First Look At The New Tribe, Mechanics And Cards from Journey to Un’Goro

The Journey to Un’Goro expansion was just announced. You can find all the information about the expansion itself in this post by Evident. I will focus on something a bit different and write about my first thoughts about the new gameplay mechanics and card that were revealed.

So far, we’ve only seen 4 cards, but two of them utilize new mechanics that I would like to talk about. Since we don’t know that much yet, there will be a lot of theorycrafting and speculations ahead. We most likely won’t learn much more until more cards are revealed (new reveals start on March 17th), so that’s the best we can hope for until then.

New Tribe – Elemental

We know almost nothing about the new tribe yet. One new Elemental card was revealed, but we’ve also learned that multiple cards from previous sets will get this tag too. It is very similar to what happened with Mechs in Goblins vs Gnomes. I think it’s safe to assume that, just like GvG was the “Mech expansion”, Un’Goro will be the “Elemental expansion”.

With a new mechanic, we will definitely see cards that synergize with this Mechanic. While it’s impossible to tell what kind of synergy it will be, one thing is certain – if it will be strong enough, it might “activate” some cards from the previous sets and make them playable again (or for the first time).

These cards were announced to get Elemental tag: Rumbling Elemental, Fireguard Destroyer, Magma Rager (and other Ragers), Unbound Elemental, Earth Elemental, Anomalus, Ragnaros the Firelord (and other Elemental Lords – Neptulon and Al'Akir the Windlord), Baron Geddon or even Ragnaros, Lightlord.

What it means from the gameplay perspective is that we might see them again in combination with the new cards. Unbound Elemental might be a good example – it’s a solid card that was played in the past, but just wasn’t strong enough lately. If some strong Elemental synergy gets introduced, we might see it back in action.

While it’s only a speculation from my side, since we’re getting the Elemental tribe and expansion focused around them, we might see the last of the four Elemental Lords – Therazane the Stonemother. While Therazane isn’t tied to Un’Goro in any way, it might be a great, new Elemental Legendary. And well, Neptulon had nothing to do with GvG either.

New Mechanic – Adapt

First new mechanic we’re seeing is called Adapt. When you play a minion with Adapt, you get to choose one of the extra three effects and add it to the minion. There are 10 Adapt effects in the pool and so far it seems that they’re randomized. We’ve learned only about 6 of them, but it’s enough to talk about the mechanic for a bit. (Edit: We know every Adapt option already!)

The mechanic shares a lot of similarities with Discover. Most of the Discover cards are weaker than “Draw a card”, but instead they provide an often needed flexibility. When you play a card like Kabal Courier, drawing a single card from your deck would probably, on average, give you a better result than discovering something. However, the fact that you can choose from 3 options makes the card powerful – depending on the matchup and the situation you might pick a completely different card. Let’s say Greater Healing Potion is a pretty weak card in general, but if you get it vs an Aggro deck, it might save your life.

Adapt works similarly. Pretty much no matter what you choose, you will end up with a slightly weaker minion than the one you would normally put into your deck. However, when given 3 options, you can – exactly – adapt to the situation and pick accordingly. So far we’ve only seen 1 Adapt card – Verdant Longneck. And so, picking a Taunt option basically turns it into a Booty Bay Bodyguard with a Beast tag. Is it good? It’s not. But can it be useful in some situations? Yes, indeed. If you desperately need Taunt, you will pick it. But if you don’t, you still have 2 other options to choose from – you might give it a small, Haunted Creeper-like Deathrattle or maybe a Divine Shield/+3 Health if you’re looking for a resistant minion to make trades with.

Flexibility is always very strong in Hearthstone. And just like Discover, if the cards are balanced properly (if they will only be slightly weaker than their non-flexible counterparts) I can see it seeing quite a lot of play. But this kind of mechanic will most likely need to be judged for each card individually.

New Mechanic – Quest

Legendary Spells in Hearthstone. I’ve waited for so long to see it happen. And they’re not just ordinary spells, they’re really unique and very, very fun. Assuming the other Quests will also look and work similarly, here’s what they do:

They’re 1 mana cost spells that you always start with in your opening hand. That part is huge, because they would be terrible topdecks later into the game, up to the point where they might be completely useless. After you play that card, you need to do X in order to receive a powerful reward. In case of Priest’s Quest, you need to summon 7 minions with Deathrattle. After you summon your 7th Deathrattle minion, the quest is finished and you get your reward. In that case, a 5 mana 8/8 Taunt that sets your health to 40. It’s like a way more powerful, but less consistent Reno Jackson – it’s harder to pull off, but when it works you get insane value.

It sounds amazing on paper, but let’s think about this mechanic for a bit. When you first see it, you might scream “anti-Aggro” card. But no, you’re actually really wrong. The card is anti-Control, not anti-Aggro. You play a card that doesn’t do anything right away (so you’re starting with 1 less card) and it probably won’t be activated before turn ~10. That’s way, way too slow against Aggro. That’s the thing – even though Amara, Warden of Hope is insane in fast matchups, majority of the games would be over before she comes into action and you probably actually decrease your chance to win by running it – after all, without it you’d start with another card – you’d increase your chance for an early Doomsayer or Shadow Word: Pain instead.

If other Quest cards look similarly, they will be great in a slower meta, but not so good in a faster one. If you often die around turn 5-7, you won’t have enough time to finish the quest. The whole mechanic might be unplayable if Un’Goro will be another Aggro expansion.

However, I think that they’ve learned their lesson after Gadgetzan. While Aggro decks should exist, a full Aggro metagame is not healthy for the game at all and they won’t likely introduce more overpowered Aggro tools any time soon. Does it mean that the Quests will be auto-include? Well, not exactly.

The second thing is that it seems that you will have to build your deck around the given Quests. In case of Priest – you probably need to play Deathrattle Priest. Which wasn’t really a terrible deck after N'Zoth, The Corruptor got released, but it was never really strong. So unless Priest gets some more tools and incentive to play a Deathrattle theme (remember that Museum Curator and Sylvanas Windrunner are leaving the Standard) the Priest’s Quest might be unplayable for one simple reason – the deck it is supposed to be played in might not be good enough.

Edit: Mike Donais just confirmed that you can mulligan the quest card away if you don’t want it in your opening hand. It makes it significantly better against Aggro. However, it still means that you might have to build a sub-optimal deck around it AND you can topdeck it later which makes it a dead draw.

New Cards

Blizzard has revealed 4 new cards and let me go through each of them quickly, giving you my first thoughts.

Volcano

The card has some potential to replace Elemental Destruction which rotates out, although I don’t think it’s as powerful. First of all – it’s only good in Control Shaman. In any faster archetype, including Midrange Shaman, you want to have the board most of the time, making it a dead card. The card is only really playable when you have an empty board (maybe a Totem or something) and your opponent has more stuff.

Volcano is pretty expensive. It costs 7 mana in total, which brings an obvious comparison to Flamestrike. Flamestrike seems to be better against multiple small-mid threats, while Volcano might be better against 2-3 pretty big minions. The card seems to be more a Midrange counter than an Aggro counter. Not only is it too slow against Aggro, most of the time Lightning Storm will be good enough (and 2 mana cheaper) against board floods.

The best case scenario for this card is not clearing a full board of small minions. It’s when your opponent has few big or semi big minions. Since it’s 15 damage in total, it can let’s say kill an 8 and 6 health minion. Or kill three 5 health minions. That’s really a great value for a single card. In case of a more Midrange meta, the card might see play in Control Shaman (the archetype is already relatively strong, especially in the higher ranks, it might take off next expansion). That’s the meta in which this card would shine. It’s too slow against Aggro (where Storm and Maelstrom Portal are better) and hard to get full value from in Control matchups (Control decks rarely have multiple minions on the board and killing one big target makes it a way weaker Hex, although still situationally useful).

Card rating: 4/5

Verdant Longneck

The card is a nice display of the new Adapt mechanic, but the main question is – is it one of the stronger or weaker Adapt cards? I like the mechanic and Verdant Longneck looks like a playable, but not very thrilling card. I’ve already talked about it for a bit, but I’ll repeat one thing – flexibility is very strong in Hearthstone. That fact alone might make it playable. Next obvious thing is that it’s a Beast. Druid will lose a lot of powerful Beasts with the next rotation, so new Beasts might fill the gaps in order to make Beast Druid playable again (I don’t think that it will be a good option unless they introduce another powerful synergy, but who knows).

The biggest concern is – will this card be stronger than Druid of the Claw? The card already has some flexibility, it might be used defensively and offensively and a 4/6 Taunt is way more powerful than a potential 5/4 Taunt. However, getting something like Divine Shield or Windfury might situationally be way more powerful. Another consideration is that Druid decks will need another 5-drop, since 2x Azure Drake was auto-included into any build. Maybe Verdant Longneck will take its place? Right now Stranglethorn Tiger seems like the only other likely candidate.

Remember that Druids can only play so many 5-drops and if there are better choices, this card simply won’t see any play. I think that before fully judging this card we’ll need to see the 4 other Adapt choices and quite possibly rest of the set. So far, Divine Shield seems to be the most powerful one on a minion like that. But I guess different minions will like different Adaptations, let’s say Divine Shield would be really weak on a 4 mana 1/7, but +3 Attack would be pretty powerful. Right now I’m like 50/50 on it.

Edit: We’ve learned about other Adapt options already. They seem quite good. There is a +1/+1, +3 Health, Stealth (for 1 turn) and Poison mechanic (similar to Cobra and other minions, instant-kill when it damages something). So, for example, Verdant Longneck will work best with Divine Shield, 3 Health and Stealth. Possibly Windfury if you think it can survive a turn. For example, Poison is pretty bad on this minion, but if we get a smaller body with Adapt it might be much better there. Stealth increases the quality of Adapt mechanic – it will still be weaker than Stranglethorn Tiger, but you don’t always need the Stealth. I like it. I still won’t increase the rating of this card, because it seems playable, but not insane. However, it means that it might really see play in case Druid doesn’t get any busted 5-drop.

Card rating: 3/5

Pyros

That’s a pretty interesting mechanic. Pyros seems to be the Hearthstone’s own Phoenix, which rises from the ashes instead of dying. The card is PACKED with value, but it’s a terrible, and I mean it, terrible tempo play. You end up having 2/2 + 6/6 + 10/10 in a single card, which is tremendous value. But you need to play 2 mana for the 2/2, 6 mana for the 6/6 and 10 mana for the 10/10. Those are worse than vanilla stats.

First of all – what kind of deck you’d want to put this minion in? There is only one option, it just screams “Grinder Mage”. One of my favorite decks back in the day relies on basically grinding the opponent down, playing a very slow game and completely out-valuing him. This card would fit into that kind of playstyle. It’s a very slow card with tons of value packed into it.

But let me get this straight – in any fast meta, this card is unplayable. You don’t want to sacrifice tempo to gain value (and I’m talking about tons of tempo). In a faster Midrange meta, like against stuff like Midrange Hunter or Midrange Shaman? Also pretty much unplayable, sadly. The card only looks great in Control vs Control games. In the matchups when Hero Power + pass on 10 mana is not something unusual, having 3 bodies, 2 of which your opponent probably has to use big removals on, packed into one card is great. But only in those very slow matchups.

That said, the Elemental tag might save it a bit. We don’t know what Elemental synergies will look like, but this card might be a solid activator. Until we learn about the Elemental synergies, I have to give the card only 2 out of 5 – and that’s only because I’m hoping that the meta will slow down at least a bit. In the current meta, it would be 1/5. However, I might increase the score depending on how big the Elemental tag turns out to be.

Card rating: 2/5, possibly more if it will be stronger with Elemental synergies

Awaken the Makers

Another very interesting case. I’ve already talked about the Quest mechanic, but I’ll talk about this card specifically a bit more. Once again, while it seems like an anti-Aggro option, don’t be fooled. The card sucks against Aggro, you really don’t want to play it against Aggro, because you won’t activate it before you’re dead. We’ve just learned that you can mulligan the card away, which might seem like it sorts out the problem vs Aggro. But it really doesn’t. If you need to adjust your build, play some cards that you wouldn’t normally, to make the Quest playable, you basically play with a slightly weaker version of the deck with no upside, since you won’t see that card anyway. Not to mention that it’s an extra problem when there are multiple decks from the same class in the meta. Let’s say Pirate Warrior and Control Warrior are equally viable. You want to keep the card against Control, but not against Pirate. What do you do when you face Warrior? Just guess?

But, let’s be positive for a bit. The potential upside of this card is HUGE, which makes it amazing in any Control matchup. While your reward is heavily delayed, in the end you get a 5 mana 8/8 Taunt AND you go up to 40 health for just 1 mana initial investment. In a theoretical slow meta, this Quest – and most likely other Quests too – would be insanely powerful. However, in any faster meta, it seems that they might not be good enough.

But wait, there is one more thing. Viability of this card is directly tied to the viability of the Deathrattle Priest deck. If the deck will suck, this card won’t miraculously turn it into a powerful deck. But if the deck is good anyway, let’s say it will be the best Priest option after the rotation, this card will be auto-include, as you will be able to finish the quest without the deck building restrictions (like let’s say Reno decks currently have).

Since Deathrattle is the theme of Priest’s Quest, we should probably assume that Priest will get some powerful Deathrattle cards. If they keep pumping Priest with powerful cards and we’ll see something like a Deathrattle version of Drakonid Operative (power-wise, not effect-wise) + something smaller, it might actually become a good enough deck to play next expansion. And in that case, Awaken the Makers might be a good card at the same time.

Card rating: Can’t really rate it now, because it heavily depends on the rest of the set, especially other Priest cards

Closing

That’s all folks. Thanks for reading my first look at the Journey to Un’Goro announcement. I will definitely write more about the expansion in a few weeks, once we get more info and card reveals. I hope that you enjoy the new content as much as I do. And let’s hope that this time around Blizzard will learn from their past mistakes and releases a really balanced and fun expansion.

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to comment. And if you want to be up to date with my articles, you can follow me on Twitter.

Good luck on the ladder and until next time!