New Mage Card Revealed: Glacial Mysteries
Christmas Tree Mage is on its way to Hearthstone with Frozen Throne! Revealed by Polygon.
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Well mage secrets are about 3x better, so kinda hard to compare like that
Paladin's secrets have good synergy too unlike mage.
Indirect nerf to casino mage.
If this were a cost 6 6/6 minion i would love it :^)
Ohhh right...
So I need to craft Eater of Secrets? Gotcha
Hopefully it's shit. Also, hopefully there's some more secret counter play than it is right now...
Aka: skip turn 8: do nothing until your opponent chooses that you did something. You play this against an enemy with any kind of board, and you lose. You play this when you're ahead...wouldn't you be better off playing something like Firelands Portal? Secrets are only impactful when your opponent is under pressure. Dropping a 6 mana 6/6 along with a swarm of secrets puts your opponent under pressure and requires immediate response. Your opponent won't have the time to play around all the Secrets, they need to pop them ASAP to get to your 6/6. Similarly, Secret Mage works because they grab hold of the board, put pressure on you and don't allow you to play around Mirror Entity and Counterspell because if you play around them you die. The later you play out your secrets the more mana your opponent has available to play around them. Even if turn 8 for 4 Mage Secrets is good enough, this puts on no pressure on its own, so it requires you to be ahead already and requires you to play A LOT of secrets to be worth it. Playing this to pull Mirror Entity, Counterspell and Ice Block isn't good enough. The one card that might make this work is Medivh, since you essentially get the Mysterious Challenger effect through Atiesh.
Let's see, you play this and:
1. You copy any minion they play
2. You polymorph it
3. You gain 8 armor when they try and hit your face
4. You counter the spell they try and cast
5. You get immune if they can push for lethal.
6. You kill the first minion that attacks.
Since you probably won't trigger iceblock, you can set up for 2-turn leathal.
You're just proving my point. Let's examine the situation if the opponent is ahead.
ad 1) and 2) They either play nothing or, more likely they play whatever smaller minion they have in their hand and immediately kill it. Considering the fact you just spent your entire turn 8 doing nothing to the board, they can easily afford to play it slow and drop some garbage. They will maintain their lead and probably increase it further afterwards by playing something for their remaining mana.
ad 3) That makes you die slower. It doesn't get you closer to winning and doesn't affect the board state. Most likely, the 8 armor will just mitigate the damage you take for skipping your turn 8. It won't mitigate whatever extra beating you take afterwards from the minions your opponent played on their turn uncontested while you were faffing about with your secrets. Also, it means you have to even run this card in your deck, which most decks playing Mirror Entity and Counterspell don't want to.
ad 4) Again, this spell ate your whole turn. They don't even need to cast anything, you just conceded the board to them, they have no urgent targets to worry about. They can easily pop the counterspell at their convenience two turns from now.
ad 5) Doesn't affect the board state.
ad 6) Assuming you even want to run this, not particularly difficult to play around unless your opponent literally only has one big minion. In which case, they will likely not attack face anyway, as they will be killing whatever small guy you get from Mirror Entity.
The big caveat here is, this doesn't just poop out secrets out of nowhere. You have to have them in your deck. By turn 8, you are quite likely to draw bunch of them. To get full value out of the card, you'd have to have duplicates of most of them. With the secrets we currently know of, I cannot imagine a deck that wants to have 8-10 deck slots occupied by secrets (plus at least one copy of this card) which quite often don't even synergize (Ice Block + Barrier are for control decks that barely even run the Barrier these days, and don't want much of the remaining secrets, Mirror Entity + Potion of Poly + Counterspell are for tempo decks that don't even want to use Glacial Mysteries, let alone the rest of the secrets, Vaporize is for...nobody, really). So I restate, without Medivh, this card only helps you if you're already ahead, which is a telltale sign of a bad card. Unless we get some extremely strong Mage secrets or Medivh is enough of a powerhouse to sacrifice cca 1/3rd of your deck space for secrets, this will be a gimmick card and nothing else.
This card could be awesome if mana cost was 7.
It's 7 mana with Inkmaster Solia :P
*secret pally flashback*
Idk if running this in a control mage is better than just playing an aggro secret deck.
Interesting card tho, synergies nicely with Med deck.
I gues Eater of Secrets will be the top tech card in next expa...along with the crabs...
Not that bad.
Good Medivh, the Guardian synergy as its a "summon an 8 cost minion and have your opponent not be able to do much of anything next turn, same for Summoning Stone."
Not really good Inkmaster Solia syngergy, as it requires you to make a Secret-heavy deck where drawing a secret is a bad thing (only one of each) and Arcanologist and Mad Scientist only weakens that.
Makes Kabal Crystal Runner free that turn, so that's quite nice. Also gives some pretty good stall if you're running Open the Waygate.
It probably doesn't synergises with Crystal Runner because she reduces her cost if you PLAY a secret from hand
I like the Medivh, the Guardian synergy you just suggested. Aside from defensive secrets, because you are getting an 8-cost minion, Effigy might see play as it would give you another 8-cost for free from either Medivh or the random 8-cost from the Atiesh dying. Duplicate sounds tempting for the value but getting double 8-cost minions seems slow.
Yeah, definitely doesn't synergise with Kabal Crystal Runner, and it actually has negative synergy with most secret cards, like Arcanologist and such. I think this is actually pretty weak, as it has less than 8 mana impact on board (Mirror Entity and Counterspell are two of the only spells that have much board impact) for a full 8 mana, which gives you only 2 left over to either Frostbolt or maybe Medivh's Valet a minion (or if you're really lucky, use the new Frost Lich Jaina hero power and summon a Water Elemental that turn).
So yes it's a control card, and the effect is strong there, because it draws AND plays all the Secrets out of your deck, which improves your draw potential. However, in a control game, while drawing a secret sucks, not drawing any cards and going into fatigue is worse, and especially with Warrior and Priest getting huge deck reload mechanics, with Archbishop Benedictus and such, maybe running through 20% of your deck with one card isn't a good idea in control match ups.
Why I really like this card is because it nerfs cards like Babbling Book and Cabalist's Tome by putting another poor spell into the Mage spell pool. And unlike Freezing Potion and Shatter, this spell does eventually become useless. Unless there's also going to be some mechanic to fill your deck with random secrets, but I doubt it.
Overall I like it. It's strong in the right scenario, but not too overpowered, and it's risky, so it won't be a staple of every deck. I like to think a secret mage variant might be built around this card, but it won't be a must have in every mage deck. Probably best to not include it, add secrets as usual, and if you get it off a random effect then, hey, nice!
I also like that paladin secrets cost 1 mana and Mage secrets cost 3.
this expansion sucks... they could add a lot of awesome mechanics, but no, they add more and more of the same.. a lot of new decks of the same thing.. X_X