I don’t think Mage needed a bigger version of Arcane Missiles.

No. Arcane missles does four random damage with Spell damage +1. If it were written like Greater Arcane Missiles (Shoots 5 missiles that do 1 damage each) it would do 10.

This is a far cry from Netherspite Historian. Other than the cost, it is worse in every aspect. The two cards may not exist in the same Standard environment, but that would be the only reason why this sees play if it does at all, similar to why worse Lightning Bolts commonly see play in standard MTG red decks.

Bone Drake has at least a decent presence on the board when you play it/

Since this is not a Dragon by itself and it comes out too late to be as impactful as Wyrmest Agent and Twilight Acolyte are, I don’t think it’ll improve the state of the Dragon package when The Witchwood drops. If the Dragon package improves in the coming sets, this will see play since it will be enough to save yourself against aggro fairly often. Plus, the 11 health will allow it to take multiple hits from even rather large minions.

It’ll be as good as the dragon package is overall. Too bad it isn’t coming out when the Dragon package would be in a better shape.

Typically, using this to heal minions will tend to be worse than using Circle of Healing, and using it to heal your face may only be viable since there isn’t Greating Healing Potion, Priest of the Feast, or Reno, but the most this can heal for is 10 for 10 mana. It does put 2/1s on the board, but the versatility of this doesn’t outweigh the high cost for little board presence and benifit.

This is basically Hunter’s Assassinate, and like that card, I don’t see this seeing play when Hunter has tools like Kill Command and Wing Blast. They may not be able to always kill minions, but those cards are more efficient at what they do and tend to more flexible than this.

Granted, this might be a decent choice for a Zombeast component.

Since it is a murloc, the first place to think of placing this card is in Quest Shaman. However, the issue with Quest Shaman has tended to be the weak reward inspite of how easy the quest is to complete and it does eat up your turn 1. Adding a bunch of random murlocs will usually end up giving you a fair amount of the bad ones. This won’t really make the quest any better.

The next place this could end up is Token Shaman, but without Evolve, Dooplegangster, and better aggro tools such a deck is unlikely to be possible, and this wouldn’t do much for the deck as it is when Primalfin Totem is around.

It is nice to have a cheap echo minion around, but I don’t see this being good enough to see play in The Witchwood Format.

Paring Dragons and Hunters together does seem a bit odd, but so does doing that with Priests and the player base is used to that shipping. Dragon tribal decks, or tribal decks in general outside of Murlocs, do tend to be midrange in nature, so Hunter’s generally midrange play style can work with it. However, there just isn’t the support for it yet.

This card though is pretty decent. The condition isn’t hard to meet, the stat line is pretty good, and it can probably kill a couple mid-sized minions by itself. If it does have Poisonous, the 7 health will probably require at least a couple cards to deal with too. The 5 drop spot in hunter has tended to be pretty bare outside of stuff like Bittertide Hydra, so this could end up getting a slot in Midrange Hunter. Granted, the lack of a beast tag might be enough to make it not see play in that deck.

Dragon Hunters will probably use this if that deck ever gets enough traction, but it seeing play in more traditional Hunter archetypes is up in the air at the moment.

While this effect is powerful and something that hasn’t extended to your opponent’s turn, I don’t see thing replacing Defile or Hellfire (Cards that actually deals with the board rather than delaying it) nor would Cube Warlock, a deck based around getting 18 or often 36 health worth of taunts on the board by turn 6, really need this that much. By the time it could save you for a turn, you probably could’ve already set up enough defenses to get to Bloodreaver.

Echoing this card can result in some interesting interactions with dumb cards like Scorp-o-Matic and Mossy Horror, but the former wouldn’t be worth that much and the latter would be a 2 card 8 or 10 mana combo that only kills minions with at most 6 attack. While Twisting Nether doesn’t come with a body, it does definitely kill everything, and if you want a super effective board wipe that will end with a body on the board, I’d rather play Lord Godfrey.

I obviously could be wrong, but when Control Priest (Not Big Priest) doesn’t really play the Pint-sized Potion-Shadow Word: Horror combo to deal with aggro, I don’t think Cube Warlocks will make room for a more expensive and generally less powerful version of the combo.

Once in a while, yeah, but that’ll be as often as it does happen.

Only recently did Secret mages started playing it generally, and that was due to the prevalence of aggro in the meta game in general. The versions of Tempo Mage with Flamewaker before the secret engine was good enough to integrate into the deck all of the time played only one copy of Ice Block only on occasion, and Elemental Mage decks from the beginning of the Un’Goro format rarely did.

I do agree that there is the no counterplay that can be had with the card that doesn’t result in your opponent getting another turn, but Ice Block is being dropped from the classic set more so because the general Freeze Mage strategy and core has never not see some amount of play be it in Quest Exodia Mage or Big Spell Mage. The ultimate win condition of Freeze Mage may be different from the deck’s inception, but playing against the deck has always felt the same.

This is definitely an interesting card, and the cost flows nicely into Blessing of Kings, which has been seeing some play as of late. The 2/5 statline is very solid as is and will be able to trade into much of what Paladins will pull out of Call to Arms and much of the early game Zoolock core. Too bad the easiest way of getting this to 3 attack, the hand buffing cards, are leaving standard for the most part.

This will see play when buff cards see play, especially is a better Blessing of Kings comes along. The only buff card you won’t want to give this is maybe Spikeridge Steed since this’ll gain taunt anyway. Perhaps this will find its way into a Midrange style Paladin in The Witchwood format.

Very solid card.

If only the other “Hand Druid” cards shown in this set were of this quality. It probably would not have been that hard, but at least a Control Druid without Jades will have the healing it would need with Oaken Summons, the Death Knight, Branching Paths, and this. Plus, Spreading Plaque is still an effective defensive tool.

I’m just unsure if Druid will be able to create the late game value to compete with other control decks. The Lich King and Ysera are a good start, but might not do much against Cubelock as it might be during The Witchwood format. A Control Druid will probably do better against aggressive decks than Cubelock will be able to, but I’m still unsure if that’ll be enough reason to play it.

With cards like this, Oaken Summons, and Branching Paths, a Control Druid post Jades may become possible within a set or two.

Well, it is Druid’s own Shield Block that can be better than Shield Block.

This is a really rather fair card and will be great in arena. Both modes the card can take are probably worth about three mana, and neither mode is obviously better than the other as is typically the case for these Choose One minions.
I can see this being part of Aggro Druid if that sticks around after it loses Mark of the Lotus, Enchanted Raven, and Mark of Y’Shaarj. Granted, its probably too fair to be a major card in constructed even with Druid losing the Jade package.

I can see this working out in a slower combo deck like Exodia Mage to more quickly find their Sorcerer’s Apprentice. I’m not saying that deck will work in The Witchwood format, but given how that deck plays Simulacrum, the would probably want to play this too.

There might be some application in Zoo decks just to draw out you minions to throw at the meat grinder, but the body is a bit too underwhelming on turn four for the aggressive board control strategy Zoo decks use.

This will end up seeing some amount of play at some point during its time in standard because it can specifically tutor cards to your hand. It may not be in The Witchwood format, but it will happen eventually.

I largely agree, but given how there’s only Baku, Genn, and the other four support cards, they did not design the entire expansion around it. However, that is the norm for these sorts of deck building questions. Reno was the only no duplicates card in League of Explorers, the Priest, Mage, and Warlock Legendary minions and Kazakus were the only ones in Mean Streets, and the princes were the only cards that revived the “No x cost cards” clause.
Un’Goro did have a lot of support for each of the quests in one way or another, but where as these cards asked, “Is the restriction worth the reward,” the quests asked, “Are all of these lesser cards worth playing towards to the reward?”

Odd/Even decks will probably be lesser preforming decks if some of the initial theory crafting with Odd Taunt Warrior, Even Paladin, Odd Cube Warlock, and Odd Elemental Mage aren’t very successful. However, they do have a greater chance of working in a Standard environment with more cards in it just by virtue of having more good odd/even cards in it.

Before they rotate, there will be at least on notable Odd/Even deck that’ll work out well enough to be competitive.

The odds of rolling an Ice Block option from a Discover pool of twelve cards would be (1/12)+(1/11)+(1/10), which sums to .274 or 27.4%, since you pull options out of the pool three times. You would get about a 10% chance of seeing any particular Mage secret in the Discover Options if there were twenty-six different Mage secrets.

It’s the same reason why either Getaway Kodo or Noble Sacrifice rarely aren’t options when you play Hydologist, but in that case seeing any individual secret happens 78.% of the time.

If all you deck does is generate random cards in hope that the climax of Tess will be enough to win you the game, and yes. Thief Rogue has received a ton of support since the concept’s inception in the Grand Tournament, not as much as Discard Warlock but more than Secret Mage as time has gone on. The list includes Ethereal Peddler, Swashburgler, Burgle, Shaku, the Collector, Hallucination, Obsidian Shard, and Lilian Voss. All of which are at least average cards existing within the class with one of the best classic cores in the game. In spite of everything working in its favor, it has never been successful enough to be considered anything more than fringe.

The Dopplegangster-Evolve combo will usually result in a board stronger than three 2/2, on average it’ll create something around three 5/5s with upsides. If Evolve instead gave the Dopplegangsters Deathrattle: Add a minion to your hand that costs (6) or made them into random minions with 3 attack, it would not be as strong.

Decks that play Barnes and Y’Shaarj are either Big decks that cheat out massive minions upwards of four turns before they’re supposed to come out or literally play only Barnes and Y’Shaarj to guarantee the massive turn four or five board. In both cases, the randomness of Barnes is limited to only summoning the very best minions it can.

Karazahn Era Zoolock did play discard elements, yes, but the most common reason why they were was because of Malchezaar’s Imp strong stats for a one cost card which made it easy to combo with Doomguard and Darkshire Librarian and Silverware Golem’s okay stats as it was. The deck’s strength was not centered on Malchezaar’s Imp and Silverware Golem. They were a part of it, yes, but given Doomguard and Librarian were the only discard cards they played, they were played as a way to mitigate the costs of those cards.

Nothing may be consistent in in Hearthstone, but the best random cards tend to be ones the limit their randomness like the entirety of the Discover mechanic or will rarely end up worse than you started like the Evolve mechanic.
A Thief rogue deck is at its weakest when playing against another rogue, especially if it relies on this as a win condition. There is no way of saying otherwise. It’s not like Cubelock, where the mirror match can be a real control showdown. A pure mirror match, which is still an even match-up, would devolve into the one who gets the highest highrolls wins.

Card generation is crutial in card games in general, but Rogue as a class has much better options for generating card advantage in the form of just drawing cards from Elvin Minstrel and Auctioneer instead of praying to RNGesus that the cards I get from this Paladin will be Tririons and Truesilvers and not the secrets and low value buffs.