New Hearthstone Expansion: Saviors of Uldum!

A new expansion! Saviors of Uldum! Apparently, the League of Explorers are coming back to fight the League of EVIL at Uldum, which is neat -- they've got a very catchy tune, too, in that trailer. I felt like there's such a short buildup to this expansion, like essentially just a brief Togwaggle animation before we get the full trailer and reveal. It's weird.

Anyway, we've got a bunch of neat little card reveals, and apparently we're getting the return of Quests. Okay, then! We get to see two of them, the druid and the warlock one, and it's... interesting? It seems like the quests for this expansion is going to be an interesting twist on the old formula. Instead of the rewards just being a card you need to cast, the quest rewards this time around seem to be replacing hero powers? And it's certainly interesting and makes these quests work faster, but I'm not sure about some of them.

The druid quest, Untapped Potential, is perhaps the weaker one of the two, although I won't be giving ratings yet until we get at least half or three-fourths of the expansion's cards revealed. Untapped Potential is a quest where you have to spend four turns with any un-spent mana, so you need to have at least one mana left over, and... I dunno. You're definitely going to waste turn 1 to cast the quest, so you have to waste a mana in the next couple of turns? That means that Untapped Potential will complete the fastest at turn 5, and you'll start seeing the benefit from the new hero power, Ossirian Tear, at turn 6... which, granted, a passive hero power where both Choose One effects would certainly be useful. But is it worth it to get rid of the regular druid hero power? And to waste the tempo in earlier turns? I would say no, because glancing at the current batch of Choose One cards, the only one that's going to benefit from Ossirian Tear that much would be Jade Idol in Wild, and that's not a nightmare I'm looking forward to dealing with. Still, neat concept.

Also, since Elise is assigned to Druid from the quest, I guess each League of EVIL and League of Explorers character is assigned a class, then? So, uh... we have hunter, paladin and mage left over? Which one out of Finley, Reno and Brann even fit the mage class? Eh. Anyway...

Warlocks get Supreme Archaeology, which looks pretty damn impractical outside of a specific deck. And, yes, maybe Plot Twist can finally find a home now! Supreme Archaeology wants the Warlock to draw 20 cards, and the reward is replacing the hero power with 2-mana, draw a card, it costs 0. But by that point in a regular deck, you get this effect, what, four, five times total since your deck's probably run out? So clearly you want to play this on a Plot Twist deck where you constantly re-shuffle and re-draw cards from your deck to quickly check off Supreme Archaeology's quest requirements. And honestly... I can actually see this working out quite well!

We get a new keyword, "Reborn", where the minion with the keyword will return to life exactly once, with 1 HP, before dying permanently. Interesting keyword, don't think it needed to be one, but the one they showcased, Reckless Mummy, a 4-mana 3/2 warrior card with rush and reborn, is certainly a fine card! At worst it's equivalent to a Piloted Shredder, but with its full potential, it's a 4-mana 6 damage removal that can go through divine shields, can hit two targets, and sometimes you're left with a body. It's a neat card and a neat keyword. I like it.

Questing Explorer is a 2-mana 2/3 card that draws a card as a battlecry if you control a quest, which is a nice card for sure! A lot of the drawbacks of old-school quest decks is that you really lose out on the tempo of sacrificing your first turn, which is why the only real successful quest decks are the priest and warrior ones who really don't care all that much about early game tempo. Questing Explorer helps to be a simple but probably pretty effective card to give you advantages when you take the inherent disadvantage of sacrificing your turn 1 play essentially doing nothing but set up the quest. Neat!

Puzzle Box of Yogg-Saron is a 10-mana mage card. It's just old school Yogg-Saron, minus the body. It's funny, but probably not going to be good. I miss old school Yogg-Saron.

Plague of Death is a card I've seen a lot of times in like, custom cards or whatever, so there you have it. A 9-mana Priest removal spell that silences everything before casting Twisting Nether. When you want the entire board DEAD. It's easily a replacement for Psychic Scream, and one that's a lot more devastating, for sure.

Jar Dealer is a 1-mana 1/1 that adds a random 1 cost minion to your hand. Not as good as Lackeys, but she's not a bad card, and one that's definitely fun in arena.

EVIL Totem is a shaman 2-mana 0/2 that... is both a totem, and also generates a Lackey every turn. We've seen just how powerful Lackey generation can be, due to the sheer amount of tempo these tiny 1-mana cards carry. We're reportedly getting a bunch of new Lackeys in this expansion, even if we haven't seen them. On paper, EVIL Totem's pretty damn powerful and could definitely be a powerful asset for Shaman decks. On the other hand... we kinda need to see if the new lackeys are anywhere as consistently good as the original five.

Oh, there's also your typical expansion pack deal with a hero portrait tied to it, this time Elise the druid hero. These are always nice, giving people some bang for their buck. I've personally never bought any of them, and I skipped out on Rastakhan, Mecha-Jaraxxus and Lei Shen, but it's always nice to see these.

In addition to the expansion announcement, a while before I posted this post, we got Patch 14.6 going live, which adds the Hall of Fame stuff, the Neo-Classic cards, a bunch of new card interaction fixes and whatnot, including one that's going to take me a while to get used to -- Forked Lightning, Multi-Shot and Cleave can now be casted if there's only a single target on board, which is interesting. There are a couple of bug fixes, a couple of wording changes (Pilfer in particular)... and something that got everyone in a bit of an uproar is that a bunch of card artwork have been changed! And considering the only time this was done was with Witchwood Grizzly and its bizarre beast tag, it's interesting why they decided to do this.

(Meanwhile, Stampeding Kodo's artwork still doesn't show an actual Kodo Beast)

And the biggest consensus is that the cards were done for censorship reasons? We did just give Jaina Proudmoore an undershirt despite her rocking that cleavage since 2002, so I'm going to assume that it's some weird censorship laws somewhere... but it's interesting that these cards are actually straight-up given new artwork instead of just being edited.

Like, sure, they edited away the blood splatters in Eviscerate, keeping the same artwork (and the blood-stains on the victim's clothes), but for Headcrack and Bite, we're getting entirely new artwork? Like, I'm not complaining, but it's kind of weird. really always did like the old Headcrack artwork, too. Is this one of those "video games can't show skulls in China" weird censorship dealies? Deadly Shot's artwork was changed into some dude firing a ballista, instead of a tauren being impaled with a gigantic bolt, so I guess it's a violence thing. I dunno. I could think of a couple more hearthstone cards with bloodier or more violent artwork.

Something that caused a bit of a controversy is the fact that Secretkeeper, Mistress of Pain, Succubus and Windfury Harpy all receive new artwork. And the gut instinct is to be angry because they're censoring sexy ladies... but honestly, Windfury Harpy is still pretty scantily clad (and looks mostly the same), and Secretkeeper is still rocking a bodice that shows off her cleavage (and belly, which she didn't show off before), so I'm genuinely not sure what's going on. Is there some artist licensing problem going on? Or is it just Secretkeeper's huge secret keeping bum that caused the censor hammer to come down? At least for the minions, the replacement artwork still looks recognizably like their original counterparts.


More interestingly are the cards that actually got modified, and it's the two succubi in the games. I guess there was a reason why we never really got more Succubus cards added into the game, huh? Although... I dunno. The Mistress of Pain became the Queen of Pain, and her artwork still kinda looks like a Succubus, just more cluttered and detail-heavy. While the regular Succubus just straight-up got replaced with a Felstalker, which... I dunno. Something's going on about censorship or something. Again, at least they replaced the Succubus with another basic WoW Warlock demon pet instead of just shoehorning a beholder in there or something.

Overall, I think people are kind of making a bit too much of a deal about it? It's not like they're going around editing every single cleavage or instance of blood in the game... Whirlwind, in particular, has both. I dunno if the pretty drastic name changes for some of them is necessary, but... eh, whatever?

Anyway, looking forward to the Saviors of Uldum stuff!