IMO, Demon Hunter -- the class based on people who are training-obsessed edgelords who will straight-up unironically tell you that while you were indulging yourself they studied the blade -- should have been a buff class built around their minions going dormant and having training montages where they get buffer and buffer. No huge demon-summoning (they're supposed to kill most of those). I also like the idea of your minions and hero on occasion switching places (so a hero card that summons a minion that represents your hero while pulling a minion -- your new hero -- off the board) representing Demon Hunters fluidly entering fights to personally get their hands dirty.
All of that is simply more difficult to deal with than revisiting established tropes. Team 5 can't even give Priest solid, reliable board-centric tempo play and that's arguably the easiest thing in Hearthstone to design. While I put a lot of Blizzard's decisions down to corporate pressure to make a quick buck with the sloppiest, hypest mana-cheats they can toss out, some of this is the design team simply being nowhere near we players on theme for reasons that are completely elusive.
Razorfen Beastmaster exists, but it's stranded. Trust me, Deathrattle DH has been getting punched in the nethers for a year now (as if its questionable theming wasn't pain enough). The rest of the DR package won't justify this stand-out.
Magnifying Glaive might bring back quest Demon Hunter. You'll have to play super-low-curve. Maybe there's a chance that Wayward Sage won't suck here.
Going to reply to myself here in case this info isn't accurate: the editor, above, is apparently wrong and I'm hearing reports that the card text isn't accurate and that the reduction-to-zero only happens once per turn, which is still broken but far less bad. It still lets you put out a 10-drop 1-4 turns early at the price of playing with an undestatted tempo-dead neutral.
If the report is wrong and he can be used indefinitely, no further analysis is needed and my comment towards Team 5 above holds.
Barring that, once again, this is Druid unfairness as Druid loses nothing by putting this into a pre-existing deck with Neptulon and Onyxia. Few other class can afford the bizarre mix of cheap and expensive minions (note that cheap Druid minions are some of the most cost-effective around) with the same efficacy. Hunter comes close with Beast Hunter dropping 7 to 9s alongside some early-game minions. Priest might be able to do this, but without a victory condition, Priest is just really involving trash. (I can't see how this would really help Quest, it is meaningless in Naga Priest, and I see no potential in the nascent generic buff Priest that seems to be forming here.) Priest has a zero-cost minion but that loses synergy unless you've played a lot of spells that turn already, increasing the mana requirement.
Control Warrior can't do it consistently because it only has like one or two cheap minions (Sir Finley, Sea Guide, Brann Bronzebeard, and Amalgam of the Deep) and it doesn't want to waste the combo/utility of any of those cards on this just to get an early Onyxia. An early Kazakusan might be worth, but is that absurd gamble worth the card slot this takes up?
This looks like it needs a new deck in Standard, like a big Paladin with a spread of minion costs. Even then, I'm not sure it's worth it unless the minion cheated out wins the game or at least locks out the opponent. Only winner there seems to be Sire Denathrius after a Brann Bronzebeard on turn 9. How are you consistently fattening Denathrius up and getting it into your hand early is a question that would need answering. Taelan Fordring gets you partially there.
Skeleton Mage with no tutors but a ton of draw? Wait, they revealed Dispossessed Soul. Mage and Demon Hunter may be able to get enough weenies out there to make this work. Shaman has more expensive weenies but better Battlecry synergies so you can try again if it doesn't pop off.
Wild is turbof!#$ed. Look at how Team 5 treats you Wild players. Why haven't you broken up with them already?
Team 5 will print broken mana acceleration that everyone hates that only gets nerfed 2 years later when it finally breaks Wild. Team 5 will print fuck-you hand-stealing effects that, as you point out, either don't work at all or are the worst thing in a card game to experience and are countered only by intense aggro decks that even aggro players get sick of.
Meanwhile, members of the design team will go on Twitter and agree that board-centric play is desired and missing, all while refusing to print mid-tier cards that make it possible.
I understand why flashy-cheaty cards get printed, but why garbage corner-case cards make it in is jarring, because the designers will admit that they can print something more playable.
The truth of the matter is that most Priest steal cards in Standard are bad and problematic and punish the Priest to a large extent. Drakonid Operative requires a dragon package that won't win you the game (and The Harvester of Envy -- excellent name, btw -- isn't a Dragon and that doesn't help), Soothsayer's Caravan has the life expectancy of a chainsmoking mayfly, and Psychic Conjurer does nothing to advance your victory condition and only feels good to play when you don't have one.
What these all have in common is that basically none of them hit the hand. They're deck-only (at best!), severely limiting the effect. That's Standard.
Wild will be wild, a nightmare of denial where the only time Priest will be acceptable is when it's stealing from an even worse shut-out deck: no one will weep when a conventional Shudderwock deck is shudderwrobbed.
So for this to be scary, we'd have to admit that an aimless Priest with no victory condition running Soothsayer's and Conjurer is scary. And then it could only really be scary to control or maybe decks with Hero cards.
Rogue stealing your hand is simply worse feels than this and much more likely to lose you the game (and they can shadowstep and Zola and Brann it, though they should have already won before any of that). Branned Mutanus and Blademaster Okani get more denial in and do it cheaper.
Agreed. Either you need a) far more Totem synergies that will come up reliably such that you don't care if this is the last card in the deck, b) this card needs to have other powers and synergies unrelated to Totems that makes it a strong play when you're not making Totems, or c) preferrably both.
Note that Team 5 seems to hate (c). They are making pre-packaged decks where 25 to 28 of your cards are all of one tribe pre-made by the design team, as if we didn't have enough of their in-house design with Quests. Cards that bridge the gap between tribes are not only rare, they're usually deliberately terrible. It's the exact opposite of what we could use, but it likely makes things easier on their end.
Card games from 20 years back solved this with simple bold text. Hearthstone can throw tribes to hover-text if there's not enough space. Hero cards don't have space for their hero powers so we're already there.
If the new set has any Stealth or Dormant minions, those actually might be worth trying out with these new cards alongside the previous dormant minions. It seems much too slow to actually win and has no obvious win conditions as yet, but it seems neat.
Naga is super-tight (and not good enough imo; far too fair) and though it wants Pelagos and this, I doubt that there's room.
Quest Priest just got another sliver of hope that it might not suck.
The Cathedral of Atonement was already a must-play -- competetive-cost, value at any time, pays for the card loss with a future profit -- but now this is a turn 3/turn 4 fill-your-hand effect that makes Goldshire Gnoll look good.
Less happily for most people, Quest Hunter may well get a boost here. Assuming Castle Kennels sees play -- I'd say better than even odds -- this lets Quest hunt for Beaststalker Tavish, making its nigh-infinite Hunter scenario more likely.
Shaman can repeat the battlecry for additional value.
Seems like to me you're only thinking in the worst-case scenario.
Since my opening was about the worst-case draw scenario, one likely to come up slightly less than 50% of the time, that's correct, but I don't think that means what you think it means.
To reiterate, the point is that the draw-plus-body engine alone doesn't do anything and it can't be slotted into any presently-known DH deck in standard to improve or keep it at parity. It almost-but-not-quite could fit into a DH weenie deck, but that deck is bad right now and its lategame isn't really strong enough to get anything done.
Which was my overall point. If you're not winning the game, drawing cards and making many small minions is meaningless. If the DH card pool had different cards in it than it does at present, there'd be, for example, possible OTKs available as lategame finishers. And if even one of those is revealed, the value of these cards skyrockets. Which is what I said.
Priest has incredible card draw with Handmaiden. Priest is having an extremely hard time winning games because card draw without a solid win condition is meaningless. Pretending that having a strong draw option is the same thing as a game-winning effect won't somehow transform the former into the latter.
There are still plenty of reveals available. If we get a mid-late DH finisher, the Relics will be powerhouses. Alternatively, if a card can justify fitting Relics into the existing Fel archetype -- by making them Fel or by providing Fel generation or something -- then these slot in. Still plenty of time for either to show up.
Imp King Rafaam . . . is an Imp. Is that . . . is that a biological change? Do energy beings have biology? He's an imp that's not a demon, too. They'll probably pre-release errata that.
What is happening in Imp-ending Catastrophe?
Solid Alibi looks . . . solid . . . for a deck that generates a lot of value and that doesn't need nor develop a lot of board. In other words, Quest Mage might come back. I'm sure those are words that everyone was eager to hear. It obviously could work with the skeles build. (Actually, I wonder if Quest could, as well . . .).
Red Herring will be just the wackiest thing to evolve into. Bad stats? Good stats? Good for me? Bad for me? Orderlol by not attacking before evolving? Played my outs? Oh, the headaches our second-guessing will cause us. And that's before its permastealth mechanics. I hope it's coded like a novel take on Divine Shield, where the Stealth aura gives you a stealth token that gets flipped (from providing stealth to not provide stealth) when you lose stealth, but the aura can't give you another stealth token if you already have one from it, so once it flips you get no more stealth out of it.
Who am I kidding? It'll be broken perma-stealth.
Edit: The attacking minion didn't lose stealth once it was granted it by the Red Herring, so, yep.
Not even close to worth it on their own. The problem is that the payoff is too far in the future AND too inconsistent.
Consider the worst-case scenario where the cheap relics come late. Notice anything about them? They don't anything to close out the game. Even if they are vastly empowered, by the time they come on-line, your opponent is likely winning and you're on the backfoot. Unless the opponent is aggro, in which case you have already lost -- unless the upgrades include rush, in which case there's a chance you might live for an extra turn.
So your other cards need to end the game. Here's the problem: these relics actively hurt, not help, the only way -- techinically "ways" but practically "way" -- that Demon Hunter has to win. And that's Fel. And Fel decks are space-hogs with no room for lots of non-Fel stuff. Which Relics are.
Blizzard has systematically crushed all Demon Hunter late game options and replaced them with jack and shit and jack was let go because of allegations. There's nothing but Fel.
But if the rest of the reveals are a bunch of victory conditions for Demon Hunter, all of this can be immediately reversed, so long as they come on-line fast enough to mitigate the inconsistent power of Relics. There's a possibility that we're one reveal from this post being completely dumpstered. Let's hope so. I'd rather have a good game than a good first impression.
Also: the typing here really sucks. "Relic" really should've been a bold-face text on the card.
It's entirely possible that relics are such absolute poop that casting one twice literally accomplishes nothing. Proving Grounds cast twice is still Proving Grounds.
Also, Relic had better be a keyword lest we get grammar chafing from this card being a Relic-by-title but not a Relic-by-rule. I can't imagine it is a school -- DH already has inconsistent school support as it is (e.g., Fel only and only certain arbitrarily-selected non-summoning cards are Fel).
As if we needed another reason to hate on Team 5's Druid design.
Because this card is massively better in Druid than any other deck. Druid can make 10-mana plays alongside other cards, can create stall decks that easily and safely accelerate past 10 tray mana, and can generate full boards of small minions with a single card multiple times -- twice in class, once more with Raid Boss Onyxia (though there's a complication there, see below). Druid gets all the win conditions, thankyouverymuch.
In other classes, this isn't much of a threat, though it'll be nice to try it out. Dude Pally would like to take a swing at this, I think, but unless it gets a spell to fill multiple boards with dudes (which would be very cool), this won't get enough fuel. Shaman can make wide boards with a couple of minions (Bearon Gla'shear, Coral Keeper, maybe Tiny Toys and Baroness Vashj if evolve rolls back into vogue) but gets less mana to play with. All classes can tutor this with Taelan Fordring, unless you're also running Raid Boss Onyxia.
I will be trying a terrible deck with Nobleman and this. It won't win, but it will deserve to.
Indeed. Dopplegangster is more dangerous than actual Heroic bossfights and it's not interesting to playthrough and it can ruin lengthy runs. Blizz acknowledges that it made a design mistake by making this change but . . . doesn't fix anything. It's impossible to tell if this is trolling or incompetence due to internal miscommunication, though I'd guess the latter.
It's not difficult; it's Cookie on Bounty 1, Match 1 with a summoned fish reduced to a health point or two. That applies to all of the non-boss content, of course.
Now, doing it extemporaneously, during non-task-grinding play, that sounds tricky.
As for that cooldown, Y'shaarj and N'zoth both help with Old Gods cooldowns and Blink Fox helps with all of them. And there are likely treasures that will help.
Losing a Merc is simply too big a penalty in PvE when you're running anything less than the most optimized comps. PvE needs another penalty besides just "1/6th of your team is now gone."
Further, PvE is far too static with not enough variation between matches in a run -- if I just defeated a comp when I had fewer treasures, why send me up against it again? There needs to be variation, possibly through difficulty escalation or minor enemy lineup changes, as the run progresses.
And treasures range from the actually disadvantageous to the perfect with lots of trash inbetween. Serious rebalancing is needed.
IMO, Demon Hunter -- the class based on people who are training-obsessed edgelords who will straight-up unironically tell you that while you were indulging yourself they studied the blade -- should have been a buff class built around their minions going dormant and having training montages where they get buffer and buffer. No huge demon-summoning (they're supposed to kill most of those). I also like the idea of your minions and hero on occasion switching places (so a hero card that summons a minion that represents your hero while pulling a minion -- your new hero -- off the board) representing Demon Hunters fluidly entering fights to personally get their hands dirty.
All of that is simply more difficult to deal with than revisiting established tropes. Team 5 can't even give Priest solid, reliable board-centric tempo play and that's arguably the easiest thing in Hearthstone to design. While I put a lot of Blizzard's decisions down to corporate pressure to make a quick buck with the sloppiest, hypest mana-cheats they can toss out, some of this is the design team simply being nowhere near we players on theme for reasons that are completely elusive.
Razorfen Beastmaster exists, but it's stranded. Trust me, Deathrattle DH has been getting punched in the nethers for a year now (as if its questionable theming wasn't pain enough). The rest of the DR package won't justify this stand-out.
Magnifying Glaive might bring back quest Demon Hunter. You'll have to play super-low-curve. Maybe there's a chance that Wayward Sage won't suck here.
Going to reply to myself here in case this info isn't accurate: the editor, above, is apparently wrong and I'm hearing reports that the card text isn't accurate and that the reduction-to-zero only happens once per turn, which is still broken but far less bad. It still lets you put out a 10-drop 1-4 turns early at the price of playing with an undestatted tempo-dead neutral.
If the report is wrong and he can be used indefinitely, no further analysis is needed and my comment towards Team 5 above holds.
Barring that, once again, this is Druid unfairness as Druid loses nothing by putting this into a pre-existing deck with Neptulon and Onyxia. Few other class can afford the bizarre mix of cheap and expensive minions (note that cheap Druid minions are some of the most cost-effective around) with the same efficacy. Hunter comes close with Beast Hunter dropping 7 to 9s alongside some early-game minions. Priest might be able to do this, but without a victory condition, Priest is just really involving trash. (I can't see how this would really help Quest, it is meaningless in Naga Priest, and I see no potential in the nascent generic buff Priest that seems to be forming here.) Priest has a zero-cost minion but that loses synergy unless you've played a lot of spells that turn already, increasing the mana requirement.
Control Warrior can't do it consistently because it only has like one or two cheap minions (Sir Finley, Sea Guide, Brann Bronzebeard, and Amalgam of the Deep) and it doesn't want to waste the combo/utility of any of those cards on this just to get an early Onyxia. An early Kazakusan might be worth, but is that absurd gamble worth the card slot this takes up?
This looks like it needs a new deck in Standard, like a big Paladin with a spread of minion costs. Even then, I'm not sure it's worth it unless the minion cheated out wins the game or at least locks out the opponent. Only winner there seems to be Sire Denathrius after a Brann Bronzebeard on turn 9. How are you consistently fattening Denathrius up and getting it into your hand early is a question that would need answering. Taelan Fordring gets you partially there.
Skeleton Mage with no tutors but a ton of draw? Wait, they revealed Dispossessed Soul. Mage and Demon Hunter may be able to get enough weenies out there to make this work. Shaman has more expensive weenies but better Battlecry synergies so you can try again if it doesn't pop off.
Wild is turbof!#$ed. Look at how Team 5 treats you Wild players. Why haven't you broken up with them already?
Please stop.
Team 5 will print broken mana acceleration that everyone hates that only gets nerfed 2 years later when it finally breaks Wild. Team 5 will print fuck-you hand-stealing effects that, as you point out, either don't work at all or are the worst thing in a card game to experience and are countered only by intense aggro decks that even aggro players get sick of.
Meanwhile, members of the design team will go on Twitter and agree that board-centric play is desired and missing, all while refusing to print mid-tier cards that make it possible.
I understand why flashy-cheaty cards get printed, but why garbage corner-case cards make it in is jarring, because the designers will admit that they can print something more playable.
Thoughtsteal isn't in standard.
The truth of the matter is that most Priest steal cards in Standard are bad and problematic and punish the Priest to a large extent. Drakonid Operative requires a dragon package that won't win you the game (and The Harvester of Envy -- excellent name, btw -- isn't a Dragon and that doesn't help), Soothsayer's Caravan has the life expectancy of a chainsmoking mayfly, and Psychic Conjurer does nothing to advance your victory condition and only feels good to play when you don't have one.
. . . And with Copycat and Murozond the Infinite, the horse has already left the barn.
What these all have in common is that basically none of them hit the hand. They're deck-only (at best!), severely limiting the effect. That's Standard.
Wild will be wild, a nightmare of denial where the only time Priest will be acceptable is when it's stealing from an even worse shut-out deck: no one will weep when a conventional Shudderwock deck is shudderwrobbed.
So for this to be scary, we'd have to admit that an aimless Priest with no victory condition running Soothsayer's and Conjurer is scary. And then it could only really be scary to control or maybe decks with Hero cards.
Rogue stealing your hand is simply worse feels than this and much more likely to lose you the game (and they can shadowstep and Zola and Brann it, though they should have already won before any of that). Branned Mutanus and Blademaster Okani get more denial in and do it cheaper.
Agreed. Either you need a) far more Totem synergies that will come up reliably such that you don't care if this is the last card in the deck, b) this card needs to have other powers and synergies unrelated to Totems that makes it a strong play when you're not making Totems, or c) preferrably both.
Note that Team 5 seems to hate (c). They are making pre-packaged decks where 25 to 28 of your cards are all of one tribe pre-made by the design team, as if we didn't have enough of their in-house design with Quests. Cards that bridge the gap between tribes are not only rare, they're usually deliberately terrible. It's the exact opposite of what we could use, but it likely makes things easier on their end.
Card games from 20 years back solved this with simple bold text. Hearthstone can throw tribes to hover-text if there's not enough space. Hero cards don't have space for their hero powers so we're already there.
Gnomes in WoW don't survive close analysis. They're scary baby people that only look acceptable from carefully-considered angles.
Wonder why some of the displays have no life totals, 30 life, and 40 life. Not important, just curious.
If the new set has any Stealth or Dormant minions, those actually might be worth trying out with these new cards alongside the previous dormant minions. It seems much too slow to actually win and has no obvious win conditions as yet, but it seems neat.
Naga is super-tight (and not good enough imo; far too fair) and though it wants Pelagos and this, I doubt that there's room.
Quest Priest just got another sliver of hope that it might not suck.
The Cathedral of Atonement was already a must-play -- competetive-cost, value at any time, pays for the card loss with a future profit -- but now this is a turn 3/turn 4 fill-your-hand effect that makes Goldshire Gnoll look good.
Less happily for most people, Quest Hunter may well get a boost here. Assuming Castle Kennels sees play -- I'd say better than even odds -- this lets Quest hunt for Beaststalker Tavish, making its nigh-infinite Hunter scenario more likely.
Shaman can repeat the battlecry for additional value.
Since my opening was about the worst-case draw scenario, one likely to come up slightly less than 50% of the time, that's correct, but I don't think that means what you think it means.
To reiterate, the point is that the draw-plus-body engine alone doesn't do anything and it can't be slotted into any presently-known DH deck in standard to improve or keep it at parity. It almost-but-not-quite could fit into a DH weenie deck, but that deck is bad right now and its lategame isn't really strong enough to get anything done.
Which was my overall point. If you're not winning the game, drawing cards and making many small minions is meaningless. If the DH card pool had different cards in it than it does at present, there'd be, for example, possible OTKs available as lategame finishers. And if even one of those is revealed, the value of these cards skyrockets. Which is what I said.
Priest has incredible card draw with Handmaiden. Priest is having an extremely hard time winning games because card draw without a solid win condition is meaningless. Pretending that having a strong draw option is the same thing as a game-winning effect won't somehow transform the former into the latter.
There are still plenty of reveals available. If we get a mid-late DH finisher, the Relics will be powerhouses. Alternatively, if a card can justify fitting Relics into the existing Fel archetype -- by making them Fel or by providing Fel generation or something -- then these slot in. Still plenty of time for either to show up.
Imp King Rafaam . . . is an Imp. Is that . . . is that a biological change? Do energy beings have biology? He's an imp that's not a demon, too. They'll probably pre-release errata that.
What is happening in Imp-ending Catastrophe?
Solid Alibi looks . . . solid . . . for a deck that generates a lot of value and that doesn't need nor develop a lot of board. In other words, Quest Mage might come back. I'm sure those are words that everyone was eager to hear. It obviously could work with the skeles build. (Actually, I wonder if Quest could, as well . . .).
Red Herring will be just the wackiest thing to evolve into. Bad stats? Good stats? Good for me? Bad for me? Orderlol by not attacking before evolving? Played my outs? Oh, the headaches our second-guessing will cause us. And that's before its permastealth mechanics. I hope it's coded like a novel take on Divine Shield, where the Stealth aura gives you a stealth token that gets flipped (from providing stealth to not provide stealth) when you lose stealth, but the aura can't give you another stealth token if you already have one from it, so once it flips you get no more stealth out of it.
Who am I kidding? It'll be broken perma-stealth.
Edit: The attacking minion didn't lose stealth once it was granted it by the Red Herring, so, yep.
Not even close to worth it on their own. The problem is that the payoff is too far in the future AND too inconsistent.
Consider the worst-case scenario where the cheap relics come late. Notice anything about them? They don't anything to close out the game. Even if they are vastly empowered, by the time they come on-line, your opponent is likely winning and you're on the backfoot. Unless the opponent is aggro, in which case you have already lost -- unless the upgrades include rush, in which case there's a chance you might live for an extra turn.
So your other cards need to end the game. Here's the problem: these relics actively hurt, not help, the only way -- techinically "ways" but practically "way" -- that Demon Hunter has to win. And that's Fel. And Fel decks are space-hogs with no room for lots of non-Fel stuff. Which Relics are.
Blizzard has systematically crushed all Demon Hunter late game options and replaced them with jack and shit and jack was let go because of allegations. There's nothing but Fel.
But if the rest of the reveals are a bunch of victory conditions for Demon Hunter, all of this can be immediately reversed, so long as they come on-line fast enough to mitigate the inconsistent power of Relics. There's a possibility that we're one reveal from this post being completely dumpstered. Let's hope so. I'd rather have a good game than a good first impression.
Also: the typing here really sucks. "Relic" really should've been a bold-face text on the card.
It's entirely possible that relics are such absolute poop that casting one twice literally accomplishes nothing. Proving Grounds cast twice is still Proving Grounds.
Also, Relic had better be a keyword lest we get grammar chafing from this card being a Relic-by-title but not a Relic-by-rule. I can't imagine it is a school -- DH already has inconsistent school support as it is (e.g., Fel only and only certain arbitrarily-selected non-summoning cards are Fel).
As if we needed another reason to hate on Team 5's Druid design.
Because this card is massively better in Druid than any other deck. Druid can make 10-mana plays alongside other cards, can create stall decks that easily and safely accelerate past 10 tray mana, and can generate full boards of small minions with a single card multiple times -- twice in class, once more with Raid Boss Onyxia (though there's a complication there, see below). Druid gets all the win conditions, thankyouverymuch.
In other classes, this isn't much of a threat, though it'll be nice to try it out. Dude Pally would like to take a swing at this, I think, but unless it gets a spell to fill multiple boards with dudes (which would be very cool), this won't get enough fuel. Shaman can make wide boards with a couple of minions (Bearon Gla'shear, Coral Keeper, maybe Tiny Toys and Baroness Vashj if evolve rolls back into vogue) but gets less mana to play with. All classes can tutor this with Taelan Fordring, unless you're also running Raid Boss Onyxia.
I will be trying a terrible deck with Nobleman and this. It won't win, but it will deserve to.
Indeed. Dopplegangster is more dangerous than actual Heroic bossfights and it's not interesting to playthrough and it can ruin lengthy runs. Blizz acknowledges that it made a design mistake by making this change but . . . doesn't fix anything. It's impossible to tell if this is trolling or incompetence due to internal miscommunication, though I'd guess the latter.
It's not difficult; it's Cookie on Bounty 1, Match 1 with a summoned fish reduced to a health point or two. That applies to all of the non-boss content, of course.
Now, doing it extemporaneously, during non-task-grinding play, that sounds tricky.
As for that cooldown, Y'shaarj and N'zoth both help with Old Gods cooldowns and Blink Fox helps with all of them. And there are likely treasures that will help.
There are considerations to move Hearthstone to 4 expansions per year and no longer do mini-sets.
Losing a Merc is simply too big a penalty in PvE when you're running anything less than the most optimized comps. PvE needs another penalty besides just "1/6th of your team is now gone."
Further, PvE is far too static with not enough variation between matches in a run -- if I just defeated a comp when I had fewer treasures, why send me up against it again? There needs to be variation, possibly through difficulty escalation or minor enemy lineup changes, as the run progresses.
And treasures range from the actually disadvantageous to the perfect with lots of trash inbetween. Serious rebalancing is needed.