cards such as Cult Master, Flesheating Ghoul, and Scavenging Hyena. All of these cards have powerful abilities that trigger when a friendly minion dies, and as such are high-priority targets. All of these cards situational: they require you to have a board. Currently, the card most commonly run in Constructed is Scavenging Hyena, which has several things going for it that the other cards don't. It's cheap, finds many opportunities to trigger its ability (courtesy of Hunter's many Beast token generation tools), and increases its Health each time a minion dies.
For a number of reasons, I don't believe in pigeonholing new cards into one of two categories: either bad or future meta staples. Necrotic Geist falls somewhere in-between. Certainly, Necrotic Geist is clunkier than Hyena. But it's important to note that Cult Master and Flesheating Ghoul aren't unplayable. They are playable cards in Arena. In addition, Cult Master has been played as a 1-of on occasion in decks like Midrange Hunter, which need card draw and focus on strong board presence. If we treat a summoning a 2/2 minion as having roughly the same value as drawing a card (a fair assumption), Necrotic Geist resembles a Cult Master, 1 mana overcosted.
Food for thought: Suppose you play Necrotic Geist on a non-empty board, then trade and destroy all of your other minions. The effect is equivalent to a 5/3 minion which casts Soul of the Forest,. That's a 6 Mana for a 3 mana body and a 4 Mana effect. Tricky to set up, but not a bad deal if you do.
5/3 body is at least 3.5 mana, because it's 8 stats in total and 6/6 total of stats from 3 2/2s is 3 mana? Not really, they are something over 1 mana probably.
You also have to consider that it's different to play 3 1 mana 2/2s and a 3 mana 5/3 (4 cards) and play a single 5/3 for 6 mana with few minions on board to then proceed to trade and get free minions.
There may be something in what you say. My mentality was that I intentionally rounded down the mana costs to provide a conservative estimate. If you wish to be more precise, we can collectively value three 2/2 Tokens as 5 mana.
Your second point makes perfect sense. I don't recall where in my post I assumed those were the same thing, however. Necrotic Geist is certainly one card.
You can't just calculate the total stats and say that's the end of it. Especially in Arena, a 5/3 with a bunch of 2/2's is just going to get cleared or, God forbid, they play that little piece of shit that goes by Mind Control Tech. At this mana cost and with this bad statline this card is complete garbage in both Arena and constructed.
Thank you for your feedback. Could you specify why exactly you found the assumption unfair?
To clarify, my evaluation of drawing a card was partly based on videos that Trump has done on the subject. He rates drawing a card about 1.5 Mana. That's roughly on par with a 2/2 Token.
Feel free to offer any constructive criticism you may have.
Won't see play in constructed decks
If the body is 3/5 it would be pretty good in arena. 5/3 is a bit easy to remove
A counter against primordial drake though lol
Works well with evolve. 7 drops aren't bad and if the tokens are 2 mana it would be a decent combo to play this, trade in your minions, and evolve
ok gonna be honest here:
This card is bad no doubt but no doubt its not hopeless
in token decks you prefer to summon things over drawing things...
also did you notice? if ghouls die you summon another ghoul! this can have a intresting synergy with new spell of warlock defile (ofcourse very weak one it was an example)
ok lets say ... you play this card traded
enemy failed to kill it... now you trade with your ghouls and get more ghouls
now still a bad card but has advantage over cult master since he can repeat his abilty alone himself while cult master require you to summon new things this minion doesnt
Fun fact! This card couldn't have been printed if Warsong Commander hadn't been nerfed, since it would simply allow you to infinitely trade the 2/2 Ghouls away to clear the opponent's board.
:)