Blizzard released the full core set and we're in for a very different new year of Hearthstone! Today we're going to be taking a look at the Priest class in the Year of the Gryphon by looking at their new set of core cards and giving the new ones a full review.
- If you want to see the full core set, you can check out our Core 2021 Guide.
- Want to see only the new cards? We have a dedicated article for that.
- You can build decks with all these cards in our deckbuilder - just select Year of the Gryphon as the format!
Let's get to it!
Thrive in the Shadows
A sister to Shadow Visions. It will be more often beneficial to draw the card directly, not get a copy of it, so this card should slot into most Priest decks about as well as Visions did. Being able to search your deck for a specific card type is quite valuable and you can game the system by only including a certain amount of spells to guarantee yourself the options you want, as we've seen with Visions in the past.
They did say they are going to push Shadow Priest and they delivered. Probably. You can possibly tutor Shadowform with this to get nuking. The art-style goes well with the overall flavor, which is nice. I'm curious to see how far are they willing to take the archetype in Year of the Gryphon.
Crimson Clergy
Much weaker Lightwarden in terms of scaling, halved Attack gain per character healed and only friendlies count, but I suppose one more Health does give it better survivability and helps survive more early trades allowing it to feed off itself when healed. As 1-drops go, it is a decent one, and it might, ironically, slot into a Shadow Priest archetype, where the deck might lean into a more aggro-ish oriented playstyle, so having a playable 1-drop is definitely a must.
Focused Will
Bye-bye Silence, so long Power Word: Shield... welcome Focused Will? Hey, we saved some deck space, eh?:) This is a very weird combination. You don't really want to silence your own minions who you would want to be buffing unless you are playing a specific archetype, and you don't want to make enemy minions harder to kill after you silence them.
I am very torn about this card. I'm sure it will see play, my question is: How much? Will it slot only into Silence Priest decks, or will it actually be a viable tech card in general? This card might be the sole reason why Humongous Razorleaf was also put in the set unless they are planning to introduce more support for Silence Priest going forward this year.
Shadowed Spirit
This card could be a reason Shadow (or Aggro) Priest might become a thing; and not of a meme status. An aggressively stated 3-drop without a downside that deals an extra 3 damage to the enemy hero is a lot of pushing power in such a small card. This feels like the old Leper Gnome level of annoyance, maybe more. Priest had plenty of ways to resurrect or copy their minions in the past and there are few cards that will be here to do just that still: Psyche Split, Gift of Luminance and Raise Dead. The last one specifically might prove to be quite a powerful combination.
We do not know what awaits us in the upcoming Hearthstone Year, but Shadow Spirit is definitely a card to look out for. It just needs one or two specific combo pieces to get broken (in Standard, it might already be in Wild).
Priest In the Year of the Gryphon
Priest already received a bit of a "core set" redesign last year when some of its Basic and Classic cards got changed or replaced. So the facelift of the class now continues.
A quick side-note: while Psychic Conjurer might be a more popular card for steal-shenanigans, and you will be able to play it about as casually as Babbling Book and will never be sad to drop it whenever ... How dare you remove my Thoughtsteal?! That is a downright travesty! Shame! Shame! Shame!
Ok, now with that off my chest, let's continue! From the looks of it, Priest is basically losing all but one early game removal, meaning if you can't get on the board early, you will have problems and will have to rely on board-clears to comeback. This might also be a problem since there actually are not many to choose from; None too consistent anyway. We still have our Holy Nova, which is good, but not good enough. We'll also keep Shadow Word: Ruin, but most minions, especially from the early swarm, might not reach the 5-Attack threshold, and Soul Mirror is not really a board-clear in most situations.
Control tools on the high-end were clipped as well, namely the all-mighty Mind Control and fan favorite (enemy?) Cabal Shadow Priest. This might not mean much for regular Hearthstone these days, but believe me, for Arena, this is a godsend. At least we get to keep the Shadow Word: Death as a consolation prize. And there is also Initiation and Wave of Apathy, but both of these need you to have a board to some extent to be useful. More necessity on being on the board, eh? Natalie Seline deserves a shout-out too, she might be the only snap-flip-board tool left that does not require any setup, but her cost is always going to be a factor.
There is a lot of buff cards in the mix overall, making the focus on board control even more apparent. It is starting to feel like Priest might be soon suffering from the old 'Paladin problem': if you are not on the board, you are dead. This might be even more true for a class without the ability to Reinforce on demand.
Priest has plenty of cards in their arsenal that provide powerful buffs to friendly minions, but there need to be targets ready.
But ... if you can stay on the board, boy oh boy, can you snowball hard. I'm interested to see if a consistent deck that manages to do that emerges. Once we see what does Forged in Barrens has in store for us, we might form a better picture about the direction Priest will be going in the foreseeable future.
And there you have it. 100% scientific and 1000% correct evaluation of a Priest class in the upcoming Hearthstone Year. Do you dare to challenge our predictions? Tell us in the comments below :)
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We're putting together reviews for all the classes and their core set cards. Here's everything up so far!
Comments
Looking forward to try to put a Deathrattle Priest together that isn't pure Convincing Infiltrator cancer. Maybe it will even be possible to brew a semi-competitve Deathrattle-Shadowform deck together :-)
Well i could see some sort of Mix between a Rally/Heal/Wall Priest. I think Priest will not be as bad as most of us expect it to be right now. Of course depending on what cards the new expansion will give us.
When priest is meme, format is fine.
I will have to see the new set, but I am starting to get worried about priest.
Dragonmaw Overseer is currently a great option to get back with Rally, but now Shadowed Spirit can also fill that space. I think I saw Roffle playing a Tempo Rally Priest in Wild that used Overseer and the old 2 drop that does a similar end of turn effect. If Priest is getting more tempo oriented something similar could be done in Standard. But with that game plan do you run both of these? Do you run both and then play a different 3 drop depending on the match up?!
I’m so hyped to see the rest of the Barrens cards to start theorizing what Tempo Priest might look like!
Focused will wouldn't be terrible if Innerfire would be in rotation. But silencing a minion only to give it extra health isn't that great - especially since you'd want that extra health on minions with taunt or to have them survive so they can use their effects longer.
If you cast Gft on something big ypu could the cast Focused Will on the 1/1 copy for a big, cheap tempo swing. Everything is of course meta dependent, but if Silence or Tempo Priest gains traction that combo could become relevant.
With the way Team5 has been talking about less generation and RNG, etc, I just imagine the sets this year will make tempo and stats on board a little more important like it was in the Classic days.
Shadowed Spirit and some other deathrattle cards can make a strong deck, with Baron Rivendare returning.
Not sure I'd put much faith in a two turn setup Fireball for 7 mana
With some resurrection shenanigans, they can play them again and again. I'm not a fan of Priest, just speculating.
Oh, sorry, setup, rng 8 mana fireball then.
but will there be resurrection shenanigans? most of those are rotating, and since there's no Rez support in the core set they might not even further support that archetype
Mass Resurrection is rotating, but Raise Dead and the new card Rally! will still be in standard. Rally! might be interesting in a tempo oriented deck. Anyway, we gotta see the next expansion.
good point, I didn't think of Rally, but that could potentially work if there's more stuff to support it.
and even if are ress shenigans you got blood f ghuun or the 7/7 taunt that summons another 7/7 taunt on Death,the buffed Carie an such
I should wait for expansion card reveals before condemning the class but this doesn't sit well with me at all. Silence Priest sucks and it's losing its biggest pay off card in the rotation (Unsleeping Soul). Also, targeting an enemy minion with that silence card is always going to feel bad.
Tempo Priest doesn't work without better card draw and basic cycle options like Insight and Thrive in the Shadows won't be enough to make it viable. The 1/3 is decent but suffers from similar issues as the Priest Hero Power. In order for it to be able to do anything it needs a friendly target to heal (or be healed in the case of the 1/3). It curves well into Power Word: Feast but that's the kind of dream curve that the archetype already depends on 100% of the time so it doesn't really mean anything. Tempo Priest depends too much on early game snowballs to have any chance of winning.
Shadowed Spirit is already getting gutted by the rotation before it even arrives. It loses two of its most synergistic cards: Shadowy Figure and Wretched Reclaimer. And i don't see a card like this seeing play in any archetype that's not Aggro or Tempo and i don't have any hope for either. The same applies to all the other Tempo cards. If Tempo Priest fails to make an impact then most of the cards in the class are going to be unplayable. Most of these card require a target in order to make of use of their abilities and maintaining a board is something that Tempo Priest isn't good at. Paladin can dump their buff spells or battlecry effects on their 1/1 tokens but Priest doesn't have such an option. Without anything to buff the cards become completely useless.
Shadowform is still horrible. You can tutor it now and you can get it online on turn 1 if you mulligan for it and started with the coin but that costs two cards, provides no tempo gain and you sacrifice your healing Hero Power. You already start the game behind in Tempo and card advantage. That's far from a winning recipe. Also, since they removed the ability to upgrade the damage to 3, you have to choose between running two copies for drawing consistency and having the second copy be a completely dead card after playing the first or running only a single copy and possibly drawing the card too late or never at all.
And Natalie Seline... Oh my god... I can't believe they kept that card in the set. It's absolute garbage. Paying 8 mana for a single target removal is too slow and the body is completely irrelevant. It's just going to be removed every single time. It's much simpler to just use Shadow Word: Death if you want to remove a big threat. Natalie only has one niche in the game which is dealing with the 4/12 dragons but that niche is incredibly small and 100% dependent on the relevance of such cards. Also, Ysera no longer generates a snowball of infinite value so she isn't big removal priority anymore which makes Natalie's niche even worse. They could have brought Lyra the Sunshard back. Or Archbishop Benedictus. Or Confessor Paletress. Or literally anything else (other than Prophet Velen, i suppose). I'm extremely disappointed with the core set.
this. well said!
If you ever have doubts about team5 trying to push tempo priest into the spotlight, then the core set changes will be the most blatant and obvious attempt yet. Basically, if Shadow Word: Death have been nixed as well you could conceivably be fooled into thinking that you've stumbled onto a list of paladin cards. There's literally no other removal option other than the conditional shadow word death, ruin, and the only borderline acceptable Holy Nova. At least we still have Holy Smite, guess christmas came early in 2021.
The consequence of this is that control priest has taken a beating it might never recover until the following year. Cards like Sethekk Veilweaver is now more likely to grant you tempo cards as opposed to reactive cards, so you can't just run veilweaver and Nazmani Bloodweaver along with Rally! because all you're going to end up with are a bunch of tempo cards. I look forward to seeing the priest cards for Barrens, and if I spot anything less than 2 removal options and a board clear I'm calling control priest truly dead and gone.
So what are we stuck with? Midrange priest, with a hard emphasis on getting board as early as possible, because if you lose it you'll never get it back, what with priest's draw potential being somewhere between the ground and the height of an ant. Face priest? That's not even a joke. You go shadowform and then pray your opponent's not warrior. Since priest lost so many of its control options, you can't rely on spiking your opponent's face for long, because now any minion that's not 5 or more attack just gets free reign.
Its not entirely gloom and doom. Silence priest in the form of Humongous Razorleaf and Arcane Watcher might just be enough, what with most classic removal cards being gone. Its literally now or never; silence priest has never really looked better since its height during Ungoro, so if it fails now then it will never be good.
Blizzard really wants Priest to be the "meme class" but the problem is that with that hero power, that identity, and that focus... for real, it won't even be a class.
arcane watcher is ROS it will rotate so priest will need another silence target on top of everything you want XD.