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Another Mage Diamond Card?! - Blizzard Explains March of the Lich King's Diamond Card Choices

Blizzard dev Celestalon tweeted out some explanations for a community concern about Diamond Cards earlier tonight. Read on below for the full story.

The Introduction

To introduce this story properly, we have to explain the root cause of the issue at hand first. Since Diamond cards were introduced there have been 15 cards created, or 16 if you want to count Ragnaros in both classic and Wild separately. Of these 15 there were 9 Neutral cards and only 6 class specific ones.

• Bru'kan for Shaman
• Decimator Olgra for Warrior
• Darkbishop Benedictus for Priest
• Jandice Barov Dual class for Rogue and Mage
• Balinda Stonehearth for Mage
• Commander Sivara for Mage

So out of the 9 classes before March of the Lich King, 4 have not had a Diamond card at all. Shaman, Warrior, Priest, and Rogue have 1. Mage has 3.

This imbalance already lead to some misgivings before, but with Castle Nathria giving a Diamond card to a new class (Warrior), things seemed to be on the path to more class balance.

That is, until tonight, when news came out that one of the Diamond cards for March of the Lich King is the recently revealed Mage class Legendary Grand Magister Rommath, which meant that there were still 4 classes without a Diamond card, while Mage was getting it's 4th card.

Explanation

From this point we'll dive into the tweet thread Team 5 Dev. Celestalon started, to explain some of the things going on.

Quote from Blizzard

I saw a few comments about Grand Magister Rommath getting a Diamond card, "mage again", and wanted to add some context/clarification.

Most expansions have 2 or sometimes 3 Diamond cards. This time, there are 5.

Quote from Blizzard

When picking cards to diamondize, class distribution is important, as well as the excitement for the character, how suitable the art is for it, and other factors.

Quote from Blizzard

In this case, we planned to diamondize the entire canon Blood Elf council: Halduron, Rommath, Lor'themar, Liadrin, plus one of the the Death Knight cards.

Quote from Blizzard

However, things don't always go as planned; not every art piece is well-suited for being diamondized. That turned out to be the case with Halduron's art; a beautiful piece, but it posed problems for diamondizing.

Quote from Blizzard

So, we looked for suitable alternatives, and ended up swapping Haldruon for a second Death Knight card. It's the launch of DK, people are going to be excited about it, and another of theirs was a known character that was well-suited to it.

Quote from Blizzard

So yes, Rommath is "another Mage Diamond", but class distribution is still important to us, and there's also a Paladin, Neutral, and two Death Knight Diamonds.

Conclusion

First of all, whoa, Celestalon tipping off the fact that Halduron Brightwing is going to be in this expansion. He is the Ranger General for the Farstriders, which means he's a Hunter. And Hunter is still short a legendary from the reveals! Will be interesting to see this card!

After this we can also conclude that Blizzard made at least some inroads to class balance, by giving Paladin and the new Death Knight class their first Diamond cards, but this still leaves 3 classes without any Diamond representation at all and the Mage class on its own with 4 cards already.

This also means we know 4 of the 5 Diamond Cards coming with March of the Lich King:

Your Opinion

That is the story and the explanation from Blizzard. Let us know in the comments what your thoughts are on this subject, and perhaps what you think the 5th Diamond card, from one of the Legendaries in the Death Knight class, is going to be!