I think I should try to write about the new cards Blizzard reveals more often, because it seems like the moment I share my thoughts on one group of cards, they go and reveal another.  But hey – that’s fine by me.  I like sharing my thoughts, and I certainly like new cards. 

This latest batch comes from the very first raid zone in World of Warcraft – Molten Core.  I spent many late nights with my guild in the depths of Molten Core many years ago on my Night Elf Hunter, Elendril, alongside my trusty pet tiger Fury.  Fury died to AOE fire damage a lot, while I had the honor of casting Tranquilizing Shot on Magmadar – which seemed to be a mechanic that existed only to ensure that guilds actually had a reason to bring Hunters to raids.  Even still, I have fond memories of Molten Core, as it was really the wild west days of WoW raiding.  Back before mods and guides made every encounter about nothing but following instructions and not standing in the fire, I had a great time trying to figure out each encounter to keep our guild progressing ahead of all of the others on our server. 

Though now, almost ten years later, I do have a confession to make.  On my guild’s server first Ragnaros kill, the encounter bugged out and the Sons of Ragnaros didn’t spawn when he submerged beneath the lava, trivializing one of the most challenging portions of the fight.  We still killed it before anyone else on Ner’zhul without the bug a week or so later, but we’d be damned rather than tell anyone that our original kill wasn’t legit.  We had a reputation to uphold! 

Sorry, fellow Lost Anarchy guildmates – I blew our cover. 

Anyway, no more nostalgia – let’s take a look at the new cards! 

Literally just yesterday I was tinkering with a non-Mech based Mage deck and found myself lamenting the quality of the three cost minions available to the class.  I wasn’t happy with Kirin-Tor Mage, since it traded down the curve with a lot of two drops and required a secret in hand to get any real value.  Soot Spewer had similar trouble surviving combat against both minions and weapons alike, with only a bit of spell power as the payoff if it lived.  I felt like I really wanted a sturdier and higher impact minion at three mana to get on the board quickly when Tinkertown Technician wasn’t a viable option. 

Well, it looks like Blackrock Mountain is bringing me just what I wanted.  Flamewaker is an absolute monster in any spell heavy deck.  Against an opponent without any minions in play, it acts as essentially a double spellpower minion – one that also happens to trigger off of spells that would otherwise not damage your opponent at all!  And against an opponent who does have minions, Flamewaker can absolutely destroy their board.  Several of the Mage decks I was building played a small mech package just to try to support Goblin Blastmage, since the card is so powerful.  Flamewaker offers half a Blastmage trigger every time you play a spell, making everything from Unstable Portal to the Coin that much more attractive. 

One thing that’s important to note is that Flamewaker works like Wild Pyromancer in that its trigger happens after you play a spell rather than when you play the spell.  That means that the damage trigger with something like Flamestrike won’t be wasted on minions that would already die from the spell’s effect.  While you can’t be certain exactly where the Flamewaker’s damage will end up, you do know that it will hit something that’s still around when the dust clears.  The timing even means that you can play Polymorph on a big opposing minion, and then the damage trigger kills the sheep itself.  This seems thematically appropriate, since so many Mages seem to break their own Polymorphs with AOE. 

While I’m definitely a fan of dragons, Flamewaker may be the card that I’m most excited to build decks with that has been revealed from Blackrock Mountain so far.  It feels like the glue that spell-based Mage decks needed to really hold them together, and fills a definite void that has existed until now.  Maybe I’m mostly excited that I won’t feel foolish for playing a Mage deck that isn’t Mech-based again…



Core Rager is a card that makes me wonder.  Is this empty-handed theme going to be something we see more of, or is it a random one-of effect?  It’s an interesting conditional, to be sure, since it encourages a very different sort of play pattern than we typically see.  Even in aggressive Hunter decks, players usually keep several cards in hand for the right moment, like Unleash the Hounds, Abusive Sergeant, or Kill Command.  Core Rager demands a much more all-out aggressive approach of just playing out everything to the board, and rewards the player with a huge monster well above the power curve if they do. 

Of course, Core Rager is just another in the long line of undercosted big creatures that fall prey to Big Game Hunter.  We’ve seen a lot of big cheap minions with conditional requirements and drawbacks over the past few sets, from Earth Elemental to Druid of the Fang to Fel Reaver, and none of these have really seen very much play thanks to their vulnerability to BGH.  Is it really worth building a deck around emptying your entire hand, which is already vulnerable to mass removal effects like Brawl, Lightbomb, or Auchenai-Circle, when the payoff is a minion that dies to one of the most commonly played cards around?  My guess is that as long as BGH is around, cards like Core Rager are going to be at best fringe playable, and at worst pretty much entirely ignored. 

That said, Core Rager isn’t just a big body that dies to BGH.  If you’re afraid of the tempo loss from getting your 7/7 Rager killed, you can actually just play it out as a 4/4 by not emptying your hand first.  A 4/4 minion for 4 certainly isn’t exciting, but it isn’t altogether embarassing, and the fact that it is a Beast means that it will still have synergy with cards like Kill Command and Houndmaster, if that’s the direction you’re looking to g0.  Then again, I doubt many decks would really want both Core Rager and Houndmaster, since Core Rager is asking you to play as many cheap, proactive cards as possible, and Houndmaster is a relatively expensive conditional effect. 

If BGH falls out of favor, Core Rager may become an attractive option as a big finisher for aggressive Hunter decks – and even then only if healing cards become prevalent instead of BGH, since otherwise Hunters are generally better off relying on charge minions and direct damage effects to complement their hero power to close out games.  My guess, though, is that it’s going to be another big minion that spends most of its time sitting in the collection lamenting the fact that it doesn’t see any play. 

Like Mage, Warlock is a class that doesn’t have a lot of attractive three cost minions at the moment.  Both Felguard and Void Terror are awkward to play on curve because of their Battlecry effects wiping out either your mana crystals or your other minions.  Imp Gang Boss, however, is a great minion to play on curve, having stats that allow it to survive hits from both three attack weapons and three attack two drops, which have long made the 3/3 stats of the average three drop hard to use effectively. 

Imp Gang Boss fits right in to the theme of the Demonlock decks that are popular right now.  Its trigger makes it a perfect minion to taunt up with Defender of Argus, and the fact that it generates extra bodies also goes well with Defender and cards like Abusive Sergeant and Power Overwhelming.  The fact that it is a demon that also makes demons makes it that much more powerful with Malganis, though that’s admittedly something of a dream scenario – you don’t usually need much help to win when you have Malganis in play. 

It will be interesting to see whether the existence of Imp Gang Boss alongside Mistress of Pain brings some of the modal “damage or pump a demon” cards into favor.  We’ve already seen Demonheart get some amount of play in the past due to its synergy with the Mistress, and while Imp Gang Boss doesn’t generate the same kind of life total swings, it certainly can create a significant board presence swing if you pump it, eat an opposing minion, and then force them to attack into it to get it off the board. 

We could also possibly see more of a self-damage theme pop up in Warlock as well as in Warrior, as we discussed last week regarding Axe Flinger and Dragon Egg.  While Warlock doesn’t have Cruel Taskmaster, the king of self-damage enablers, it does have something of a self-damage theme in the class already with cards like Hellfire, Dread Infernal, and the like.  With only two cards per class in Blackrock Mountain, there’s only one more opportunity to re-enforce the theme within Warlock itself, but given cards like Dragon Egg and Grim Patron, as well as the “don’t stand in the fire” theme of Molten Core in the MMO, I would not be surprised to see more neutral tools that both enable and reward self-damaging coming in the adventure. 

Alright, that’s it for this batch of cards.  Now that I’ve finished writing this, I fully expect the next reveal to come within a few hours…