The biggest question with Murozond the Infinite is, when the card reads "play" does it mean you get the battlecries from minions? Unfortunately, the closest cards to compare to this (probably Tess Greymane and Lynessa Sunsorrow) have different templating, so comparisons won't be perfect. Tess reads "replay" and her effect doesn't trigger battlecries, so that would seem to imply this could be different, but Blizzard regularly screws up the templating on cards like this, so I'm not optimistic. Note that there's also ambiguity around the order in which those cards will be played, but random is the safest bet.
Either way, Murozond the Infinite seems like a very cool card, but maybe not a very good card. The best cases are ones where your opponent played some kind of AOE and subsequent minions, or played some rush minions to try to retake the board. It's easy to see how this could be a very big tempo swing if played after the right turn, or a way to "steal" a hero card and even the odds in a control match-up. But if you don't get battlecries, and you're functionally just copying non-rush minions, this might just languish in your hand, never finding a turn when you can afford to spend 8 mana not reacting to what your opponent did last turn.
Faceless Corruptor is ridiculous for any deck that wants to value trade for board control. If you have a minion in play, this is basically the Quest Druid's Oasis Surger, which is a bonkers tempo play, and you also potentially get an attack beforehand.
Treenforcements has a great name, and while it's an unassuming effect, a 1 mana 2/2 is a strong Aggro/Token card, and the health buff can make it easier to trade on board early and snowball. All in all, a very solid Token Druid card.
The fact that this curves into The Forest's Aid is the thing that takes it from just another Treat meme card to playable, but I doubt it goes into every Druid swarm deck. A lot of those decks in the past only ran one copy of The Forest's Aid, and I think you'd want two before you were excited about planning to win on turn 9 or 10 with a swarm deck.
Embiggen seems super powerful. Prince Keleseth was massively OP, and additional price of 1 extra mana on all of your minions is easy enough to mitigate in Druid thanks to numerous ramp cards (like the new Breath of Dreams). This could easily mean there's an Aggro Druid resurgence coming.
Wyrmrest Purifier might be the worst epic ever printed. If you're going to replace all the neutrals in your deck with random class cards, why not just do that in the deck builder before the game ever starts? At least then you're not stuck playing a vanilla minion.
I like Kripp fine, but he's got a very flat tone when he streams - seems like an odd choice for a hype man, but at least he's good at the game and will be able to showcase the decks well in play.
Platebreaker is certainly a surprise, and yes it looks like a hard counter to control Warrior and Druid archetypes, but it's not necessarily overpowered.
First, you would never run more than one of these because they're only useful against two classes*. Second, because this is worse than vanilla against most classes, you'd need to see a lot of control-style Warrior and Druid decks on the ladder before teching it in (according to Vicious Syndicate's last standard report, together they're probably around 13% of the ladder, and Warrior is nowhere near the top tier of decks despite its armor). Finally, you'd need to see armor as the major reason you're losing against Warrior and Druids on the ladder. As noted, Control Warrior isn't strong right now, and Quest Druid's access to armor doesn't really stave off hyper aggressive decks today.
Honestly, I think this is a card that, if it were in standard today, would see no play at all. The only way that changes is if Control Druid, Control Warrior, and Thekal Paladin all become major ladder contenders, which seems unlikely. In either case, this card seems like it was printed to bully some of the degenerate strategies in wild, and will be fine in standard.
* Technically Paladin and Mage can both generate armor (with High Priest Thekal and Ice Barrier respectively), but the uses are narrow. This definitely feels bad for High Priest Thekal, but Paladin has enough healing that he may still be worth playing for the games when Platebreaker isn't teched in.
It's not immediately obvious whether or not this can pull quests. Some cards like this have omitted quests in the past, and hopefully this will also, as getting a quest your deck isn't built for is going to feel really bad.
"Drawing" two cards is worth 3, and a 3/5 is certainly worth more than 2, so the back-of-the-envelope math suggests this card is good. The tough thing is that it's so low tempo for the turn you play it, and you could always just include a particular 1-cost spell you want in your deck instead, so the bar for entry into any deck is a little high. To see play, Cobalt Spellkin needs a dragon deck (because this probably sits in your hand activating your better dragons) in a class that either a) gets value out of having cheap spells regardless of their effects, or b) has mostly great 1-drop spells.
Obvious contenders here are Rogue (where the 1-drop is at least a combo activator, and might also be a useful card), Warrior (where the pool of 1-drops is small, and chocked full of good stuff), and Mage (basically the same argument as Warrior, with the added bonus of spell-casting synergies). I don't think any of the other classes get enough value out of this to be excited about it.
Plated Beetle, but for one mana more you get the armor immediately and you get a lackey. Seems like a great card for a warrior that wants to survive early aggro
In standard, Mindflayer Kaahrj is an okay card that people will be excited to see off of Galakrond's hero power. Where it could really shine, though, would be Battlegrounds. Make it a tier 5 or 6 unit that lets you choose a target in Bob's Tavern to summon as a deathrattle. Gold version could summon two new copies, so that if/when you get a gold version you'd have a 6/6 minion with as many as four minions attached to it on deathrattle.
Mindflayer Kaahrj seems fine. If we assume you already have to pay whatever the cost is to kill your opponent's best minion, for 3 mana more you get a nearly vanilla minion and a free copy of that best minion. Obviously you'll lose out on battlecries, and you'll have to wait a bit for that copy, but there's enough value there to make Mindflayer Kaahrj a strong, albeit very slow, card. It's slow enough that I doubt most people will run it in their decks, but I can imagine being very excited to roll this minion from your hero power in a Galakrond Priest deck.
This is not necessarily a bad tool for Dragon Priest, but it's worse than Duskbreaker most of the time. With Duskbreaker, the 3 damage came down earlier and was immediate. Best case scenario here is that on turn 6 you hit your opponent with a 3 damage AOE to clear, and then have 6 mana to do what you want with. That's pretty good on its face, but it's not going to stop an aggro deck that has already run over you because your AOE has to wait a turn. Moreover, if you need an AOE on 5, you're typically better off using Mass Hysteria to clear, and if you need single target removal you could use the new Time Rip. The only minor advantage here is that you can play Chronobreaker without a dragon in hand and hope to get one before the effect needs to trigger.
Maybe I'm being unfair here - with tools like Embalming Ritual and Wretched Reclaimer to combo with this, the deathrattle might be better than a battlecry, but I expect that if its good enough to see play in a Dragon Priest deck, that deck will need to be a tempo oriented deck where you can fight for the board in the early turns and set up Chronobreaker as a way to suppress any comebacks from your opponent.
Stormhammer seems to have found itself in the wrong class thematically, but otherwise this is great. You don't need a dragon on board any earlier than turn 4 to ensure this sticks around, and don't need more than one or two free swings to make this well worth the cost as a means of early game board control. All in all, a solid replacement for Eaglehorn Bow in any Dragon Hunter deck, and a fairly compelling reason to run Kobold Stickyfinger in a dragon-heavy metagame.
I really don't see what deck wants Tentacled Menace. The vanilla statline helps it a bit, but the effect is really weird. I guess in a "Big" deck like Big Paladin you could use this to try and swap costs, but it's typically the case that "Big" archetypes still have to include lots of cheap removal tools cards, and Tentacled Menace really wants your mana curve to be bad/unplayable to make this work consistently.
Maybe Big Warrior can get value out of this, because where other classes have cheap ways to get big stuff out (Paladin has Duel!, Druid has ramp, etc.) Warrior's "Big" payoffs are expensive (e.g. Dimensional Ripper, The Boom Reaver, and The Boomship).
The comparison to Doomsayer is certainly apt - Depth Charge is a nice AOE that goes off on the start of your turn, and kills your opponents minions assuming this comes down early in the game. Clearly this is a great neutral anti-aggro tool.
The tough thing about this is that it's way worse than Doomsayer in the mid to late game, when your opponent may have big enough minions to survive this. I think whether or not it sees play over (or in addition to) Doomsayer is going to be determined entirely by how aggressive the metagame is.
Frizz Kindleroost is absurd - vanilla statline and a (potentially) massive cost reduction across the cards in your deck. It's kind of silly that Blizzard keeps printing these high-roll type cards, despite constantly finding that they're frustrating to players...Maybe this time it's better because a) mana cheating is something every deck can get value out of, and b) every class has a Dragon archetype this expansion.
The classes which most easily abuse this discount: Warrior (with War Master Voone after you draw the discounted cards), Rogue (with its various bounce and shuffle tools to make tons of cheap dragons), and Shaman (with Corrupt the Waters and Shudderwock)
The biggest question with Murozond the Infinite is, when the card reads "play" does it mean you get the battlecries from minions? Unfortunately, the closest cards to compare to this (probably Tess Greymane and Lynessa Sunsorrow) have different templating, so comparisons won't be perfect. Tess reads "replay" and her effect doesn't trigger battlecries, so that would seem to imply this could be different, but Blizzard regularly screws up the templating on cards like this, so I'm not optimistic. Note that there's also ambiguity around the order in which those cards will be played, but random is the safest bet.
Either way, Murozond the Infinite seems like a very cool card, but maybe not a very good card. The best cases are ones where your opponent played some kind of AOE and subsequent minions, or played some rush minions to try to retake the board. It's easy to see how this could be a very big tempo swing if played after the right turn, or a way to "steal" a hero card and even the odds in a control match-up. But if you don't get battlecries, and you're functionally just copying non-rush minions, this might just languish in your hand, never finding a turn when you can afford to spend 8 mana not reacting to what your opponent did last turn.
Faceless Corruptor is ridiculous for any deck that wants to value trade for board control. If you have a minion in play, this is basically the Quest Druid's Oasis Surger, which is a bonkers tempo play, and you also potentially get an attack beforehand.
Super niche tech card...hard to say what hero power is even all that punished by costing 3 once, but there's no downside since it's got vanilla stats.
Treenforcements has a great name, and while it's an unassuming effect, a 1 mana 2/2 is a strong Aggro/Token card, and the health buff can make it easier to trade on board early and snowball. All in all, a very solid Token Druid card.
The fact that this curves into The Forest's Aid is the thing that takes it from just another Treat meme card to playable, but I doubt it goes into every Druid swarm deck. A lot of those decks in the past only ran one copy of The Forest's Aid, and I think you'd want two before you were excited about planning to win on turn 9 or 10 with a swarm deck.
Embiggen seems super powerful. Prince Keleseth was massively OP, and additional price of 1 extra mana on all of your minions is easy enough to mitigate in Druid thanks to numerous ramp cards (like the new Breath of Dreams). This could easily mean there's an Aggro Druid resurgence coming.
Wyrmrest Purifier might be the worst epic ever printed. If you're going to replace all the neutrals in your deck with random class cards, why not just do that in the deck builder before the game ever starts? At least then you're not stuck playing a vanilla minion.
I like Kripp fine, but he's got a very flat tone when he streams - seems like an odd choice for a hype man, but at least he's good at the game and will be able to showcase the decks well in play.
Platebreaker is certainly a surprise, and yes it looks like a hard counter to control Warrior and Druid archetypes, but it's not necessarily overpowered.
First, you would never run more than one of these because they're only useful against two classes*. Second, because this is worse than vanilla against most classes, you'd need to see a lot of control-style Warrior and Druid decks on the ladder before teching it in (according to Vicious Syndicate's last standard report, together they're probably around 13% of the ladder, and Warrior is nowhere near the top tier of decks despite its armor). Finally, you'd need to see armor as the major reason you're losing against Warrior and Druids on the ladder. As noted, Control Warrior isn't strong right now, and Quest Druid's access to armor doesn't really stave off hyper aggressive decks today.
Honestly, I think this is a card that, if it were in standard today, would see no play at all. The only way that changes is if Control Druid, Control Warrior, and Thekal Paladin all become major ladder contenders, which seems unlikely. In either case, this card seems like it was printed to bully some of the degenerate strategies in wild, and will be fine in standard.
* Technically Paladin and Mage can both generate armor (with High Priest Thekal and Ice Barrier respectively), but the uses are narrow. This definitely feels bad for High Priest Thekal, but Paladin has enough healing that he may still be worth playing for the games when Platebreaker isn't teched in.
It's not immediately obvious whether or not this can pull quests. Some cards like this have omitted quests in the past, and hopefully this will also, as getting a quest your deck isn't built for is going to feel really bad.
"Drawing" two cards is worth 3, and a 3/5 is certainly worth more than 2, so the back-of-the-envelope math suggests this card is good. The tough thing is that it's so low tempo for the turn you play it, and you could always just include a particular 1-cost spell you want in your deck instead, so the bar for entry into any deck is a little high. To see play, Cobalt Spellkin needs a dragon deck (because this probably sits in your hand activating your better dragons) in a class that either a) gets value out of having cheap spells regardless of their effects, or b) has mostly great 1-drop spells.
Obvious contenders here are Rogue (where the 1-drop is at least a combo activator, and might also be a useful card), Warrior (where the pool of 1-drops is small, and chocked full of good stuff), and Mage (basically the same argument as Warrior, with the added bonus of spell-casting synergies). I don't think any of the other classes get enough value out of this to be excited about it.
Plated Beetle, but for one mana more you get the armor immediately and you get a lackey. Seems like a great card for a warrior that wants to survive early aggro
3 mana 2/3 generate a dragon is already good, add lifesteal and paladin dragon handbuffs and you’ve got a stellar tool for Dragon Paladin.
In standard, Mindflayer Kaahrj is an okay card that people will be excited to see off of Galakrond's hero power. Where it could really shine, though, would be Battlegrounds. Make it a tier 5 or 6 unit that lets you choose a target in Bob's Tavern to summon as a deathrattle. Gold version could summon two new copies, so that if/when you get a gold version you'd have a 6/6 minion with as many as four minions attached to it on deathrattle.
Mindflayer Kaahrj seems fine. If we assume you already have to pay whatever the cost is to kill your opponent's best minion, for 3 mana more you get a nearly vanilla minion and a free copy of that best minion. Obviously you'll lose out on battlecries, and you'll have to wait a bit for that copy, but there's enough value there to make Mindflayer Kaahrj a strong, albeit very slow, card. It's slow enough that I doubt most people will run it in their decks, but I can imagine being very excited to roll this minion from your hero power in a Galakrond Priest deck.
This is not necessarily a bad tool for Dragon Priest, but it's worse than Duskbreaker most of the time. With Duskbreaker, the 3 damage came down earlier and was immediate. Best case scenario here is that on turn 6 you hit your opponent with a 3 damage AOE to clear, and then have 6 mana to do what you want with. That's pretty good on its face, but it's not going to stop an aggro deck that has already run over you because your AOE has to wait a turn. Moreover, if you need an AOE on 5, you're typically better off using Mass Hysteria to clear, and if you need single target removal you could use the new Time Rip. The only minor advantage here is that you can play Chronobreaker without a dragon in hand and hope to get one before the effect needs to trigger.
Maybe I'm being unfair here - with tools like Embalming Ritual and Wretched Reclaimer to combo with this, the deathrattle might be better than a battlecry, but I expect that if its good enough to see play in a Dragon Priest deck, that deck will need to be a tempo oriented deck where you can fight for the board in the early turns and set up Chronobreaker as a way to suppress any comebacks from your opponent.
Stormhammer seems to have found itself in the wrong class thematically, but otherwise this is great. You don't need a dragon on board any earlier than turn 4 to ensure this sticks around, and don't need more than one or two free swings to make this well worth the cost as a means of early game board control. All in all, a solid replacement for Eaglehorn Bow in any Dragon Hunter deck, and a fairly compelling reason to run Kobold Stickyfinger in a dragon-heavy metagame.
I really don't see what deck wants Tentacled Menace. The vanilla statline helps it a bit, but the effect is really weird. I guess in a "Big" deck like Big Paladin you could use this to try and swap costs, but it's typically the case that "Big" archetypes still have to include lots of cheap removal tools cards, and Tentacled Menace really wants your mana curve to be bad/unplayable to make this work consistently.
Maybe Big Warrior can get value out of this, because where other classes have cheap ways to get big stuff out (Paladin has Duel!, Druid has ramp, etc.) Warrior's "Big" payoffs are expensive (e.g. Dimensional Ripper, The Boom Reaver, and The Boomship).
The comparison to Doomsayer is certainly apt - Depth Charge is a nice AOE that goes off on the start of your turn, and kills your opponents minions assuming this comes down early in the game. Clearly this is a great neutral anti-aggro tool.
The tough thing about this is that it's way worse than Doomsayer in the mid to late game, when your opponent may have big enough minions to survive this. I think whether or not it sees play over (or in addition to) Doomsayer is going to be determined entirely by how aggressive the metagame is.
Frizz Kindleroost is absurd - vanilla statline and a (potentially) massive cost reduction across the cards in your deck. It's kind of silly that Blizzard keeps printing these high-roll type cards, despite constantly finding that they're frustrating to players...Maybe this time it's better because a) mana cheating is something every deck can get value out of, and b) every class has a Dragon archetype this expansion.
The classes which most easily abuse this discount: Warrior (with War Master Voone after you draw the discounted cards), Rogue (with its various bounce and shuffle tools to make tons of cheap dragons), and Shaman (with Corrupt the Waters and Shudderwock)
Great card - easily worth more than the cost so long as you’re addingcards into your deck.