Should You Buy Onyxia’s Lair? Is The Alterac Valley Mini-Set Worth It?

Hearthstone’s mini-sets offer a unique value proposition, and Onyxia’s Lair is no different. Getting 35 cards for 2000 gold and no RNG involved still remains the best deal in the game, but the question is whether the cards on offer are worth your while this time around.

The Dragon, Revealed

The final content release of the Year of The Gryphon has now been out for over a week, which gives us a reasonable handle on whether you immediately need the new cards to keep up with the pace or even just to have fun. Though the power levels and the metagames will inevitably fluctuate over time, there are clearly quite a few standout performers here. The question, though, is whether it’s a better idea to craft those individual cards or to fork out 2000 gold for the complete mini-set.

Regardless of the cards in question, this remains some of the best value propositions Hearthstone has to offer to its playerbase, especially to those on the free-to-play side of things. 35 specific cards for a little more than sixteen Arena run entry fees is still pretty damn decent, even if it doesn’t come with the single-player content Team 5 used to bundle with the old adventures (The Curse of Naxxramas, Blackrock Mountain and more).

If you have gold to spare or plan to pre-order the next expansion, there’s really no reason not to pick up the mini-set with gold. Buying the mini-set will make your future pack openings marginally better because of the duplicate protection effects. However, if the purchase would stretch your resources a little thinner than you’d like, well, now’s the time to take a look at the specific cards involved.

To do so, So even though there are still many unknowns (as there will always be just before a rotation), we can also take a quick look at the previous mini-set to see how it performed over time.

Deadmines: Is It Looking Any Better?

The Deadmines mini-set seemed like a super dubious value proposition to the playerbase around its release, with just a few cards finding a home in the meta decks at the time. However, things have already changed, even without a rotation.

Multicaster‘s utility now goes beyond Questline Mage shenanigans, all three Druid cards turned out to be a nuisance, Doggie Biscuit became a monstrous tempo tool for Face Hunter in the early game, Mages are already well-set for a slower meta with Deepwater Evoker and Arcane Overflow, Shadow Priest loves Defias Leper, and the cheap Tradeable cards in the form of Blackwater Cutlass and Wicked Shipment turned out to be massive utility/combo enabler tools. Defias Cannoneer and Man the Cannons came and went alongside an entire archetype, already having their time in the sun, and Shadowblade Slinger became a great addition to defensive Warlock decks. Meanwhile, Brilliant Macaw is already looking like it’s fulfilling its obvious potential. And it’s only been three months since the mini-set’s release!

With so many balance changes and upended metagames nowadays, plus the faster cadence of releases, it’s a much worse idea to dismiss cards and archetypes out of hand than it used to be a few years ago. Every card and strategy has much higher potential because the devs have way more levers to pull than they used to, and this latent effect increases the value of any mini-set by itself.

Onyxia Rises

All this suggests that even some of the more odd-looking cards of Onyxia’s Lair could turn out to be really rather relevant after the Standard rotation and the impending Core set changes. Raid Boss Onyxia is already a terror in the Arena and the occasional presence in Kazakusan Druid, which is built around, well, Kazakusan, a card that has already proven to be deck-defining. Kazakusan is best with combo builds and mana cheating, but even Control Warriors can make it work with their slow-and-steady approach. It is without a doubt the star of the mini-set so far.

Meanwhile, Rogue’s Questline shenanigans were also significantly bolstered by the tempo potential from SI:7 Smuggler”]. This makes it what, at least four or five adjusted archetypes that benefit from the mini-set? And that’s before taking into account the statements we’ve heard from the devs about the future-proofed designs of some of these cards.

A lot of the Onyxia’s Lair mini set is designed with the future in mind, and not necessarily just slotting cards into existing decks. Some things certainly would fit the landscape for right now, but we like to think ahead as well.

— Cora ???? (@Songbird_HS) February 12, 2022

Admittedly, their track record on this stuff has not been exactly stellar so far, but it does seem likely that they’ll aggressively pull the lever towards the slower side of things after the rotation, there are many other cards here that could conceivably become super valuable as early as the next set release.

Whelp Bonker as a reimagined Acolyte of Pain could find relevancy in a different metagame, and you’d have to imagine Demon Hunter could use all the AoE they can get after the rotation. Raid Negotiator and Boomkin made it clear that a Choose One-focused Druid deck is right around the corner, while Pet Collector‘s presence suggests the impending arrival of the sort of juicy midrange Beasts that we haven’t seen in a long while. (Remember when Savannah Highmane was jokingly referred to as the only Legendary in the game that you can run two copies of?)

Any late-game Mage deck with a focus on big spells will love to have Drakefire Amulet, especially if new, synergistic Dragons are printed later down the line. Though there’s little appetite for experimentation with Paladin, Stormwind Avenger and Ring of Courage might allow for the buff archetype to survive past the rotation. There’s no way Dragon Priest will become a thing now, but there’s valuable support here as well, and Smokescreen is exactly the sort of card that’s either going to be useless or a nerf candidate. I can’t see Team 5 print that card without some sort of future synergy in mind, something that hasn’t yet emerged from the… smoke.

All in all, there’s a lot to like here, and we’ve already seen an immediate impact on the metagame. Relevant now and potentially even more useful later, Onyxia’s Lair seems like a much safer purchase than Deadmines was around the time of its release. Considering how well that turned out in the end, the sky is the limit for Onyxia’s soaring dragons.