Dastardly plans and a pittance of armor: an analysis of the Scheme cards

One of the more controversial new mechanics of the Rise of Shadows expansion revolves around the motley crew of villains assembled by Rafaam – each of them received a specific Scheme card with an effect that starts out weak but gains power over time. One of them has already received Purify-levels of hate but it remains to be seen whether it’s justified. What goes without saying is that the idea of holding cards is fairly counter-intuitive in CCGs and most Schemes have effects which work worse in the matchups where you can reasonably expect to babysit a dead card in your hand without getting overrun.

Long-term Planning

Just like most Hearthstone keywords, Scheme also isn’t entirely new: we’ve seen similar effects with the handbuff mechanic from MSoG and it also harkens back to the Corridor Creeper-esque cost reduction cards and the bonuses conferred upon holding a Dragon in your hand as well. They all revolved around your hand composition, rewarding you for having a card available to you and not playing it just yet. Of course, this was motivated by the expensive nature of the Dragon cards in the Blackrock Mountain era, but the gameplay principle is similar: if you’re willing to construct a deck with the likelihood of having dead cards in your hand early on, certain tools are available to you in order to mitigate this downside.

Enter Schemes, a keyword where no such deckbuilding decisions are needed – apart from identifying which archetypes benefit from their specific effect, which is a fairly easy assignment –: the challenge is more of a gameplay element, a constant risk-reward assessment about how long you can play around with a dead card in your hand for a potential larger payoff later down the line.

This is fairly counter-intuitive for card games in general, but especially for Hearthstone, where tempo is key due to the attacker’s ability to choose targets. The nature of Scheme cards also means that the matchups where their effect would immediately be required still makes them an awful topdeck, and (barring a certain key exception) their impact is limited in the grindy matchups where you can afford to wait for a few upgrade ticks as their ceiling simply isn’t high enough. All in all, Scheme as mechanic seems like a fairly undertuned proposition, though that’s not saying they inherently can’t see play: the strength of the initial effect and the pricing has just as much to do with their potential as the wait time requirement does by itself. That said, it’s a bit odd that a keyword like this is so strongly tied to a specific set of characters in terms of naming and flavor: this makes me think that it likely won’t be experimented with later down the line, mostly kept as a one-expansion wonder like Spellstones were for KnC or the Shrines in Rastakhan’s Rumble.

One by One

That being said, let’s look at the individual Scheme cards: their roles and power levels greatly vary across the different classes and they’re essentially guaranteed to fulfill very different roles in the metagame.

Lazul's Scheme – an interesting utility card

This card immediately reminded me of Shrinkmeister from the good old days of GvG and the way it comboed with Cabal Shadow Priest. A “boring”, “normal” (are these quotation marks even needed, I wonder?) Control Priest archetype could easily make use of that kind of a combo, and a well-upgraded version could let you steal (or potentially kill with Shadow Word: Pain, perhaps steal with Shadow Madness for a Divine Spirit/Inner Fire lethal?) any massive minion. The fact that it costs zero mana makes it an interesting addition to the plethora of Lyra the Sunshard/Shadowreaper Anduin-related shenanigans in Wild – otherwise, the effect simply doesn’t seem worth a card slot in your deck.

Togwaggle's Scheme – a matchup-crushing tool and a potential problem child

The reason why this particular card is so scary that its effect basically mitigates the downside of the Scheme keyword: it’s fine to take your sweet time with an anti-fatigue uber-value tool, and it also allows for degenerate options with the excellent Myra's Unstable Element.

Hagatha's Scheme– good for sure, but good enough?

The rotation of Volcano obviously necessitated a new Shaman board clear, but unlike Un’goro’s signature spell or Elemental Destruction from way back when, the class will not have an instantaneous large AoE removal option in the Rise of Shadows metagame. As the most expensice Scheme card mana-wise, it’s soul-crushingly bad as a topdeck option, and this could very well kill its playability.

Rafaam's Scheme – redundancy option for an archetype that doesn’t need it

Remember Imp-losion? Feeding Time? Forbidden Ritual? Hell, how about Fiendish Circle, still in Standard for a year? Even if Zoo decks take a token-heavy approach, a card like this won’t be particularly useful: the strength of that archetype always came from its inherent ability to refill through Life Tap, a low mana curve essentially allowing you to draw and play two cards per turn in the late game on a consistent basis, Sea Giant shenanigans notwithstanding. Even if you get to upgrade this card to a ludicrous degree, its effect is basically undesirable as the imps are too brittle by the time you can summon a reasonable amount of them.

Dr. Boom's Scheme – we needed a new Purify to hate on anyway

A good way to establish how awful this card is would be to compare how long it takes to reach vanilla status with the other Scheme cards. While you could argue about the specifics (and how much you value the 3/2 body on a Lab Recruiter effect, for instance), it basically comes out at three or four turns at most. Well, gaining 5 armor for 4 mana is still singularly awful when you compare it with Shield Block or even cards like Feral Rage. This card is horrible and was likely meant to be so.

That being said, I don’t buy the conspiracy theory about a last-minute change in its effect, at least the explanation used by the Reddit crowd. Supposedly, Dr. Boom’s Scheme would have synergized well with the bomb-based Warrior archetype – at least that’s what the card art seems to suggest – but it was too good, hence the crippling downgrade. However, changing card art is extremely easy and we usually don’t even hear about it: you may recall the little detail from the second Rise of Shadows card reveal stream that Seaforium Bomber’s original art was the image used for Clockwork Goblin, but the card was initially meant to be a Mech and happened to be too strong, hence the swap. What’s more likely is that Team 5 gauged Warrior’s control arsenal to be strong enough anyway and simply printed a bad card, much like how Druid’s lame class cards in the early expansions of Hearthtsone were due to the strength of Malfurion’s core set.