I mean as you said it’s very difficult to make that much of an impact on the game as the last expansion of the year. Having to compete with 5 expansions for relevance is always going to make things difficult, a common misconception that I’ve seen is that the new old gods just plain suck compared to the old ones which isn’t strictly true.

Y’shaarj and Yogg are both much stronger than their previous incarnations with Cthun and Nzoth being a fair bit weaker but what’s the real problem is the power creep. We’re dealing with 4.5 years of power creep and putting out old gods on the same power level as the old ones during the last expansion of the year.

They’ll have a much stronger effect next expansion but it is a rather annoying waiting game.

As someone who is effectively a Warrior OTP (>1000 wins with warrior and my 2nd most is warlock with <300 wins.) my first instinct is to scream and say HANDS OFF MY ARMOR! But in this case I think I'll go with the more refined approach and address your concerns.

Firstly I'm going so say that I agree with you in that armor is really good. It's insanely good. However it is quite one dimensional unlike healing for example. Hearthstone has only ever introduced 4 cards that interact with your armor: Geosculpter Yip, Heavy Metal, Reckless Flurry and (everyones favourite) Shield Slam.

Based on the established class identity of each class you'll find that not all classes are created equal and have their strengths and weaknesses. Armor is warriors greatest strength and without it we'd see a repeat of mage after they lost ice block, that class has been dead for the majority of the time since then and I'm guessing this is why they haven't hall of famed edwin yet.

My overall point is that while armor is great against aggression and limited damage otk I feel like you're giving it too much credit. Because outside of the ETC combo, warrior loses pretty hard to greedier control decks with great value generation like priest despite the turn 2 comparison of gaining 2 health vs healing your opponents face. This is a well written article but I'm going to have to disagree with the conclusion.