Taking Stock of the Year of the Mammoth – The Impact of Journey to Un’goro Keywords

With the new Hearthstone year inching ever closer and the upcoming rotation getting rid of some iconic and seemingly omnipresent tools in Standard, it’s time to examine how the different goodies introduced over the course of The Year of the Mammoth fared over the course of their allotted time in the game’s main format. What bombed like hand-buffing and Mean Streets of Gadgetzan and what changed the face of Hearthstone as we know it? This series of articles will examine every keyword introduced in this period, starting with the ones from the Journey to Un’goro expansion.

Give me a Quest!

The main highlight was the new card type introduced in the form of the Quests, cards that guaranteed to start in your opening hand and gave you a very specific payoff for accomplishing a given objective. The strategic decision-making promised for the mulligan certainly didn’t become a reality: quests became such a single-minded aspect of the deck strategy that tossing them away was almost never viable except Taunt Warrior, an archetype which could simply attempt to outlast aggression.

They also forced you to absolutely build your deck around them lest you render them useless. The rewards associated with their completion also varied widely in power level across the different classes – ranging from never seeing serious play to surviving two different nerfs. was a serious issue with the rewards as well. Keep in mind that the only quests that ended up being competitively viable were the ones that could somehow reduce the cost of their payoff, either due to Preparation, a slew of Sorcerer's Apprentices and Fire Plume's Heart: five mana often turned out to be too much of a tempo sink, especially when the reward didn’t outright close the game for you.

Adapt and Overcome

Another one of the Un’goro-specific keywords was Adapt, the small semi-random stat-boost conferred upon minions, generally as part of a Battlecry effect. Not many of these cards ended up seeing play, but the ones that did were especially memorable: Hunter’s long struggle in the 2-drop slot was essentially fixed by Crackling Razormaw for two years – it perfectly fit the class’ weakness in establishing an early-game board presence, further bolstered later on by the many viable 1-mana options printed in later sets – and Vicious Fledgling became a high-variance, potentially game-deciding mess due to the possibility to hit Windfury early on. The card was such an issue that it got outright banned from Arena. Lightfused Stegodon also warrants a mention as a strong tool in token-based Paladin strategies until Baku the Mooneater’s cost restriction pushed it out of such builds. That being said, three out of fourteen cards seeing play overall doesn’t inspire confidence, and it makes sense that such a fairly uninspiring keyword wasn’t explored in further sets.

Journey to Un’goro was also the expansion when Elementals became a tribe, introducing a whopping twenty-five different minions of its kind. Interestingly enough, while many of them saw play on an individual basis (consider Fire Fly, Glacial Shard and Tar Creeper from the neutral category) and some of them had obvious synergies with each other (Radiant Elemental and Lyra the Sunshard), decks based on the value generated based on an Elemental-focused build never really stood a chance, mostly because of the arrival of the Death Knights in the very next set. A notable subclass was the family of Tar cards: since only Tar Creeper saw play over the last two years in Constructed – becoming a premium card in the process –, it’s fairly clear that this sort of effect only works on cheap minions and that it would be way too good on such taunts if printed on a regular basis. The two classes with the most obvious Elemental synergies would receive additional removal options as well in the form of Volcano and Meteor (including the third and fourth copies from Primordial Glyph, it felt sometimes), and while both of those cards became staples, they were not enough to make this kind of a deck work. They were not the only ones: Rogue’s Assassinate-on-a-stick (also known as Vilespine Slayer) also turned into a must-have tool, and Walk the Plank, its obvious replacement seems to indicate that the Classic set’s hard removal option will simply never be good enough in Constructed.

The Best of the Rest

The set also marked the arrival of binary hard-shutdown tech cards with Golakka Crawler, prefacing Skulking Geist from the next set. It also marked the first time we’ve seen a non-meme Murloc deck under Paladin, Rockpool Hunter and Gentle Megasaur becoming true sleepers of the set. An aggressive turn in the metagame was perfect for Gluttonous Ooze to push out Harrison Jones as the preferred weapon removal option, signifying a shift from value gain to health in this tech slot.

It also laid the foundations of the sort of endless resource generation that would peak with by the Death Knights soon thereafter: Stonehill Defender and Shadow Visions broke core concepts that should have perhaps been left untouched. Other boundaries were pushed by Living Mana’s ability to generate a lethal-threatening board with a single card while Charged Devilsaur’s quasi-Charge eventually allowed for fairly busted lethal combos for different classes.

Hemet, Jungle Hunter could sped up the clock for certain combo decks to such an extent that it made them single-handedly viable in some capacity (most notably Mecha'thun Priest) while Paladin’s triple threat of Spikeridged Steed, Sunkeeper Tarim and Vinecleaver would prove that even such fairly expensive, seemingly control-friendly tools work better as the top end of aggressive strategies when the class is otherwise hamstrung by a lack of a finisher. Interestingly enough, both Devilsaur Egg and Terrorscale Stalker were added to the game in this set but it nevertheless took a year to establish an archetype based around their synergies.

All in all, Journey to Un’goro was an interesting and impactful expansion with strong individual cards and slightly disappointing keywords, the start of a trend that would follow most new releases ever since then. Nevertheless, it marked an important evolution – pun intended – in card design as well, and one has to wonder whether some of its more underappreciated element(al)s were simply overshadowed by what came in the next, cold and icy set…