What does Priest need from Saviors of Uldum?

There’s no question that Priest keeps getting the short end of the stick at the beginning of every Standard year: their inferior evergreen set forces the developers to slowly build them up as the other classes get a head start. Apart from the occasional Chef Nomi-related shenanigans, the class was dead in the water for the Rise of Shadows metagame. This begs the question: what kind of cards are required in the next set to make Priest players rejoice again? The recent nerfs, Hall of Fame decisions and the little we already know about Saviors of Uldum all seem to be pointing to one direction.

Wherefore Art Thou, Anduin?

From a design perspective, perhaps the most notable part of the recent developer AMA on Reddit was Iksar’s admission that they themselves are not exactly clear on where they would like to see as Priest’s settled identity. As a class, it oscillated between red-headed stepchild status and oppressive monster from expansion to expansion, its underpowered evergreen set necessitating constant tune-ups every Standard year. (For the record, the developers themselves don’t agree with this widely held assessment: in their eyes, Priest’s Basic and Classic cards are powerful but too divergent to form a cohesive strategy for the class.) This means that Anduin starts out every rotation at the bottom of the power charts and eventually climbs up on the back of ultra-strong class cards later in the year, almost always including a strong AoE effect due to Holy Nova’s borderline uselessness.

Perhaps the most notable (and partially pre-Standard example) of this was Mean Streets of Gadgetzan, an expansion where every single Priest card ended up seeing Constructed play later down the line. It’s worth mentioning that the class still couldn’t get traction at the time when these cards were originally released, so much so that One Night in Karazhan’s Purify threw the community into a fit for what they deemed to be a “joke” card taking up one of the three class-specific slots in an adventure for a woefully underperforming Anduin. Priest remained shackled between the tyranny of Midrange Shaman and Jade Druid for a long while before it eventually crushed the metagame with the Razakus Priest archetype once Knights of the Frozen Throne was released. Without the MSoG cards, it would have remained rooted to the bottom of the charts.

What this basically tells us is that Priest’s identity is extremely malleable because its baseline is so far behind the rest of the classes: on a flavor level, ways to manipulate your opponent’s deck with Thoughtsteal-like cards and leveraging your hero power either via helping value trades or “shadow” effects to deal damage make up for most of its original options alongside the Divine Spirit/Inner Fire combo, which went from meme status to legit finisher over the years. Technically, it’s one of the best-suited classes for an exhaustion-based control strategy, but that approach has basically been neutered by Team 5 as time went on, opting to morph slow decks into ones which generate an avalanche of resources to close out the game. (Remember Lyra the Sunshard?) This change can easily be understood by comparing the current Control Warrior decks with ones from the past metagame: as a topline observation, Execute doesn’t even make the cut in the popular builds nowadays, which was absolutely unthinkable previously.

Controlling Crowds

This also means that control decks either require essentially infinite resource generation or a dedicated finisher as a win condition in today’s metagame. This killed off the oldschool Control Priest decks with Ysera/double Mind Control toppers for good, while Mind Blast’s rotation to the Hall of Fame basically removed the only viable burn-based route for Priest from the Standard environment. The AMA responses seem to indicate that the most flavorful solution would be to find a way that allows the class to leverage a big board presence in the long run, but this doesn’t work well either with Divine Spirit or resurrection-based shenanigans. It’s no coincidence that the two often show up together in semi-viable Priest decks.

There are further concerns to take into consideration: not only is it difficult to allow Priests to set up boards without threatening instant combo kills, most of their Classic cards also make them uniquely suited to playing off the board. With multiple sets of removal options, Shadow Madness, Mind Control and other nasty tools, any sort of dedicated win condition allows them to play a solitaire-like playstyle, which has always been controversial in Hearthstone. Not only that, but they are the only class in the game that never received support for a dedicated tempo-based approach (apart form perhaps the short glory of the Spiteful Summoner/Grand Archivist duo, notably based on a set of overtuned Neutral minions). With so many avenues closed off and an inconsistent collection of evergreen tools, Priest will likely remain in archetypal limbo until the developers become willing to make major changes to the class.

Saviors on the Horizon?

Even if Priest’s long-term identity requires a drastic adjustment, we can still look at their current pool of cards and situation in the metagame to look at what kind of tools they’d require to thrive in the upcoming expansion.

Currently, there are two noteworthy Priest decks: the Chef Nomi-based hyper-cycle mega-board finisher approach and the fringe Mech-based one which tries to leverage the recently buffed Extra Arms to stick on the board in the early game and go from there. Unfortunately, slow decks are limited by Bomb Warrior’s built-in clock (and ironically enough, Priest can’t bring enough healing to bear to counteract the damage) while faster ones have to find joint answers to Tempo Rogue and Conjurer Mage at the same time. This trio makes it close to impossible to fight on the board (see the total collapse of Zoo and Midrange Hunter’s contentious matchup spread), making buff-based Tempo Priest decks quite unlikely to succeed in Saviors of Uldum.

However, we’ve already seen that Priest will be given a second strong board clear effect in a row in the form of Plague of Death, which seems to suggest that further tools are coming to help their survivability. Realistically, a few more tools like this (with a potent healing card on the side) could be enough to push Nomi Priest higher up on the tier lists. Since old-school exhaustion-based Control decks are a no-no, it’s hard to imagine the class getting enough tools to out-generate a Warrior or a Shaman in a slower metagame, so we can basically ignore this avenue for now. (Same goes for the burn-based strategies due to the loss of Mind Blast.)

This basically leaves us with Resurrect Priest for now, but since that archetype has to be very selective with its minions, it will likely occupy the same niche as Nomi Priest does, with the other classes’ options likely pushing one approach clearly ahead of the other. Note that the loss of the burn finisher also hurt this kind of a deck as well, and with both archetypes aiming to generate a finite set of powerful boards, their overlap is big enough that we’ll likely only see one of them in action on the ladder at any given time. A Potion of Madness-like powerful early-game removal tool would prove greatly beneficial for both. Don’t forget that Nomi Priest can potentially also benefit from the underrated Radiance, which means that even simple card draw tools would be incredibly powerful for the class.

One thing is for sure: if the Priest class cards are going to be as good as the theme tune for the expansion was, Anduin will definitely dominate the Saviors of Uldum metagame.