Our Imaginations Run Wild with Toki, Time-Tinker
In the run-up to a new expansion, Blizzard opts to reveal new cards slowly, rather than all 135 at once. We’re in the thick of reveal season now and like a slow-drip of adrenaline we get a handful of new cards to dissect every day. New keywords Rush and Echo along with the odd- and even-mana synergies unveiled at the jump have dominated the conversation so far. But this spooky set features a lot worth talking about — even though we only know about half its cards.
Embrace the Tinker
The latest card to get us really thinking: Toki, Time-Tinker. (Not “Tinkerer” — I checked). Toki is a 6-mana 5/5 legendary minion for the Mage class. Playing Toki awards you with a Legendary minion “from the past.” That means no weapons, Quests, or Death Knights. It also means its card pool features minions from the Wild set only, no matter your playlist of choice.
With the all-powerful Ice Block having secured itself a spot in the Hall of Fame and Kazakus rotating to Wild, Mage is in an peculiar spot. For months, Mage players have gone all-in on one of two gameplans: throw burn spells at the opponent or clear the opponent’s minions again and again until Frost Lich Jaina wins the value game. The former is losing many of its key tools for generating tempo swings while the latter is losing its most powerful defensive tool.
Suffering an identity crisis as we near the next expansion, the class needs more than Toki, Time-Tinker. Let’s make this clear right away: she is not competitively viable. The stats are underwhelming and par for the course given the value-generating ability, in the same vein as Nexus-Champion Saraad and Confessor Paletress before her. More consequential, the extreme variance in good and bad Wild legendary minions means that for every Sylvanas Windrunner you’re blessed with, you’ll pull two Patches the Pirate. Toki doesn’t give us any indication of a new way to play Mage, either, but it teases the possibility for the type of extended value that Mage already gets from Sindragosa and Cabalist's Tome — the type Thijs and Kibler exploit on stream and we all enjoy on YouTube the next day. Toki is a meme machine and we should accept that right away.
Please No
To enjoy speculating about Toki, perhaps we should get these possibilities out of the way. These are the absolute worst-case scenarios, cards you might not even bother dropping onto your board.
Wilfred Fizzlebang: This expensive Warlock legendary never really saw play by Warlock players, even. Give it to a Mage and, well, unless you figure out how to draw cards with your ping (spoiler: you can’t), you’re going to need to accept your terrible luck and look elsewhere for value.
Majordomo Executus: This fiery legendary minion was a meme generator itself back in its day. But the risk-reward scenario was more dire than with Toki. Its deathrattle changed your hero into Ragnaros, the Firelord — giving you the powerful hero power now granted by Fire Plume's Heart at the expense of reducing your health to 8. Perhaps you still have The Coin at turn 10 and get a fringe out for lethal, but that’s a lot of situational RNG to wish for.
Patches the Pirate: In the Year of the Mammoth, drawing Patches was the worst-case scenario in numerous pirate decks eager to pull the now-nerfed 1/1 from the deck. We’re unsure if a post-nerf Patches sliding into your hand — in a Standard game, after it rotated to Wild — would feel like a sick joke or poetic justice.
Honorable mentions: Mayor Noggenfogger, C'Thun.
Please, Ben Brode, Just This Once
With those out of the way, we can talk about the minions that might inspire more welcome emotions. These are the type of pulls from Toki that you will see on highlight reels in the Year of the Raven.
Dr. Boom: The omnipresence of this ridiculously powerful GvG minion earned it the nickname “Dr. 7.” If you never experienced the joy of drawing the doc on curve, pulling him from a turn-6 Toki might be the next best thing.
Kun the Forgotten King: In a pinch, Kun’s armor ability can spare you an extra turn, but 9 times out of 10 you’ll be using him to refresh your mana crystals — granting you a free 7/7 minion with mana for spells or a more dominant board presence.
Sylvanas Windrunner and Ragnaros the Firelord: Torment Combo Priest and Burn Mage with these Hall-of-Famers. They were banished from Standard for a reason.
Emperor Thaurissan: Though the Emperor works best in combo decks like the Renolock and Freeze Mage of old, we suspect that Emperor’s discount on your hand (even if it triggers only once) will serve well any deck that uses Toki. Value-oriented Mage decks often find their hands cluttered by turn 6 or 7 with cards they can’t play for a few turns, and when they can, it’s often one at a time. Emperor Thaurissan would help remedy this while imposing on the board a solid body.
Of course, the Wild format is home to many, many legendary minions. You could be happy with a number of randomly generated, situational Toki cards. N'Zoth, the Corruptor could be good, along with Yogg-Saron, Hope's End, Loatheb, Mal'Ganis (who needs Ice Block?), The Mistcaller, and Hallazeal the Ascended, provided you have a few burn spells in hand. Kel'Thuzad, Sneed's Old Shredder, Confessor Paletress — we could go on with the insane possibilities for value. The fringe pick I hope I get to use? Acidmaw, which makes your ping deadly.
Good and bad considered, the concept of a time-traveling gnome giving old cards new life is pretty sweet, and we hope a control variant of Mage can hold its own to give Toki, Time-Tinker space to do her thing.
Let us know what theory-crafted decks and legendary possibilities you’ve conjured up in the comments below!
i dont know why people are saying this is all bad, Throw it into a deck and i bet its gonna be more good than bad. or at the least worth a shot and if not oh well replace it and move on.
Just hopefully not everyone is gonna copy paste.
have fun and make a damn deck its just a game after all.
Trolden is very thankful for this card.
The text line didn't have room, but her full name is "Toki, Time-Tinker, Friend of Trolden"
Gelbin Mekkatorque was one of the funniest legendaries I had the pleasure of playing back in the day, I will never forget when my opponent dropped a Tirion Fordring on the board and the invention turned him into a chicken, it was glorious lol. :P
Unless T5 tinkers with the odds of getting like 75% of the time a good card Toki will sadly be a meme machine reserved for streamers and youtubers to feed the rng clown fiesta
Blizzard also Ships Toki! (Toast + Poki)
Toki rhymes with Loki. Coincidence?? I think not!
I honestly love the theme of her, I just wish she there had a fatter body or a lower cost. Like she would be a lot better as a three cost minion so that way if say you're on turn 10, no matter what you pull even if it's bad you at least can probably play it.
But putting that aside, I I do think that the mechanic itself is pretty neat. With Mage struggling for an identity I think meme shenanigans could be a viable fit for it.
Cool card to play around
Take a toki, play some Toki Mage. Best way :D
i strongly dislike that this straight up allows you to break the rules and play a card that's illegal in standard format.
some people are happy to not have to see certain cards not be in the format anymore.
this design is just weird.
and the rng wtf....
Someone did the math and it breaks down to roughly 1/3 chance for a good pull, 1/3 chance for okay pull, and 1/3 chance to regret your life decisions.
I'm curious if there's more "from the past" mage cards in the expansion. I'd give RNG time travel mage a go, but there's no way it would be consistently competitive. It's a cool card with great art and I'm sure it looks great in gold, but it's not good.
If it had apply to spells it would be really good. Just look at these all torches!
If only the card read " Battlecry: Discover a legendary minion from the past."
Why not? That's still a very random sampling from all the Wild legendaries. Discover would make the card way more consistent while still being fully RNG, and it would be a lot funner and more interactive to be able to choose. It's still very unlikely Dr. Boom or other insta-picks would be there. Most importantly you could make sure you get some value from it. As it stands it will too often give you Fizzlebangs and Stalags.
Can we have this please please please???
I'd like "Battlecry: Discover ANY legendary minion from the past." just so we can still get stuff from other classes like Gahz'rilla or Iron Juggernaut. Otherwise the cards become far more limited.
I'm pretty sure she pulls from all classes.
Well Toki means "time" in Japanese or something according to someone on this site who was wasting time complaining they named it Toki. Why would Chromie make more sense?
Because Chromie is an established WoW character already associated with time shenanigans.
While getting Patches isn't great, with Frost Lich Jaina it's essentially a 3-mana Water Elemental if you have a turn where you couldn't generate one otherwise.
That does make it a bit less terrible, but we're getting a bit in the weeds now, aren't we?