New Mage Card Reveal - Astromancer
A previous version of this article referred to this card as "Fluffy Epic Mage".
A new card has been revealed by Dian Fuji.
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Setting up a 10-card-hand with mage is one of the most easiest things ever. The card is strong af.
Other RNG. How boring.
My attitude is fine. I just don't like the big RNG swings random minions create, similar to how Imp-losion was a very bad design.
Seeing as how they design cards months in advance, I wouldn't be surprised if this was supposed to be on the follow-up turn to a 6-mana Spiteful Summoner
Why can't they scrap the whole idea of "Summon a random minion with X cost"? The "fun" of it was used up with Piloted Shredder years ago, and it is a pure RNG mechanic I think has no buisiness deciding games. I know you want us to see all your fancy art and emotes of useless cards, but come on...
Oh, and take the "random legendary minion" bs with you!
I'm surprised you haven't gotten the common response of "Hearthstone was always about RNG, go play chess" or "RNG is FUN" yet.
But yes, there are more than enough cards like this in the game already.
Too slow in elemental mage?
First of all: yes. The biggest problem with it is that it breaks your elemental chain. If you don't want that to happen (because you want to play something like Blazecaller) you can play it from turn 8. Or turn 7 plus coin something else but that's stupid.
When playing elemental mage most of the time you have a lot of cards in your hand and on turn 8 it would summon a random 8 or even 9 drop I'd say. But that is way too late. You're already running Mountain Giant that benefits from a big hand and you can get that one out on turn 3 or 4 (plus it is an elemental now). When you are in the lategame you wanna get Frost Lich Jaina in play and start making Water Elementals. No time for this guy :)
You do realize that unlike SPiteful Summoner you can never get anything more than a 9-drop, since the moment you play this card you will have at best 9 cards left.
I also don't think MIdrange Minion Handmage will be a thing, so this looks like a blank
Use the combo of Illidan Stormrage and knife juggler triggering explosive sheep and you gain a card from deathrattle minion.In that way you can have 10card in your hand before the battlecry
Big Mage with Spiteful Summoner and this card just makes it bigger -_-
Just putting 2 huge minions is not enough for turn 7 in constructed, this is why we don't see Spiteful Summoner anymore. And this card is somewhat worse than Spiteful Summoner. So it will be good arena card.
Book of Spectres draws a bunch of cards, which buffs Astromancer.
Kind of a boring card, honestly. One of the more disappointing designs in the expansion so far. Maybe after Reckless Experimenter, I was expecting too much of class epics.
The card itself surely is powerful, or let's say Spiteful Summoner powerful minus the limitation on deckbuilding, plus the limitation of keeping your hand full. With 8+ cards, the battlecry will be about as good as Spiteful, and the card can't be rendered useless by drawing your big spells too early, and it also allows you to include your favorite cheap removal spells.
I guess this also requires some build-around, favoring cards that replace themselves or generate more cards, like Fire Fly, and Stonehill Defender, and Primordial Glyph, and Steam Surger... so, just the usual "pretty good" category cards, that you might already use anyway.
And you might end up using Mountain Giant in Mage now... As if the Giant wasn't popular enough already.
Spiteful Summoner was a bit more interesting since you'd have to build a deck around it. A powerful effect that comes at a high price. This is a mostly better version (less predictable), Mage exclusive for some reason I don't know, and suggests a playstyle that is popular enough already.
It's good. Just boring.
I think a lot of people disagree, summoning random 8+ cost minions was always fun as hell, don't see any reason why it should be different this time. Moreover, as you mentioned, it quite fits to current kind of control/big/elemental mage. Pretty solid card, I like it.
I can't say much about how "fun" random 8-drops are. And hell if I know what people tend to agree or disagree with.
But to me, this is neither original nor inspiring. It's nothing new, as it essentially is another version of Spiteful Summoner, just better, and suggests a deck with lots of draw and card generation; with cards that are already played a lot. I'm not saying that random minions can't be fun to anybody or that you can't like this card. But I can't see what's so particularly cool about this one either, other than that it's undeniably strong.
I'd rather have Spiteful be the 7 mana "get a random big minion out" card, which is btw. somewhat playable in Mage already, and come up with something more original and Mage-like for a class card instead.
Years back, a deck named Casino Mage became somewhat popular for its unpredictability and randomness. The devs noticed that some people enjoyed that decktype and it was at that moment that they decided that Randomness should be embeded in the core of the Mage class for all eternity.
No, it got popular for being a solid tier 2 deck that countered the cancer of the time: combo druid.
I think Cinderstorm is a fine rng card, and it keeps mage relevant. This card, however, reminds me mostly of Faceless Summoner which was s just an OP arena card that was never useful in constructed.
Just another Spiteful, that you can possibly use in an Aluneth Mage.
I stay unconvinced with the flavor of random summoning in Mage, especially if unrelated to Spells.
Dude Elemental mage with the book just got a huge upgrade this thing is literally spiteful for that type of mage, we'll have to see how powerful it is but this seems strong enough to see play and be like a tier 2 deck.