Scholomance Academy was released over a month ago. Over that time, we’ve already seen a plethora of new decks, strategies and multiple uses for new cards. One of the main features of the latest expansion is a new keyword – Spellburst. It gives you a one-time, powerful effect after you cast a spell when the Spellburst card is on the board. Cards that benefit from you casting spells have existed as long as the game itself – Wild Pyromancer or Gadgetzan Auctioneer are just two examples out of many we’ve got over the years. Spellburst is – of course – different in many ways, but here’s the question – could the new keyword become evergreen and possibly as common as other spell synergies?
What is an Evergreen Keyword?
Let’s start with one thing that might not be that obvious to everyone – what exactly is an evergreen keyword (or mechanic in general)? To put it simply, it’s a keyword that goes beyond the expansion it was released for and gets commonly reused in the future. Many keywords are tied to a single expansion, because they fit there thematically, have limited design space or would just not be good to reuse for a number of different reasons (such as complexity). Good examples would be Grand Tournament’s Inspire, Rastakhan’s Overkill or Boomsday’s Magnetic. The fact that they aren’t evergreen doesn’t necessarily mean that they will never get printed again – we MIGHT get another expansion built around them in the future, or they might appear without being keyworded. For example, even though Echo is not an evergreen mechanic, Witch's Brew is basically an Echo card. But them not being evergreen means that we don’t commonly see them anymore.
On the other hand, a keyword which adds something interesting to the game, is well liked by the players, is easy to design cards around and just “feels” good to be on cards quite commonly can be turned into an evergreen keyword – one that keeps reappearing on new cards nearly every expansion. Outside of the original keywords introduced in Basic/Classic (Divine Shield, Taunt, Stealth etc.) not many keywords became evergreen. Discover, Lifesteal and Rush are basically the only ones. You could probably count Dormant too (it’s still quite rare, though) + Quests / Sidequests, but they feel more like an entirely new card type. Naming aside – for Spellburs to be considered evergreen, we would need to get at least a few new Spellburst cards each year (and possibly even each expansion).
Is Spellburst Good?
We had some time to play around with the new keyword and so far my opinion is positive – Spellburst feels really good. Both in terms of balance and the play style / strategy possibilities it opens.
Let’s begin with the power level. Spellburst abilities aren’t very hard to activate, but they aren’t over the top in terms of strength. Their effects are usually stronger than Battlecries, and around the same power as Deathrattle. Is that too strong? I honestly wouldn’t say so. Yes, Spellburst effects are immediate, which makes them better than Deathrattles, but you need another card to trigger them. Unless you do it with a 0 cost card, you also need to wait – even having a 2 mana spell to trigger the effect adds 2 mana to the original cost. Deathrattles, on the other hand, can usually just get dropped on curve without losing any value (opponent killing them is not a problem, because that’s often what you want to do anyway).
Out of the twenty Spellburst cards introduced in Scholomance Academy, twelve see play. A couple more have a lot of potential, but the current meta doesn’t work well for them. I would say that there is only a single truly bad Spellburst card – Enchanted Cauldron. But every expansion has its share of meme cards, and that’s simply one of those. All in all, that’s a great score, because at the same time, none of the cards is blatantly broken and dominated the game. Yes, Cabal Acolyte is getting nerfed, but it’s more because it FEELS bad to play against, not because it’s broken (don’t get me wrong, it’s a strong card, but Priest is nowhere near the top of the meta even with all the stealing effects).
Now, looking at how interesting to play / strategic they are – I would say that they aren’t lacking in those departments either. The effects are varied and while some are very simple (like Intrepid Initiate, which is a good card, but not particularly complex), others are incredibly fun to play with lots of decision making involved – Speaker Gidra, Headmaster Kel'Thuzad and Pen Flinger come to mind – especially Pen Flinger. Try running it in a Libram Paladin or Quest Shaman deck – it’s an awesome experience!
As for how strategic the effect is – even though it’s pretty simple, it’s much more strategic than let’s say a Battlecry. You need to think about saving an activator. You need to think about how the Spellburst effect actually combos with an activator. E.g. Wretched Tutor loves Apotheosis, because Lifesteal will trigger on the AoE damage – also the aforementioned Kel’thuzad & Gidra need a careful choosing of an activator. Another consideration would be dropping the minion on curve without activating its effect and risking it getting killed vs letting it sit in your hand until you can do both on the sam turn. Lots of the time it’s not that simple – if you play it, you risk losing value, but if you don’t, you often lose tempo. You sometimes also need to think about timing of the trigger – Reaper's Scythe is the clearest example here. You can play it and then hold onto the Spellburst for a couple of turns until an opportunity arises. But it means that you can’t play any spells during that time – can you afford a few weaker turns for a potential pay-off in the future (and – of course – to force your opponent into playing around it)? As you can see, even though the mechanic is very simple, there’s still a lot of strategy that needs to go into it – which makes it more interesting than something like Battlecry (where strategy is mostly based on the effect, not on the way you trigger it).
Could It Become Evergreen?
Whether Spellburst becomes evergreen entirely depends on the Hearthstone developers, but I do think that it has potential to become one. It’s simple, it doesn’t use any mechanics that are limited to this expansion and doesn’t even synergize with this expansion in particular. Yes, we have a bunch of cheap spells to trigger it released in Scholomance Academy, including Studies cards. But other sets also have their share of cheap spells and good activators. The best thing is that Spellburst cards wouldn’t feel out of place in any expansion. Spells are one of the basic mechanics of Hearthstone, which means that having a keyword activated by them feels natural.
What I like about it is that it adds a lot of design space as to what kind of effects can get printed on minions. Most of the abilities need some way of triggering them – be it Battlecry, Deathrattle, “End of turn” or something similar (“aura” effects are rather uncommon). And triggering one-time effects with spells adds a lot of interesting design options. Again, I will bring up Gidra & Kel’thuzad, but I just really like the design on those. Same effect would be very hard to achieve with anything else than Spellburst. Or even a simpler design like Diligent Notetaker – it just wouldn’t work well with other ways of triggering it. You could make them Battlecry or let’s say “end of turn”, but they just wouldn’t be “elegant” enough if you know what I mean.
Spellburst is also a great way of adding some spell synergies without giving players a potential to abuse them. Since the ceiling of the effect is known right away and quite easy to achieve, devs can design the card’s power level around it. When it comes to minions that can trigger multiple times (e.g. Gadgetzan Auctioneer), balance can be hard – those cards are often too strong or too weak. They kind of need to be balanced around a “good case” scenario of a few triggers, making them pretty useless in decks that can’t do that. Spellburst cards, on the other hand, can go into all kinds of decks with just a couple of ways to trigger them (like Pen Flinger in Zoo Warlock or Intrepid Initiate in Aggro Demon Hunter), but they gain some edge in builds that run multiple cheap spells. Proper deck building makes the effect slightly better, but you don’t NEED to dedicate a massive part of your deck to those cards.
And, while it’s not the deciding factor, I feel like Spellburst is well-received by the playerbase. I haven’t heard people complaining about it – on the contrary, most seem to like it. That’s one of the reasons why Discover became such common in the first place – people liked it. Sure, Team 5 ended up overusing the mechanic eventually, but that’s a whole other story. After just a month, it already became natural.
Conclusion
All in all, I think that Spellburst has a chance to become evergreen – or at least Hearthstone devs might try to use it again in future expansions to test out the waters before making a final decision. Unlike keywords such as Echo or Magnetic, which are either hard to balance or heavily tied to a certain expansion, it just ticks all of the necessary boxes. Of course – that doesn’t automatically make it a guaranteed evergreen ability, but I simply wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case. And I hope it will be the case.
What do you think about it? Would you like to see Spellburst as an evergreen keyword? And what other mechanics from the past would you like to see getting printed again (and more commonly in general) – Overkill, Twinspell, Reborn?
