Deathrattles don't need to be that good to make doubling them great. Doubling an early Loan Shark could be a pretty big deal. Having the effect stick around is also huge - cards like Baron Rivendare have been bad because they get killed before you can generate persistent value, but that's very much not the case here.
The fact that Dun Baldar Bridge works for summon (rather than play) is the only thing that makes me think this card could be good. The payoff wants you to run a token strategy, but the midgame turns are where you want to be cementing your control of the board, so this ends up competing with various Rush minions and buff effects you might rather have for immediate impact. There are some cool combos you could do here (e.g. Derailed Coaster the turn after you play this could be a big board swing, and City Architect could be as a fast follow on this), but those may be too inconsistent.
Lightforged Cariel seems like a really solid value card with a lot of relevant support already available for the hero power (Catacomb Guard and First Blade of Wrynn come to mind). The Immovable Object offers a nice little bit of chip damage in longer games, and may save your bacon against aggro. The odd thing, though, is that most handbuff decks we've seen lately have been tempo decks that hope to end the game with Battleground Battlemaster. This is probably a nice addition, and maybe a solid tech card against aggro in that deck, but you're mostly looking to close the game out before you could hope to generate a ton of value from this.
This feels like tech card bait. This is not likely to be a combo breaker since it doesn't interact with hands or decks, so it needs to eat a valuable minion in a tempo oriented game. But on turn 8 there are probably better things you could be doing in that kind of match up.
Solid card for the cost - goes from being a 1/3 to a 2/2 to a 3/1 in the best case. Probably won't see constructed play without a tribal tag, but in the right circumstances it could see play in an aggro deck., and it could be a cool buff target.
Cost reduction is solid, and Mage has plenty of spell damage available to it, so this seems like a good card. Hard to say if it's good enough to supplant other cards in the current Questline Mage decks, though.
Easily worth the price up front, and the hero power is just dramatically better than the default Druid hero power for any combo or control deck, even before you account for the new max mana cap. Auto-include in any deck that wants to go into late game.
The comparison this begs is to Darkshire Councilman - same cost, nearly the same stats and scaling, but one triggers off of summons while the other triggers off deaths. Obviously the former is much easier than the latter to get value from, but with Feast of Souls in standard as a payoff for Token DH, I think it's easy to see how it wouldn't take much to make this a powerful payoff. Not an obvious 5-star card today, but I'm hopeful about its chances as the expansion cards are revealed.
I'm impressed that grind didn't drive you insane before you got to so many mercs. I've been grinding away for a while and am still missing a bunch of mercs, not to mention the sheer amount of grinding left before most of those mercs would be worth a damn.
Oddly enough, I haven't seen anywhere that can say for sure what the coin ranges are, but this reddit post includes a table for which mercs are part of the rewards for any given bounty.
Anecdotally, I think I've mostly seen 10- and 15-coin rewards for lower level (heroic) content, and 15- and 20-coin rewards for higher level (standard) content. (Note: I haven't done high level heroic content yet - that might yield better rewards.) I guess at this point the Heroic Air Elemental may no longer be the best task farm thanks to their hot "fix" to Mysterious Stranger, but it's honestly crazy how many extra coins I have for Cariel, Cornelius, and Rokara after the task farming I was doing.
Edit: Just did a quick Heroic Raven the Hunter mission to see what I'd get: 55 (as 15, 25, 15) for Kurtrus, 15 for Cariel, and 25 for Anduin. The chest says you get to earn coins for the mercs in your party along with one of the bounty mercs randomly, but this happened despite the fact that the mercs in that bounty are Grom, Tyrande, and Kurtrus, and despite my not having Anduin at all (let alone in my party). (My party did include Cariel.) So, it seems like maybe heroic bounties can also grant unlisted mercs.
Farming Heroic Air Elemental is already an incredibly tedious process. Unless "adjusting the appearance rate of Mysterious Stangers" means that they will be dramatically more likely than other options when you're the appropriate level, this will only serve to make the entire farming process all the more miserable.
Frankly, I'd prefer a guarantee they be for legendaries you don't already have - it's not that hard to grind for tasks and get coins for legendaries you do have, but if you're mostly F2P it can be a real nuisance to unlock new mercs (particularly since duplicate protection doesn't work as many expected).
I opened a pack today and found much to my annoyance that I was granted a skin for an epic I have, rather than an epic merc I dont have.
I heard a lot of talk about there being some kind of protection so you'll only ever get skins once you have all the mercs of that particular rarity, but I guess today I can see that that is not the case.
Yeah, to be clear on this, I do have all the rares, but I don't have all the epics or legendaries. Like many, I foolishly imagined that duplicate protection didn't treat portraits as unique mercs and expected a new epic merc when I opened that pack
For what it's worth, this is not just an issue with the pre-order. I just opened this pack and was disappointed to find that all of the mercs were duplicates.
I tried it last night, and I quit playing after the very first level (the one with Hogger as the boss). I found it boring and simplistic, from the gameplay to the aesthetics. Seriously, the background/environment looks very plain, almost like it's an unfinished game that was simply rushed to completion. The fact that others here are saying that there's a lot to criticize yet it's very addictive is a massive red flag for me; that's the hallmark of a predatory game, and I don't want to fall for it.
I'll give it another try in the coming days, but as it stands, it's just not very interesting. It bored me so much that it made me go back to playing Standard even though this meta is my least favorite ever, which is saying something.
The early parts of the game are absolutely too simplistic, and the various slowdowns you face when you play (e.g. tedious animations, a need to navigate different menus for each function of the game, etc.) make those early parts feel even worse. That said, the high level PVE content feels a lot more strategic.
The PVP also feels like it has a lot of potential - basically taking the challenge of the high level content and layering an element of the unknown by hiding your opponent's move choices. I think one of the significant challenges this faces is inaccessibility. Each merc's abilities have two key factors - speed and cooldown. If you know all of the details of each merc then you can infer those as your opponent uses abilities (e.g. when my opponent plays LIch King, I know the base abilities, but depending on how much my opponent's Lich King is upgraded, Frostbite could be speed 8, 7, 6, or 5, and Frostshield could have a cooldown of 2 or 1 and a speed of 4, 3, or 2).
Knowing that is critical to anticipating how your opponent will play, but the game makes no effort to tell you that information (all you get is what gear the opponent has equipped). That's a big part of the PVP skill curve, and I don't think it should be changed in-client, but I think it leaves it a bit inaccessible without some deck tracker type support, and if inaccessibility leads to less traction from players, the mode will end up a failure.
I think there's a bit of ugly that's missing here - how cumbersome interactions in the mode can be:
Each match-up in PVE incurs a loading screen
The animations across the board tend to be pretty slow (e.g. the animation to put your extra mercs in your bench each game, the XP gaining animation that is both slow and split into groups of 3 for no obvious reason)
There are gratuitous interactions (the "Ready" button once you've played 3 mercs, the "Bounty Complete" Screen that shows very little, the sheer number of clicks it takes to complete and receive rewards for a completed task)
Lots of key content you'd like to be able to reference in many places is gated to specific views (e.g. tasks and task progress would be nice in match, but are only visible at camp, you can't see current team composition when you're picking treasure, and you can't see merc levels outside of the collection even though that would be super useful when picking a team in PVE)
If you're unlucky enough to have and use the diamond portraits then you're stuck listening to a small set of voice lines constantly. (Incidentally, I'm F2P for this mode and didn't realize this was a thing until I watched some of Brian Kibler's content on YouTube.)
Perhaps most baffling of all - retrieving the level 30 equipment rewards require you to leave the game mode entirely so you can check your achievements
The result is that there's an inordinate amount of time spent in Mercenaries that isn't spent playing the game because you're spending time in menus, or trying to remember what you just did so that you don't make a bad choice for your run.
The core of the game is really fun, but there are a lot of walls you have to work around to get to it.
Azalina Soulthief saw play in some hyper aggro decks that wanted an option for late game reload, so I imagine the new Mindrender Illucia will still be viable for that narrow purpose in highly aggressive Shadow Priest decks. Given the low card draw Priest has that might be good, but it's still a shame that the card no longer offers any disruption potential for slower control decks. Combo disruption seems like a great expression of the Control Shadow Priest archetype, so I hope we'll see more (and more focused) attempts at that in the future.
There were also about a half dozen substantive articles about the new Mercenaries mode. The news comes in at whatever pace it comes in, and I hardly think you should fault a news site for posting new content once it's known to them. It's true that right now the front page is mostly cosmetics, but that's just the order those updates became available as news.
Deathrattles don't need to be that good to make doubling them great. Doubling an early Loan Shark could be a pretty big deal. Having the effect stick around is also huge - cards like Baron Rivendare have been bad because they get killed before you can generate persistent value, but that's very much not the case here.
The fact that Dun Baldar Bridge works for summon (rather than play) is the only thing that makes me think this card could be good. The payoff wants you to run a token strategy, but the midgame turns are where you want to be cementing your control of the board, so this ends up competing with various Rush minions and buff effects you might rather have for immediate impact. There are some cool combos you could do here (e.g. Derailed Coaster the turn after you play this could be a big board swing, and City Architect could be as a fast follow on this), but those may be too inconsistent.
Lightforged Cariel seems like a really solid value card with a lot of relevant support already available for the hero power (Catacomb Guard and First Blade of Wrynn come to mind). The Immovable Object offers a nice little bit of chip damage in longer games, and may save your bacon against aggro. The odd thing, though, is that most handbuff decks we've seen lately have been tempo decks that hope to end the game with Battleground Battlemaster. This is probably a nice addition, and maybe a solid tech card against aggro in that deck, but you're mostly looking to close the game out before you could hope to generate a ton of value from this.
This feels like tech card bait. This is not likely to be a combo breaker since it doesn't interact with hands or decks, so it needs to eat a valuable minion in a tempo oriented game. But on turn 8 there are probably better things you could be doing in that kind of match up.
Solid card for the cost - goes from being a 1/3 to a 2/2 to a 3/1 in the best case. Probably won't see constructed play without a tribal tag, but in the right circumstances it could see play in an aggro deck., and it could be a cool buff target.
Cost reduction is solid, and Mage has plenty of spell damage available to it, so this seems like a good card. Hard to say if it's good enough to supplant other cards in the current Questline Mage decks, though.
Easily worth the price up front, and the hero power is just dramatically better than the default Druid hero power for any combo or control deck, even before you account for the new max mana cap. Auto-include in any deck that wants to go into late game.
The comparison this begs is to Darkshire Councilman - same cost, nearly the same stats and scaling, but one triggers off of summons while the other triggers off deaths. Obviously the former is much easier than the latter to get value from, but with Feast of Souls in standard as a payoff for Token DH, I think it's easy to see how it wouldn't take much to make this a powerful payoff. Not an obvious 5-star card today, but I'm hopeful about its chances as the expansion cards are revealed.
Ironhide Direhorn is off crying somewhere
I'm impressed that grind didn't drive you insane before you got to so many mercs. I've been grinding away for a while and am still missing a bunch of mercs, not to mention the sheer amount of grinding left before most of those mercs would be worth a damn.
Oddly enough, I haven't seen anywhere that can say for sure what the coin ranges are, but this reddit post includes a table for which mercs are part of the rewards for any given bounty.
Anecdotally, I think I've mostly seen 10- and 15-coin rewards for lower level (heroic) content, and 15- and 20-coin rewards for higher level (standard) content. (Note: I haven't done high level heroic content yet - that might yield better rewards.) I guess at this point the Heroic Air Elemental may no longer be the best task farm thanks to their hot "fix" to Mysterious Stranger, but it's honestly crazy how many extra coins I have for Cariel, Cornelius, and Rokara after the task farming I was doing.
Edit: Just did a quick Heroic Raven the Hunter mission to see what I'd get: 55 (as 15, 25, 15) for Kurtrus, 15 for Cariel, and 25 for Anduin. The chest says you get to earn coins for the mercs in your party along with one of the bounty mercs randomly, but this happened despite the fact that the mercs in that bounty are Grom, Tyrande, and Kurtrus, and despite my not having Anduin at all (let alone in my party). (My party did include Cariel.) So, it seems like maybe heroic bounties can also grant unlisted mercs.
Farming Heroic Air Elemental is already an incredibly tedious process. Unless "adjusting the appearance rate of Mysterious Stangers" means that they will be dramatically more likely than other options when you're the appropriate level, this will only serve to make the entire farming process all the more miserable.
Frankly, I'd prefer a guarantee they be for legendaries you don't already have - it's not that hard to grind for tasks and get coins for legendaries you do have, but if you're mostly F2P it can be a real nuisance to unlock new mercs (particularly since duplicate protection doesn't work as many expected).
Yeah, to be clear on this, I do have all the rares, but I don't have all the epics or legendaries. Like many, I foolishly imagined that duplicate protection didn't treat portraits as unique mercs and expected a new epic merc when I opened that pack
For what it's worth, this is not just an issue with the pre-order. I just opened this pack and was disappointed to find that all of the mercs were duplicates.
The early parts of the game are absolutely too simplistic, and the various slowdowns you face when you play (e.g. tedious animations, a need to navigate different menus for each function of the game, etc.) make those early parts feel even worse. That said, the high level PVE content feels a lot more strategic.
The PVP also feels like it has a lot of potential - basically taking the challenge of the high level content and layering an element of the unknown by hiding your opponent's move choices. I think one of the significant challenges this faces is inaccessibility. Each merc's abilities have two key factors - speed and cooldown. If you know all of the details of each merc then you can infer those as your opponent uses abilities (e.g. when my opponent plays LIch King, I know the base abilities, but depending on how much my opponent's Lich King is upgraded, Frostbite could be speed 8, 7, 6, or 5, and Frostshield could have a cooldown of 2 or 1 and a speed of 4, 3, or 2).
Knowing that is critical to anticipating how your opponent will play, but the game makes no effort to tell you that information (all you get is what gear the opponent has equipped). That's a big part of the PVP skill curve, and I don't think it should be changed in-client, but I think it leaves it a bit inaccessible without some deck tracker type support, and if inaccessibility leads to less traction from players, the mode will end up a failure.
I think there's a bit of ugly that's missing here - how cumbersome interactions in the mode can be:
The result is that there's an inordinate amount of time spent in Mercenaries that isn't spent playing the game because you're spending time in menus, or trying to remember what you just did so that you don't make a bad choice for your run.
The core of the game is really fun, but there are a lot of walls you have to work around to get to it.
I really don't get why the Cranberry Juice guy made an appearance, particularly since his fifteen minutes of fame were a year ago.
Azalina Soulthief saw play in some hyper aggro decks that wanted an option for late game reload, so I imagine the new Mindrender Illucia will still be viable for that narrow purpose in highly aggressive Shadow Priest decks. Given the low card draw Priest has that might be good, but it's still a shame that the card no longer offers any disruption potential for slower control decks. Combo disruption seems like a great expression of the Control Shadow Priest archetype, so I hope we'll see more (and more focused) attempts at that in the future.
In the last 24 hours, two articles were posted about upcoming balance updates:
There were also about a half dozen substantive articles about the new Mercenaries mode. The news comes in at whatever pace it comes in, and I hardly think you should fault a news site for posting new content once it's known to them. It's true that right now the front page is mostly cosmetics, but that's just the order those updates became available as news.