After the success of the last shaman quest, does Thrall have what it takes to secure a second powerful showing with Command the Elements? The quest steps are not that bad to complete, the questline rewards are all good, but is the fact it's attached to a clunky mechanic in Overload enough to keep this quest from showing its face in the meta? Let’s find out!
Parameters for the Statistics
Before jumping into the breakdown, I would first like to give the conditions behind a lot of the calculations you will see in this article and almost all the future ones. In every scenario, I assume the player goes first and hard mulligans everything but the questline to find the key cards to accomplish the quest, and then prioritizes completing the questline with the hypothetical opponent not applying much pressure. In addition to that, unless a percentage is stated, assume that the given scenario will happen 50% of the time. With this out of the way, let us dive into this questline!
Decklist
Quest Completion Breakdown
Like always, there are two cards that might be able to speed up the process by a fair margin that we should first calculate the odds for, these being Marshspawn and Instructor Fireheart. The former has an 83% chance of showing an overload card to pick while the latter only has a 74% chance due to Lightning Bloom costing less than 1, but makes up for this via being able to generate more spells in general via Hot Streak! To put it simply, for almost all intents and purposes, Marshspawn and Instructor Fireheart can count as overload cards in themselves, bringing the questline completion to around 7-8 turns.
Now that we have that out of the way, time for the first step of the questline. We need to find 3 overload cards, and given that we have 14 cheap overload cards, we can expect to have drawn enough cards by turn 3-4 60% of the time. However, as you might expect from running a bunch of overload cards, we might not be able to cast some of the more expensive ones like Serpentshrine Portal if we are overloaded from a turn previously. As such, we can expect to be done with the first step by turn 4-5.
Luckily, the first step also helps unlock all our overloaded mana crystals, meaning we can jump in immediately to the next step. In addition to that, having access to more mana crystals in total also means we can reliably cast all the cards we draw, with the exception of Instructor Fireheart shenanigans. We can expect to draw to have found enough overload cards for the second step of the quest by turn 7 around 60% of the time.
This brings us to the final step of the quest, which for whatever reason only takes 2 more overload cards. We can expect to be done by turn 9 around 50% of the time, with the odds being significantly higher if we have used cards like the aforementioned Marshspawn or Instructor Fireheart. Like always, playing any card that draws more speeds up this process quite a bit and given the relatively cheap cost of the cards in this deck, we will be able to more also play Brukan the turn we complete the quest.
Reward
Stormcaller Bru'kan is definitely up there for explosive finishers. Double Time has always been one of the stronger duel treasures and it does not even keep the same targeting.This is another reward that is not really able to be broken down into numbers. The biggest issue is simply that overload is going to make having consistently strong turns difficult, going from having a full set of mana to practically none over and over again, but besides that, doubling up every spell gives an absurd amount of burst, as well as board presence, depending on the spell. It also goes without saying that Instructor Fireheart also becomes crazy when active.
What are your thoughts on Shaman's Questline? The fast completion and very powerful effect both point towards it being strong, but I worry that the early game will just be too clunky, even with the first step unlocking your crystals. That and a lot of the overload cards are not the best to play early without targets. I'm still optimistic though for this quest simply because Double Time on everything is just so powerful.
Learn More About Stormwind's Other Questlines
We have a whole series of articles planned for the questlines. Here's everything published so far:
- Demon Hunter's Final Showdown Legendary Questline
- Druid's Lost in the Park Legendary Questline
- Hunter's Defend the Dwarven District Legendary Questline
- Mage's Sorcerer's Gambit Legendary Questline
- Paladin's Rise to the Occasion Legendary Questline
- Priest's Seek Guidance Legendary Questline
- Rogue's Find the Imposter Legendary Questline
- Shaman's Command the Elements Legendary Questline
- Warlock's The Demon Seed Legendary Questline
- Warrior's Raid the Docks Legendary Questline
Comments
Best expansion for shaman so far. Lots of strong and fun tools. This new quest will prevent shaman having more card generation until it rotates, and it may live for a long time in wild format… if it’s easy to complete the quest of course.
The quest rewards has anti-synergy with the quest requirements, because double casting a spell with overload doubles the overload. Doubling Charged Call is nice but I am not sure if double casting spells is enough of a reward for playing 8 cards with overload in a class with little draw.
Shaman's best card draw is Primal Dungeoneer but that decklist has 14 nature spells and 8 non-nature spells (Investment Opportunity, Overdraft, Perpetual Flame, and Feral Spirit).
The quest looks too slow against aggressive decks and I don't know how much staying power it will have against control decks. I would not be surprised if I am completely wrong on this though.
Going the elemental route to use things such as Primal Dungeoneer more effectively is undoubtedly pretty strong given that Elemental Shaman is already a very strong deck. The main reason why I didn't want to do that is simply because the overload and tempo loss from a lack of a 1 drop is too much. I can certainly be wrong about that, especially given some of the other new toys shaman has been given, but I just dont see the two mixing well.
As for running cards like Investment Opportunity and Overdraft, this is mainly because I like testing out new cards and seeing how they line up. I'd totally understand if this quest does eventually just turn into only nature spells because a 3 mana 2/3 draw 2 is just too powerful most the time.
And yeah, the double overload once the quest is completed is kind of a big deal as well.
This is good analysis. The overload spells requirement has kinda ruined the hype for this quest. Without overload though, it might be too broken. The quest still looks good though, so that balances it out. The card draw is what I worry though. No Primal Dungeoneer will actually hurt us.