New Strategies and Meta Effects of the Magnetic keyword

When a new expansion arrives, it is accompanied by some new mechanic or twist. Some of these have been very popular and successful: Discover quickly became an integral part of the game and Hero cards have largely defined the past year of Hearthstone. Others fail and fade away, such as The Grand Tournament’s Inspire, which was a slow value mechanic that was never able to find a foothold in a highly tempo-based game like Hearthstone.

For The Boomsday Project, the new keyword is Magnetic. Magnetic is a Mech tribal mechanic – if you play a minion with the Magnetic keyword on the left side of an existing Mech, it fuses into it and acts as a buff card giving the Mech all of its stats and card text in addition to the Mech’s existing stats and abilities. If you play a Magnetic minion anywhere else on the board, it enters play as a separate minion. For a comprehensive look into the keyword and all revealed cards that feature it, refer to our constantly updated Magnetic keyword guide.

The purpose of this article is not to go through Magnetic cards as such, but to look at how the mechanic fits into the Hearthstone meta and how successful we can expect it to become. Is it another Inspire? Or another Discover?

Neutral Spells are Here, Kind of

Classes in Hearthstone obviously have major differences when it comes to minions, but it has been spells that really separate classes. Blessing of Kings, for example, is as iconic of a Paladin buff spell as you can have, and it is also a spell that has been relevant in most Hearthstone metagames, latest in Even Paladin in pre-nerfs The Witchwood meta – and Even Paladin is not completely gone even in the current meta.

What makes Blessing of Kings so good? It comes out fairly early, and it creates a big minion for such an early stage of the game. It’s not quite your neighboring Even Warlock’s turn three Mountain Giant, but it does not force you to hold on to your cards for the early game to get to play it, either. Removing big minions early in the game can be difficult, sometimes they just carry the entire game.

While Magnetic minions are minions, they act as buff spells when used to fuse into an existing Mech. Envious of Paladin’s Blessing of Kings? Try some Wargear instead – it’s a five-mana +5/+5 when played on a Mech.

Sure, neutral minions that buff other minions have already existed. Bonemare was so good that it ended up nerfed – and it still sees some niche play – whereas Fungalmancer sees a lot of play in many aggressive decks right now. However, you still end up paying in part for the body instead of paying only for the buff, so having access to pure neutral buffs can provide more effective ways to be aggressive.

There is the obvious limitation that you can only buff Mechs, and how effectively you can use Magnetic minions as pure buff cards will depend on the available Mech card pool. Blizzard has told us that Paladin, Hunter, and Warrior will be the classes with most focus on Mechs in The Boomsday Project, and how many Mechs other classes will have available is far from certain. The classic Mech decks were Mech Shaman and Mech Mage, two very aggressive representatives of the tribe, and neither of them has been promised support in the new expansion.

Not a New Discover, but a New Tribal Identity for Mechs

There are plenty of tribes in Hearthstone, and we have discussed them in detail before. One thing that is clear when looking at the tribes is that Mechs did not have a unique tribal mechanic – they have mostly shared their mechanic with Beasts, requiring having a minion of the appropriate tribe on the board. With Magnetic, Mechs become more clearly separated from Beasts while still retaining a similar mechanic – a Mech is needed on the board to use Magnetic minions as buffs.

This tribalism limits the meta effect of Magnetic. It is not going to be used in every class and not even in the majority of decks. That’s just not how tribes work. However, a strong tribal mechanic can produce multiple top tier decks: Dragons, Murlocs, and Pirates have all had their time at the top thanks to strong mechanics amplified by extremely powerful individual cards.

Magnetic with Other Keywords

Magnetic minions are more than just a pure stat buffs. One of the first revealed Magnetic cards, Zilliax, features a jaw-dropping list of additional keywords: Divine Shield, Taunt, Lifesteal, and Rush. This list really makes one think!

• Divine Shield enables a free value trade, your minion will take no damage and can even kill a Poisonous minion without getting destroyed.
• Lifesteal can turn into a ton of healing on demand, because the minion can attack immediately. If you’ve ever played Vicious Scalehide and Blessing of Kings in Even Paladin, you have an idea of just how powerful this can be when facing other aggressive decks.
• Rush can be confusing at first sight: if there is a Mech from previous turns on the board already, it can attack when buffed. However, Rush can both help Zilliax when played alone, and when played together with another Mech late in the game. It gives the combination Rush and enables it to attack another minion immediately.
• Taunt is probably the least useful of Zilliax’s keywords in combination with Magnetic. It can be used to create a big Taunt minion, but Taunt is only useful on the opponent’s turn and not immediately when the Magnetic minion is played.

In addition to these four keywords, we have seen Beryllium Nullifier with its Can’t be targeted by spells or Hero Powers ability. This can make building a big Mech slightly safer, as it cannot be targeted by spells such as Polymorph, Hex, and Siphon Soul. Big Mechs remain highly vulnerable to Silence effects though.

Of the remaining keywords, there are some that would be incredibly strong with Magnetic, but I do not expect to see them:

• Charge would enable you to build a big Mech and hit face immediately. However, Blizzard has been cutting down the number of Charge minions over the years, and with the introduction of Rush (can attack minions immediately, but not the other player), it does not seem likely that we would see many new Charge cards anymore.
• Windfury would be a huge damage-dealing machine and as such unlikely to be included in a Magnetic minion. It is more likely to appear on a non-Magnetic Mech (and there is the Whirling Zap-o-matic in Wild) – that way the Mech at least needs to survive a turn before turning into a doom machine.
• Poisonous would turn any on-board Mech into a piece of hard removal. It is possible that we can get this, but it would also be incredibly strong. While Poisonous itself does not deal face damage, buffing a small Mech with it can help to remove a Taunt minion and push on with other minions.

Being Aggressive and Going Tall or Going Wide

Magnetic cards are flexible buff cards, but their main property is still their ability to act as buff cards. Buff cards are usually better suited for an aggressive strategy than for a control strategy: both permanent buffs, such as Blessing of Kings, Cold Blood, and Blessing of Might,  and temporary buffs, such as Savage Roar and Rockbiter Weapon, have mostly found themselves as tools of aggression.

Even when there are defensive buffs available, such as Spikeridged Steed, their usefulness for control purposes has been limited, because Silence effects are so ubiquitous in the game and you risk a lot if you rely on defensive buffs.

The flexibility of Magnetic cards, however, provides something pure buffs cannot. They can be used in strategies that go tall – build big minions – as well as in strategies that go wide – build a large board of small minions. This property makes for some intriguing strategic decisions. Typically, an aggressive deck can only do one or the other, but Magnetic minions enable you to use the same set of cards to go for either strategy. If you notice that the opponent has difficulties dealing with large minions, you can build a big Mech, whereas if the opponent lacks area-of-effect damage, you can go for a wide board instead.

Revisiting an Old Tribe and its Effect on Wild

While Standard is the main tournament format, it is worth taking a moment to consider the Wild format as well. Mechs were a major theme in Goblins vs Gnomes, which rotated out of Standard format long ago, but all those old Mech cards are always available in Wild.

There are lots of old Mechs that can potentially synergize very well with Magnetic, such as:

• Mechwarper – Play Magnetic buffs cheaper.
• Fel Reaver – Cheap, big buff target.
• Annoy-o-Tron – Even more annoying with some sweet buffs.
• Micro Machine – High health Magnetic minions, huh? Let’s add growing attack to that high health and see where this goes.
• Piloted Shredder – It used to be a fan favorite, and it can be again.
• Shielded Minibot – Paladin will be the Mech class, you say? How about we add one of the best two-drops in the game to the mix.
• Whirling Zap-o-matic – Buffs and Windfury in a Shaman deck sound good.
• Snowchugger – The infamous Mech Mage early-game minion.
• Mimiron's Head and V-07-TR-0N – Honorable mention, because the Mega-Windfury on a giant Mech dream has to live.

Generally, I would expect Magnetic to be used in an aggressive way, and high-cost Mechs are unlikely to work well with that plan. The relatively cheap Mechs listed above, on the other hand, can be an excellent match. Mech Shaman, Mech Mage, and Mech Paladin all have something to gain from combining the old and the new.

Magnetic in the Future Meta

Obviously, predicting a future meta is risky business. No one will get it completely right, much less when most of the cards have not been revealed yet. That said, I’m going to try to make some predictions anyway.

First, I believe Magnetic will have a solid place in the meta. It is well-suited for aggressive and tempo-based decks, and the overall design of Hearthstone favors such decks. It provides these decks with a degree of flexibility they did not have before: You do not have to choose between minions and buff cards, because Magnetic minions give you access to both. You can go tall or you can go wide, whatever the situation requires. Getting your strategy right in each matchup is important when the game allows you to make more choices, and as such Magnetic also promotes skillful play.

Second, Silence continues to reign as the ultimate tech choice. Is it even a tech choice anymore? Silence is great against Magnetic, not that there was any reason to believe Silence would go out of style regardless. It might even be argued that Hearthstone has a small design problem with Silence: it is too widely used, but the game would be insanely snowbally without it. That’s a tricky position, which is unlikely to be solved in the near future, if at all. Therefore, keep rocking some Silence cards.

Third, the value of hard removal is increasing. Magnetic adds more good targets for single-target hard removal just in case Even Warlock and Big Druid did not do enough. Voodoo Doll is a good card, use it if you play a slower deck that has a good way to activate it.

Fourth, the effectiveness of area-of-effect damage is decreasing. With Magnetic enabling aggressive decks that build huge minions, it is difficult to answer that with Lightning Storm, Hellfire, or even Dragon's Fury. On the other hand, if decks are built to remove individual minions, Magnetic decks will simply play their minions wide. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t – and this flexibility is a big part of why Magnetic has a good chance to be a major part of the meta.

Magnetic is no Discover. The fact that it is a tribal mechanic already makes sure of that. However, Magnetic is no Inspire either. It fits the overall game design of Hearthstone much better than Inspire ever did, and therefore it is likely that Magnetic will find its place in the meta.

What about you? What do you think about Magnetic and its place in the future meta? Will it succeed or do you think it’ll be a flop?