Those archetypes can come back/be powerful with subsequent expansions or with rotation next year.
That's true, but, at least me personally, I'd like to see new cards make more impact in general when an expansion hits, instead of having to wait 2-3 expansions for them to be even slightly viable.
That mentality is exactly what pushes power creep and is why I generally oppose buffs. Cards are in Standard for 16-24 months, and often find a home sooner or later. If you push everything to be viable in their own expansion then they are ridiculous when the decks that would have made use of them without needing buffs arrive. To deal with that while making all the new expansion's cards viable forces rampant power creep.
The current pure/libram paladin is a good example of this: it was so important to people to make libram pally strong last expansion that now the deck has a win rate that would usually have people complaining that it needs a nerf.
This is just another question that can only be answered by someone from the dev team. All else is speculation, and a pretty impossible one at that. Its just not possible to somehow gauge a formula at something that can be from equal percentage to discover, to slightly skewed towards class cards.
...
Actually it is perfectly possible, and even easy if you have the patience. All you need to do is discover enough times with a given card pool and count how many times you see each possible card. That will give you a set of probabilities for each card, and it doesn't matter how it gets there - all the matters is what it ends up at.
Of course I don't have that much patience, so I tested the easiest one: how often does Draconic Lackey present Waxadred as an option? As the only dragon in rogue, and a near endless supply of lackeys, this should be a simple question to answer with enough confidence to guess at the algorithm used.
I'm doing this against the innkeeper (Wild), so the pool is 1 dargon in rogue and 42 in neutral.
Hypothesis 1: Every card has equal likelihood of being presented, irrespective of class.
Here the odds of NOT finding Waxadred are (42/43)*(41/42)*(40/43) = 40/43, so the probability to see ol' Waxy in a discover is 3/43 = 6.97%. Or equivalently, you expect to see him about once every 14 discovers.
Hypothesis 2: Class vs Neutral is chosen before the card
In this case, the question reduces to the likelihood of not choosing a class card. If that likelihood is 50% per option, you would have (1/2)^3 = 1/8 as the probability to be presented with 3 neutrals. I.e. you would see Waxy in a whopping 7 out of every 8 discovers in both Standard and Wild!
Results from testing
Admittedly I got bored pretty quickly, and I only ended up doing 12 discovers, in which I saw Waxadred exactly once, which is perfectly consistent with Hypothesis 1.
The sample size is too small for that to be taken as proof, and perhaps Hypothesis 2 should use a lower probability, but I see no reason why it would. For it to give 1/12 to see Waxadred it would need to be at 1 - (1 - 1/12)^(1/3) = 2.86%, which is preposterously low and just as untenable a suggestion as 50% is.
So I have to conclude it is highly likely every card is weighted equally. The only way for it to be consistent with experience otherwise is for every discover pool to use a different probability of choosing between class and neutral cards, which is too complicated for next to no gain.
I would argue the Albatross at (4) is still a good way to counter Reno decks, if that's what you want to do. Tech cards shouldn't also be great against everything else. They should be a bit sub-par but still OK in those match-ups, and that's exactly where the Albatross is.
You have to keep in mind how cut-throat the definition of a 'good' card is to most players, with anything not currently seeing play in a high tier deck labelled as 'bad' or often 'unplayable', when in reality they are good in certain metas but almost nobody thinks to try them again if they were from more than 1 expansion ago. Occasionally they are tried out and then suddenly the community that has been calling them garbage for years thinks they're amazing (see Vanish for a good example).
I suppose "Deathrattle: summon an 8/8 Rattlegore. It gets 1/1 smaller each time it dies." would be a clear way to write it, so each successive Rattlegore can replace 8/8 with the appropriately sized X/X, and summoned copies would explicitly state how large it will be.
While that may be better overall, I am personally OK with the current, super succinct description. At least it explains the base card well and is an instance where any confusion only leads to a pleasant surprise for the player who has a Rattlegore from another card, e.g. via Bandersmosh or Shadowy Figure.
I'd have no issues with them moving him to Wild and replacing him with a different Nozdormu card, but to actually rework it would be a mistake imo.
Yes, he has always been broken in one way or another: most often his mechanic just doesn't quite work properly, and occasionally it gets abused for some unfair nonsense. But, when you really look at it he has always been just 1 of many possible routes to uninteractive win conditions or crazy RNG outcomes.
It is better to keep such an iconic card around than to delete it completely for less serious crimes than other cards commit.
I have thought about this quite a bit over the years, and having lots of ramp and/or mana cheating is only really a big issue when there is lots of card draw to go alongside it and alleviate the card disadvantage. Of course druid is one of the 4 classes (druid, warlock, rogue and demon hunter) that have more card draw than they really know what to do with, so it is a genuine issue.
Similarly to Ultimate Infestation before, the card draw attached to Twilight Runner is the thing that really makes it unfair at the moment. If that card just cost 6 so it couldn't be recruited with Guardian Animals it would feel so much more reasonable, even on turn 1 (though that's still going to be tough to come back from, at least you aren't way behind on cards as well).
Illucia is fundamentally a combo-killer, and only a complete change to the card effect could change that. The mana cost does matter, however, against aggro. I expect stalling them on turn 3 will be quite a bit less effective than on turn 2, since they already have more out on the board. So if she's no longer as strong against so many decks, she might get played less often, which helps combo out indirectly.
The whole thing still has room to change from what was listed in the survey. Indeed, they wouldn't have bothered with an opinion-gathering survey if they were planning to just implement it as is. So for now I'd just wait to see what it ends up at, and consider whether I think it is problematic then.
Honestly, I'd be surprised if they could justify it to their accounting department if it gave out as much gold as the gold-grinding F2P players get each cycle. They'd likely be aiming to be closer to the average amount of gold accumulated by regular players. Of course that is bound to get the gold-grinders complaining, and justifiably so, but that doesn't have to mean it is just some dastardly plan to cripple the HS economy.
People often end up overly cynical or too willing to defend the company, without accepting there is a balance between being making the game better and appeasing the accountants in almost every decision they make, and it is never completely one-sided.
Surely the reworked Warglaives of Azzinoth should cost more than 4 mana? At worst it is 4 mana for 5 burst damage, but it will often completely nullify your opponent's efforts to build any sort of board presence for, frankly, the rest of the game unless they run weapon removal or try to go wide (which is easy to punish because you have good AoE). Also, its rarity seems off given how iconic the weapons are and it's comparison to Gorehowl, which by the way it is just a way better version of. If you are reworking a card that much, shouldn't you just make it a completely new one?
I don't see why Cordana Felsong has a Sap effect, which has only ever existed outside rogue in Freezing Trap, which is a severely restricted version of it. There are enough complaints about DH being able to do everything without giving them a mechanic that has always been specific to a single class. It also serves as strong single target (pseudo-)removal, which is one of the few things the class doesn't have without face tanking a ton of damage.
Finally, Dark Portal is just asking for confusion with The Dark Portal and needs a name change.
Then what do you suggest? What kind of tools Tempo Priest could use that isn't card draw? The archetype has powerful buffs, strong tempo minions, strong value cards and a bit of mana cheating (through Alura). What is missing here other than card draw? I don't see it. I can't see what other tools could compensate for such a massive flaw in the archetype.
I have played Tempo Priest, and the biggest flaw is a fundamental one: it has no comeback mechanism whatsoever. Or at least, it uses no comeback mechanism whatsoever; there's plenty to choose from in priest if you want them. No amount of card draw will make up for the fact that when you have lost the board, you have more or less lost the game already.
Now, card draw would be a help against decks that don't fight for the board, but even then it will be tricky trying to make progress building a board from scratch against control, while you probably have a decent win rate against combo already.
So what do I suggest? Probably to try to make it a bit more midrange-y and less all-in from turn 1. I recall dragon priest in TGT, which got off to a fast start with Twilight Whelp and [Hearthstone Card (Wrymrest Agent) Not Found], and had Velen's Chosen to really hammer in early dominance, but didn't rely entirely on it and had slow cards and AoE like Lightbomb in there as well. It was tier 2 in this particular meta snapshot: https://tempostorm.com/hearthstone/meta-snapshot/legacy/meta-snapshot-33-new-kid-on-the-block
I fully admit a lot has changed for priest since then, and card draw is no small part of that, but I genuinely think the entire philosophy of the all-in Tempo Priest we have today makes its own problems. It is built to win if the opponent has no answer for a few early big minions and doesn't give itself any options if that fails. Coming back to my previous post: a 1 mana change on 1 card can make all the difference on whether that approach is overall a success or a failure, as happened with Extra Arms a year ago.
So overall I think the archetype just needs to consider the full Priest toolkit better, and at worst it is in a bucket alongside a huge number of decks that are in that unfortunate window where they are fine but their win rate is a couple of per cent too low for ladder climbers and they get called 'unplayable'.
No, I don't see it as unfair. The majority of supported mechanics and archetypes in every class fall by the wayside and disappear from the meta after a week or two. E.g. Rogue has all these fancy tools for shuffling insane cards into their deck, and has Anka, the Buried to make deathrattle decks do some ludicrous things, but they have no presence in the meta whatsoever. But remember when Unlicensed Apothecary cost 4 mana and Necrium Blade was around? Then we definitely saw deathrattle rogue.
My point is that 1 mana made the difference between deathrattle rogue being OP and practically unplayed at the end of the DoD expansion cycle. That is how fine a line archetypes' success or failure is determined by (at least to players who care about win percentages; casual players don't care whether it is 45% win rate or 55%, but that's a separate discussion). Notably, deathrattle rogue had exactly the same amount of card draw available to it (in fact it even had more options after Galakrond's Awakening), so you have to find other reasons than card draw for why it ended up 'weak'.
Applying this to tempo priest and shaman, I would argue that what they are lacking is not card draw, but effective tools to compensate for them not having strong card draw. If a class is good at something it should be weak elsewhere, and vice versa. The times classes have been poorly designed are when they have too few weaknesses, or their strengths are not sufficient to overcome their weaknesses. Control priest does have such tools, but the tempo archetype is not quite there yet.
The 4x bonus wasn't just removed because of chains like this. It was removed because you could pick the exact card you want too reliably when the pool of class cards was small. The best example was probably getting Sunkeeper Tarim in odd paladin far too consistently.
Card generation for the 3 classes it is actually meant as a strength for does make thematic sense:
Rogue is literally stealing from everyone else;
Priest is probing their opponent's mind;
and Mage is so skilled with arcane magic that it can call upon spells it hasn't prepared.
I think these 3 should keep it as is, although not necessarily in the same form as it sometimes is right now, especially Mage whose casting of random spells with Puzzle Box of Yogg-Saron, The Amazing Reno and now Trick Totem is just plain dumb. The important part is that these classes are designed with this in mind, and we can handle 3 classes doing this.
For everyone else however it should be reduced, and hopefully the next set rotation cycling out the Year of the Dragon will help.
However, I don't think every class should have access to great card draw. It is good for the diversity of the game if some classes do have to work out how best to use an emptying hand, without the answer just being to draw more cards. Plus card draw would have to replace something else in the cards they are given, so it is directly bad for diversity.
Fresh faces would be great, but there's a lot of mid-power cards that just don't compete in Wild and would be perfect for an evergreen set.
Xaril, Poisoned Mind is my go to example: it demonstrates most of rogue's class design (deathrattle, small minion body, value generation, cheap spells, card draw, stealth, bouncing minions, single target damage, and I guess rogue has a few minion attack buffs) in 1 neat little package that just needs more time and a lower power environment to see play in.
Where such perfect examples already exist I'd rather they bring them out of retirement than reinvent the wheel.
I'd bet mostly on rogue and priest. Both classes currently have only 1 tribe associated with them, and both have a strong deathrattle focus (which I would expect to be quite prominent in an undead tribe).
Plus rogue just has a long history of getting undead characters (especially forsaken) outside of undead-heavy sets (e.g. Undercity Valiant, Undercity Huckster, Myra Rotspring, Plaguebringer, Kidnapper to name a few), mostly because of their affiliation with poisons and sticking to shadows.
Of course, if Death Knights get added a long way down the line, it would be heresy for them not to use the undead tribe if it existed.
I first thought Silas would fit, but so many things lined up with Lilian, including the tease a few months back that it would be 'Legendary' (where Lilian has the advantage of being an existing legendary card at the time) that she's my best guess. At least until I'm shown wrong in two months time anyway!
Honestly, they could do both Lilian and Silas. It wouldn't be the first time a single class has received 2 new ones in quick succession (shaman had King Rastakhan and The Thunder King, while druid got Elise Starseeker and Dame Hazelbark).
Really the class needs both an undead mascot and a thief/swindler/shady businessman mascot to cover the deathrattle and burgle/coin flavours of the class, and Lilian and Silas (or Gallywix) would cover them well. It could probably do with a pirate that is easier to reach for most people than [Hearthstone Card (Cap'n Valeera) Not Found] too. But instead Blizz decided the most diverse class (in the sense of the number of roles it fills in society) should be the one to get their heroes slowest.
Honestly Enrage was always a fairly pointless keyword as it was only ever a shortening of 'when damaged'. It feels like something they came up with when they were initially designing the game looking for keywords, but later sensibly went: "hang on, why are we using this thing when it's not actually making our cards any cleaner or easier to understand?"
I personally agree with their philosophy with both Elusive and Poisonous: don't add a keyword until card space demands it, because however slight the difference may be, the game is still more accessible without it.
Recruit however... they should have just made that span expansions since it already exists.
I have a hunch we'll get Lilian Voss as a hero alongside the Scholomance solo stuff since she's the obvious good guy to go exposing the dark side of the school with.
That's less than two months away, assuming I'm right of course.
He did say it was a small downside, and I agree with him it is not zero. For experienced players who already know all the keywords and mechanics it takes negligible effort to learn 1 more, but new players are met with 10 keywords in the basic set alone, and that did not include other common keywords like deathrattle, stealth, discover, immune, outcast, overload, combo, choose one, secret; plus however many set-specific keywords there are at the time; plus mechanics like armour, transform and weapons that are all simple but still need learning what exactly they do.
Each individually is trivial, but when there's that many at once there is no hope they all stick in your head straight away, so while card space isn't an issue it might as well just be written out.
Not so much a prediction as a wish for how to change Secret Passage: it could read "Replace your hand with the same number of cards from your deck. Swap back next turn."
I.e. if you have X cards in hand, it will draw X. (I'm not sure if X would include secret passage itself. Probably, so that it's not completely worthless when you top deck it with an empty hand.)
This stops aggro abusing the hell out of it, and it becomes more powerful the less you need it. It will then be something to play when you have a hand of cards that just aren't helpful in the current situation, and when you're looking for something specific, which is what I always thought it was designed to be.
That mentality is exactly what pushes power creep and is why I generally oppose buffs. Cards are in Standard for 16-24 months, and often find a home sooner or later. If you push everything to be viable in their own expansion then they are ridiculous when the decks that would have made use of them without needing buffs arrive. To deal with that while making all the new expansion's cards viable forces rampant power creep.
The current pure/libram paladin is a good example of this: it was so important to people to make libram pally strong last expansion that now the deck has a win rate that would usually have people complaining that it needs a nerf.
Actually it is perfectly possible, and even easy if you have the patience. All you need to do is discover enough times with a given card pool and count how many times you see each possible card. That will give you a set of probabilities for each card, and it doesn't matter how it gets there - all the matters is what it ends up at.
Of course I don't have that much patience, so I tested the easiest one: how often does Draconic Lackey present Waxadred as an option? As the only dragon in rogue, and a near endless supply of lackeys, this should be a simple question to answer with enough confidence to guess at the algorithm used.
I'm doing this against the innkeeper (Wild), so the pool is 1 dargon in rogue and 42 in neutral.
Hypothesis 1: Every card has equal likelihood of being presented, irrespective of class.
Here the odds of NOT finding Waxadred are (42/43)*(41/42)*(40/43) = 40/43, so the probability to see ol' Waxy in a discover is 3/43 = 6.97%. Or equivalently, you expect to see him about once every 14 discovers.
Hypothesis 2: Class vs Neutral is chosen before the card
In this case, the question reduces to the likelihood of not choosing a class card. If that likelihood is 50% per option, you would have (1/2)^3 = 1/8 as the probability to be presented with 3 neutrals. I.e. you would see Waxy in a whopping 7 out of every 8 discovers in both Standard and Wild!
Results from testing
Admittedly I got bored pretty quickly, and I only ended up doing 12 discovers, in which I saw Waxadred exactly once, which is perfectly consistent with Hypothesis 1.
The sample size is too small for that to be taken as proof, and perhaps Hypothesis 2 should use a lower probability, but I see no reason why it would. For it to give 1/12 to see Waxadred it would need to be at 1 - (1 - 1/12)^(1/3) = 2.86%, which is preposterously low and just as untenable a suggestion as 50% is.
So I have to conclude it is highly likely every card is weighted equally. The only way for it to be consistent with experience otherwise is for every discover pool to use a different probability of choosing between class and neutral cards, which is too complicated for next to no gain.
I would argue the Albatross at (4) is still a good way to counter Reno decks, if that's what you want to do. Tech cards shouldn't also be great against everything else. They should be a bit sub-par but still OK in those match-ups, and that's exactly where the Albatross is.
You have to keep in mind how cut-throat the definition of a 'good' card is to most players, with anything not currently seeing play in a high tier deck labelled as 'bad' or often 'unplayable', when in reality they are good in certain metas but almost nobody thinks to try them again if they were from more than 1 expansion ago. Occasionally they are tried out and then suddenly the community that has been calling them garbage for years thinks they're amazing (see Vanish for a good example).
I suppose "Deathrattle: summon an 8/8 Rattlegore. It gets 1/1 smaller each time it dies." would be a clear way to write it, so each successive Rattlegore can replace 8/8 with the appropriately sized X/X, and summoned copies would explicitly state how large it will be.
While that may be better overall, I am personally OK with the current, super succinct description. At least it explains the base card well and is an instance where any confusion only leads to a pleasant surprise for the player who has a Rattlegore from another card, e.g. via Bandersmosh or Shadowy Figure.
I'd have no issues with them moving him to Wild and replacing him with a different Nozdormu card, but to actually rework it would be a mistake imo.
Yes, he has always been broken in one way or another: most often his mechanic just doesn't quite work properly, and occasionally it gets abused for some unfair nonsense. But, when you really look at it he has always been just 1 of many possible routes to uninteractive win conditions or crazy RNG outcomes.
It is better to keep such an iconic card around than to delete it completely for less serious crimes than other cards commit.
I have thought about this quite a bit over the years, and having lots of ramp and/or mana cheating is only really a big issue when there is lots of card draw to go alongside it and alleviate the card disadvantage. Of course druid is one of the 4 classes (druid, warlock, rogue and demon hunter) that have more card draw than they really know what to do with, so it is a genuine issue.
Similarly to Ultimate Infestation before, the card draw attached to Twilight Runner is the thing that really makes it unfair at the moment. If that card just cost 6 so it couldn't be recruited with Guardian Animals it would feel so much more reasonable, even on turn 1 (though that's still going to be tough to come back from, at least you aren't way behind on cards as well).
Illucia is fundamentally a combo-killer, and only a complete change to the card effect could change that. The mana cost does matter, however, against aggro. I expect stalling them on turn 3 will be quite a bit less effective than on turn 2, since they already have more out on the board.
So if she's no longer as strong against so many decks, she might get played less often, which helps combo out indirectly.
The whole thing still has room to change from what was listed in the survey. Indeed, they wouldn't have bothered with an opinion-gathering survey if they were planning to just implement it as is. So for now I'd just wait to see what it ends up at, and consider whether I think it is problematic then.
Honestly, I'd be surprised if they could justify it to their accounting department if it gave out as much gold as the gold-grinding F2P players get each cycle. They'd likely be aiming to be closer to the average amount of gold accumulated by regular players. Of course that is bound to get the gold-grinders complaining, and justifiably so, but that doesn't have to mean it is just some dastardly plan to cripple the HS economy.
People often end up overly cynical or too willing to defend the company, without accepting there is a balance between being making the game better and appeasing the accountants in almost every decision they make, and it is never completely one-sided.
Surely the reworked Warglaives of Azzinoth should cost more than 4 mana? At worst it is 4 mana for 5 burst damage, but it will often completely nullify your opponent's efforts to build any sort of board presence for, frankly, the rest of the game unless they run weapon removal or try to go wide (which is easy to punish because you have good AoE). Also, its rarity seems off given how iconic the weapons are and it's comparison to Gorehowl, which by the way it is just a way better version of. If you are reworking a card that much, shouldn't you just make it a completely new one?
I don't see why Cordana Felsong has a Sap effect, which has only ever existed outside rogue in Freezing Trap, which is a severely restricted version of it. There are enough complaints about DH being able to do everything without giving them a mechanic that has always been specific to a single class. It also serves as strong single target (pseudo-)removal, which is one of the few things the class doesn't have without face tanking a ton of damage.
Finally, Dark Portal is just asking for confusion with The Dark Portal and needs a name change.
I have played Tempo Priest, and the biggest flaw is a fundamental one: it has no comeback mechanism whatsoever. Or at least, it uses no comeback mechanism whatsoever; there's plenty to choose from in priest if you want them. No amount of card draw will make up for the fact that when you have lost the board, you have more or less lost the game already.
Now, card draw would be a help against decks that don't fight for the board, but even then it will be tricky trying to make progress building a board from scratch against control, while you probably have a decent win rate against combo already.
So what do I suggest? Probably to try to make it a bit more midrange-y and less all-in from turn 1. I recall dragon priest in TGT, which got off to a fast start with Twilight Whelp and [Hearthstone Card (Wrymrest Agent) Not Found], and had Velen's Chosen to really hammer in early dominance, but didn't rely entirely on it and had slow cards and AoE like Lightbomb in there as well. It was tier 2 in this particular meta snapshot: https://tempostorm.com/hearthstone/meta-snapshot/legacy/meta-snapshot-33-new-kid-on-the-block
I fully admit a lot has changed for priest since then, and card draw is no small part of that, but I genuinely think the entire philosophy of the all-in Tempo Priest we have today makes its own problems. It is built to win if the opponent has no answer for a few early big minions and doesn't give itself any options if that fails. Coming back to my previous post: a 1 mana change on 1 card can make all the difference on whether that approach is overall a success or a failure, as happened with Extra Arms a year ago.
So overall I think the archetype just needs to consider the full Priest toolkit better, and at worst it is in a bucket alongside a huge number of decks that are in that unfortunate window where they are fine but their win rate is a couple of per cent too low for ladder climbers and they get called 'unplayable'.
No, I don't see it as unfair. The majority of supported mechanics and archetypes in every class fall by the wayside and disappear from the meta after a week or two. E.g. Rogue has all these fancy tools for shuffling insane cards into their deck, and has Anka, the Buried to make deathrattle decks do some ludicrous things, but they have no presence in the meta whatsoever. But remember when Unlicensed Apothecary cost 4 mana and Necrium Blade was around? Then we definitely saw deathrattle rogue.
My point is that 1 mana made the difference between deathrattle rogue being OP and practically unplayed at the end of the DoD expansion cycle. That is how fine a line archetypes' success or failure is determined by (at least to players who care about win percentages; casual players don't care whether it is 45% win rate or 55%, but that's a separate discussion). Notably, deathrattle rogue had exactly the same amount of card draw available to it (in fact it even had more options after Galakrond's Awakening), so you have to find other reasons than card draw for why it ended up 'weak'.
Applying this to tempo priest and shaman, I would argue that what they are lacking is not card draw, but effective tools to compensate for them not having strong card draw. If a class is good at something it should be weak elsewhere, and vice versa. The times classes have been poorly designed are when they have too few weaknesses, or their strengths are not sufficient to overcome their weaknesses. Control priest does have such tools, but the tempo archetype is not quite there yet.
The 4x bonus wasn't just removed because of chains like this. It was removed because you could pick the exact card you want too reliably when the pool of class cards was small. The best example was probably getting Sunkeeper Tarim in odd paladin far too consistently.
Card generation for the 3 classes it is actually meant as a strength for does make thematic sense:
I think these 3 should keep it as is, although not necessarily in the same form as it sometimes is right now, especially Mage whose casting of random spells with Puzzle Box of Yogg-Saron, The Amazing Reno and now Trick Totem is just plain dumb. The important part is that these classes are designed with this in mind, and we can handle 3 classes doing this.
For everyone else however it should be reduced, and hopefully the next set rotation cycling out the Year of the Dragon will help.
However, I don't think every class should have access to great card draw. It is good for the diversity of the game if some classes do have to work out how best to use an emptying hand, without the answer just being to draw more cards. Plus card draw would have to replace something else in the cards they are given, so it is directly bad for diversity.
Fresh faces would be great, but there's a lot of mid-power cards that just don't compete in Wild and would be perfect for an evergreen set.
Xaril, Poisoned Mind is my go to example: it demonstrates most of rogue's class design (deathrattle, small minion body, value generation, cheap spells, card draw, stealth, bouncing minions, single target damage, and I guess rogue has a few minion attack buffs) in 1 neat little package that just needs more time and a lower power environment to see play in.
Where such perfect examples already exist I'd rather they bring them out of retirement than reinvent the wheel.
I'd bet mostly on rogue and priest. Both classes currently have only 1 tribe associated with them, and both have a strong deathrattle focus (which I would expect to be quite prominent in an undead tribe).
Plus rogue just has a long history of getting undead characters (especially forsaken) outside of undead-heavy sets (e.g. Undercity Valiant, Undercity Huckster, Myra Rotspring, Plaguebringer, Kidnapper to name a few), mostly because of their affiliation with poisons and sticking to shadows.
Of course, if Death Knights get added a long way down the line, it would be heresy for them not to use the undead tribe if it existed.
I first thought Silas would fit, but so many things lined up with Lilian, including the tease a few months back that it would be 'Legendary' (where Lilian has the advantage of being an existing legendary card at the time) that she's my best guess. At least until I'm shown wrong in two months time anyway!
Honestly, they could do both Lilian and Silas. It wouldn't be the first time a single class has received 2 new ones in quick succession (shaman had King Rastakhan and The Thunder King, while druid got Elise Starseeker and Dame Hazelbark).
Really the class needs both an undead mascot and a thief/swindler/shady businessman mascot to cover the deathrattle and burgle/coin flavours of the class, and Lilian and Silas (or Gallywix) would cover them well. It could probably do with a pirate that is easier to reach for most people than [Hearthstone Card (Cap'n Valeera) Not Found] too. But instead Blizz decided the most diverse class (in the sense of the number of roles it fills in society) should be the one to get their heroes slowest.
Honestly Enrage was always a fairly pointless keyword as it was only ever a shortening of 'when damaged'. It feels like something they came up with when they were initially designing the game looking for keywords, but later sensibly went: "hang on, why are we using this thing when it's not actually making our cards any cleaner or easier to understand?"
I personally agree with their philosophy with both Elusive and Poisonous: don't add a keyword until card space demands it, because however slight the difference may be, the game is still more accessible without it.
Recruit however... they should have just made that span expansions since it already exists.
I have a hunch we'll get Lilian Voss as a hero alongside the Scholomance solo stuff since she's the obvious good guy to go exposing the dark side of the school with.
That's less than two months away, assuming I'm right of course.
He did say it was a small downside, and I agree with him it is not zero. For experienced players who already know all the keywords and mechanics it takes negligible effort to learn 1 more, but new players are met with 10 keywords in the basic set alone, and that did not include other common keywords like deathrattle, stealth, discover, immune, outcast, overload, combo, choose one, secret; plus however many set-specific keywords there are at the time; plus mechanics like armour, transform and weapons that are all simple but still need learning what exactly they do.
Each individually is trivial, but when there's that many at once there is no hope they all stick in your head straight away, so while card space isn't an issue it might as well just be written out.
Not so much a prediction as a wish for how to change Secret Passage: it could read "Replace your hand with the same number of cards from your deck. Swap back next turn."
I.e. if you have X cards in hand, it will draw X. (I'm not sure if X would include secret passage itself. Probably, so that it's not completely worthless when you top deck it with an empty hand.)
This stops aggro abusing the hell out of it, and it becomes more powerful the less you need it. It will then be something to play when you have a hand of cards that just aren't helpful in the current situation, and when you're looking for something specific, which is what I always thought it was designed to be.