Ashes of Outland Launch Survival Guide – Release Time, Mechanics Overview, General Advice, Arena Rotation, Deck Theorycrafts

Ashes of Outland, the first expansion of Year of the Phoenix, launches today! Below, you will find everything you need to know during the launch.

Important Information

• Launch Date: 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET / 19:00 CET / 3 AM KST on April 7 (April 8 in Asia)
• 135 new cards!
• A new class – Demon Hunter – will now be available! You first need to unlock it by completing a short Prologue (if you haven’t done it already).
• Expansion will contain single player content. We don’t know when it launches (probably a ~month from now). It will be free, story-driven adventure with no new cards added.
• If you missed it, you can still pre-order all the way until expansion launches.
• We’ll cover all of the new decks from pros & streamers here!

Mechanics Overview

While Ashes of Outland doesn’t directly introduce any new mechanics, it goes deeper into some of the concepts that were already present in the game. Additionally, the new Demon Hunter class will have its own, new keyword.

Prime Minions

Each one of the 9 original classes is getting a Prime Legendary. While it’s not a keyword, they share the same mechanic (as well as a part of their name). Basically, the first version is a cheap-ish minion that’s average in terms of power. However, after they die, they shuffle a much more powerful version of themselves into your deck. They are now pretty high cost (6+, but only Rogue’s costs 6, the rest of them are 7 or higher), but also very powerful minions. Not “I immediately win the game” powerful, but ones that can really turn the tide of battle.

The mechanic was already present on some cards before – e.g. Forgotten Torch or White Eyes. Prime cards work exactly the same, although the second part is usually much more exciting.

Imprisoned Demons

Dormant mechanic is making a big comeback this expansion, but with a twist. Instead of having to complete a certain task in order to wake the minions up (e.g. The Darkness, Lucentbark), they are awakened after two turns. Those minions cannot attack on the turn they wake up, unless they have Rush. On the one hand, you don’t need to put any extra effort, and they usually come with higher stats (although they’re not your classic “pile of stats” minions) or a powerful effect. On the other hand, it’s a big tempo sacrifice, since initially you spend your mana to do nothing and your opponent can take advantage of that.

All of them have a Demon tag – which means that they can theoretically fit into some Demon deck (both Warlock and the new Demon Hunter class might attempt to build one), but also can be countered by Sacrificial Pact (which is now available to any class quite easily through Zephrys the Great), so keep that in mind.

Outcast

Outcast is the new, Demon Hunter exclusive keyword, and at least in theory it looks very powerful. Cards with Outcast have an additional effect if you play them as the left-most or the right-most card in your hand. If they are in the middle (e.g. you have 5 cards and it’s the third), Outcast simply won’t trigger. Those effects usually involve drawing an extra card or reducing mana cost, which makes Demon Hunter incredibly efficient at cycling through the deck and making tempo plays while not running out of cards.

What’s important to note is that the effect works better in faster decks than in slower decks, because when you’re nearly out of cards, it’s much easier to activate it. In fact, when you’re down to 1 or 2 cards, Outcast is always active.

General Advice

Expansion’s release might be overwhelming for new players, but also tempting for others. Here are some advice we can give you based on surviving every expansion launch ever since the game’s creation:

• If you’re playing on a budget and don’t have a lot of Dust to spare, DO NOT craft any cards Day 1. Wait until the meta to stabilize at least a bit. If you want to be safe, a week should suffice, but I would say that 3 days is really a minimum. And if you’re wondering which cards to craft, we’ll update our Legendary & Epic crafting guides as soon as the meta stabilizes.
• On the other hand, if you’re filthy rich P2W player… I’m kidding. If you’re 100% sure that you want a certain card in Golden version, craft it FIRST before opening packs. This way you won’t open a useless regular version first (and the chances that you will snatch it in golden are incredibly slim).
• Decks that dominate the meta on Day 1 rarely turn out to be the best decks in the expansion. We’ve seen this time and time again. Don’t call for the nerfs, don’t make big rants and so on until the meta stabilizes. Some decks just do better when no one knows how to play against them, others are better at punishing unoptimized, greedy builds and so on. Sometimes decks that dominate Day 1 meta completely disappear after a week.
• Have one Quest slot open & start an Arena run before expansion launches. Open Quest slot is important, because we’ll be getting a Legendary Quest chain, and in case you don’t have any free slots, it will replace one of your regular Quests. As for the Arena run – we’ll be getting an Arena rotation, so current Arena decks will be get forcefully retired, meaning that you will get a free ticket back on top of Arena rewards (if you have some time, you might also want to play until 2 defeats – e.g. if you get up to 2-2, you will get rewards for 2 wins instead of 0). I’m afraid that Arena runs were disabled early. You could still start a new run when I first created this post. Sorry if you didn’t manage to do it in time 🙁
• You can now disenchant bad cards / cards you don’t want without worrying about opening them again. With the recent changes to pack openings, once you disenchant a card, you can’t open it again until you get the entire set of a given rarity. E.g. if you disenchant a Legendary, you need to open every other Legendary before you acquire the ones you got rid of again.
• Have fun! That’s the most important part of expansion launches – meta is fresh, people play a lot of unoptimized decks, so you can enjoy basically whatever you want. Try building your own decks from the cards you cracked, test new strategies, or just play pros / streamers decks – do whatever works best for you!

Arena Rotation

New expansion release also comes with a new Arena rotation. While the Arena has switched to rotating format that includes Wild expansions too, this time around it will be Standard-only. Here’s a full list of sets that will be available in Arena after Ashes of Outland launches:

• Basic
• Classic
• Rise of Shadows
• Saviors of Uldum
• Descent of Dragons
• Galakrond’s Awakening
• Demon Hunter Initiate
• Ashes of Outland

We’ll have a tips & tricks guide for the new rotation ready some time after the launch!

Ashes of Outland Theorycrafts

If you’re looking for some decks to try out on Day 1, we’ve got your back! Here’s a full list of theorycrafts we’ve prepared.

We’ll also be adding new decks from pros & streamers to this post after the expansion is out, so stay tuned!