I like tokens. I like card draw. This is both. I like it.
The on-turn board clear that gives both players tokens is also quite interesting. It can be a bit hard to exploit due to the fact that most one-sided small board clears are tied to Slow champions, but cards like Champion of the Wicked and Fireball can break the symmetry. In most situations (unless your opponent has one of those small board clear champions like War Machine/Raxxa), your opponent will just attack into your zombies, and you’ll trade with them, but, you don’t have to trade.
For instance, if you’re at 30 and your opponent is at 15, you can just take the first hit in preparation to swing back unblocked on your turn, especially if you are holding a slow small board clear effect. If you do take this line, you need to pay careful attention to how your opponent reacts to determine your next line though, especially in app.
If you opponent immediately attacks with their next zombie, especially if all three are queued up in an attack separately queue, there is a reasonable chance your opponent will follow up by breaking all zombies in play (Flash Fire/Wither etc.). Therefore, you probably want to block the next two attacks, unless you think they made a mistake and didn’t even consider the fact that you wouldn’t block.
If your opponent spends some time to think after you decline the first trade, they probably weren’t expecting that. If they don’t attack with the others after that, this generally means that they actively want to trade so they’ll wait until you attack to do so. If they do attack with the next zombies, it could mean that they either do have a way to clear all champions, especially if they are low on health, or, if high on health, they might be accepting the trade of 6 damage each turn. Deciding which scenario is more likely based on the current board state, cards in hands, health total, and opponent’s preferences will determine whether or not you should block. (Your opponent also might decide to keep attacking out of fear of you playing a small board clear on your turn to blow out their blockers.)
If your opponent spends a significant amount of time thinking before making their first attack, they are most likely considering what to do just in case you choose not to block, so they can immediately react after you make your decision. This is partly done to make sure attacking is the correct play, but also to negate directly giving you the information above. (However, they’ve still given you some information this way.)
While it is frequently “correct” to trade zombies for zombies, taking 2 damage from that first hit can be valuable, even if it ends up “just” gaining you insight into your opponent and their potential cards in hand.
In draft, this is reasonable both after your opponent spends their gold, as a punisher, and even potentially before. It can give you a chump blocker for a non-evasive attacking champion (that your opponent can’t use a slow champion to answer before blockers), draw you closer to a more appropriate answer, and give you two more back-up chump blockers just in case.
In constructed, it is excellent in token decks (especially combo token decks) because it gives you tokens, draws you a card, and provides a board clear in case things go really poorly, like Brachiosaurus -> Brachiosaurus -> sadness. There is also the potential to board clear with this on-turn into off-turn Plague Zombies/Surprise Attacked Drinker of Blood -> Wither/Flash Fire. Overall a solid card. That being said, using this against a wild player into them responding with Draka, Dragon Tyrant on their turn is brutal, since you just handed them an extra 6 damage a turn, but Draka is always going to be brutal against tokens.
Every time my opponents play it against me, it is amazing. Playing it to an empty board is excellent, as is playing it to a contested board. You get a 5/5 body that hits hard and bullies demon tokens, and you get two human tokens that can pump your damage to 7 a turn (from a 0-cost card) or chump block. So, it can theoretically chump block your big 1-cost champion for three turns, and the 5/5 body means at least one chump block is effectively guaranteed, if needed. The three bodies you get make you resilient to targeted 0-cost removal and, since War Priest is a 0-cost champion, it is incredibly resilient to bounce effects (AoE bounce in particular). This is a card that is deceptively powerful (or at least it initially deceived me as to its power). And yet, I still continue to draft cards over it and then get frustrated when it bodies me, like Thought Plucker.
Moving into constructed, it is a solid addition to human tokens since Secret Legion and Demonic Rising immediately weaponize it, as will Ambush Party, Rise of the Many, and Bold Leader. It can also theoretically just chill on an empty board whether before gold is spent or as a follow-up start after a board clear (following your opponent’s next gold expenditure of course). War Priest might be decent in other constructed decks as well, but it is currently difficult to fit a bunch of 1-cost Good cards into non-Good decks, and there is a bunch of competition for 0-cost cards for Good decks.
Solid Draft card. Ambush body with 8 defense that gets back the best card in your discard pile for the state of the game: frequently a 0-cost card (which you can immediately replay), a draw 2 (for your next off-turn), or a re-establishing card. This gets better the stronger the cards in your deck are, especially your 0’s (Raxxa’s Curse). (It’s also much worse if your deck is full of mediocre cards.)
In constructed, a 7/8 body without evasion is meaningless, and I can’t see spending a gold to return one card to your hand ever being worth a deck slot (outside of incredibly restrictive deck building formats).
I’m not terribly impressed by this usually weaker Dark Draft version of Dark Knight. Best reliable-case scenario in Dark Draft is you ambush this in, off-turn, when both golds are down to break an attacking wolf/zombie token and get a 0-cost 5-damage attacker that breaks to 3 damage effects. Meh, not as bad as my original draft made it out to seem. You can also ambush it in to block a champion out of desperation or trade with a demon token, but at only 5 offense, it won’t break basically any 1-cost champion that would attack. At the end of the day, still an ambush 0, so still fairly desirable overall.
The Evil AoE buff is most valuable for getting your tokens slightly bigger than your opponents’ to make trading a nightmare for them. So, if you have a bunch of Evil tokens, maybe, particularly Zombie Apocalypse or Wake the Dead. This wasn’t enough for me to put it into the tech category, but this does cause it to increase in value.
In constructed, however, I’m intrigued. I did bump The Risen‘s rating up to Tier 5 (from 7) in large part because of all of the Evil 0’s in Duels that work with it now (Eager Necromancer, From Beyond, Villify, and this [the worst of them]). This is a 2-card 18-potential damage combo that is an excellent punish if you already had Evil tokens in play and/or got Zombie Apocalypsed. The buff is tied to the champion though, so, unlike From Beyond, if they can can remove just this, that is a massive reduction in potential damage and trading ability. Further, the lack of inherent blitz drastically reduces its offensive potential since setting this up off-turn gives your opponent both two windows to interact with it before you can get an attack through and a gold to do so. We haven’t seen much Courageous Soul off-turn for comparison, although the jump from two health to three is a big deal.
Widget Ridge is a 1 to 2 player deck-building game of absurdist steampunk awesomeness (3 to 4 players supported with two core sets). The goal is to acquire Augments, Devices, and Accessories in order to connect them into an ever-modulating construct to generate spark to win the game. So build your Solar-Powered Mechanical Bison with a Parachute to disrupt my Coal-Powered Battle Corset on Wheels before it takes over! (Emergence Expansion [and core game] on Kickstarter until Sunday, November 22 2020 11:00 PM CST.)
How to Play
All players begin the game with 10 starter cards which can produce gold and/or spark. Gold is the currency you accumulate in a single turn to buy new cards. Spark is the victory points you track to win the game. On a turn, you will usually start with 5 cards in hand.
Play a Card
The first thing you will do is play a card from your hand. If it is a starter card or a Left/Right card, you will gain an immediate effect, usually Gold or Spark. Center cards provide no immediate effect.
If you still have more cards in hand, you may play them now or you may Buy a new card or Add a played card to your Workshop.
Buy a Card
If you have generated Gold this turn by playing one or more cards, you may buy one of the 6 cards from the marketplace. The cost is the number in the upper right hand corner gear. Bought cards immediately go to your discard pile and the marketplace is immediately refilled to 6 cards. Gold does not carry over between turns.
If you still have more gold to spend, you may Buy another card or you may Play a card or Add a played card to your workshop
Add a Played Card to Your Workshop
The workshop is the heart of the game. Anytime after you’ve played a non-starter card on your turn, you may add it to your workshop, assuming proper Connections. When a center card becomes connected to a Left/Right card, you get the center card’s connection ability. There is no limit to the number of connection effects you can get in a single turn; however, two cards can only connect to each other once per turn.
A workshop may have no more than one Left card (Augment), one Center card (Device), and one Right card (Accessory). Center cards have connectors on both sides, Left/Right cards have connectors on only one side. To add a card, your workshop must either be empty or the new card must form a connection with a Center card. You may discard a Left/Right/Center card to replace it with a new card of the same type. (Your workshop may not contain both a Left and Right card with no center.) This is where center cards shine.
For example, say I have played the 6 cards in the picture above and my workshop is empty. First, I add Perfectly Balanced to my workshop. Since it does not connect to a center card, nothing happens. Second, I add Battle Corset to my workshop creating a connection between the two cards and triggering Battle Corset’s “Gain 3 Spark. You may draw a card, then discard a card” connection ability. Third, I add On Wheels to my Workshop and get a second Battle Corset connection trigger. Fourth, I want to add Solar-Powered to my Workshop, so my Perfectly-Balanced gets discarded first, and then I get a Battle Corset connection trigger. Fifth, I want to add Mechanical Bison, so my Battle Corset gets discarded first, and then I get twoconnection triggers from my Mechanical Bison, since we just created a connection between both Mechanical Bison/Solar-Powered and Mechanical Bison/On Wheels. Sixth, I want to add With a Parachute, so my On Wheels gets discarded first, and then I get a Mechanical Bison connection trigger.
After Adding a played card to your Workshop, if you have more played Left/Right/Center cards, you may Add them to your workshop or you may Play a card or Buy a card.
Full Construct Phase
Once you no longer want to Play more cards, Buy more cards, or Add more cards to your Workshop, any of your cards not in your workshop are discarded (either from your hand or in play). Then you draw back up to 5 cards in hand (shuffle your discard pile to form a new deck if needed).
Once you’ve drawn back up, if you have a full Left/Center/Right workshop, you may trigger your “Full Construct” ability, resolving it from left to right.
For example, the Solar-PoweredMechanical Bisonwith a Parachute would go: You may pay 3 spark, If you do, you may melt a card, OR you may put a card from your discard pile into your hand.
The Perfectly-BalancedBattle Corseton Wheels would go: You may draw a card OR melt a card, If you do, draw a card, and your opponents discard a card, OR melt a card in the marketplace and gain Spark equal to its printed cost.
The Solar-PoweredBattle Corseton Wheels would go: You may pay 3 spark, If you do, draw a card, and your opponents discard a card, OR melt a card in the marketplace and gain Spark equal to its printed cost.
Once you’ve resolved your Full Construct ability, it is the next player’s turn. Repeat until someone reaches 100 spark (or the win condition of whichever setup you are using is met).
Other Clarifications
Melt: remove a card from your hand, your discard pile, or the common marketplace to the corresponding melt pile (it will not be shuffled into your deck, you may never melt an opponent’s card)
Destroy: discard a card from a Workshop (it will be shuffled back into its owner’s deck)
In a two-player game, the game starts with the first player drawing only 3 cards while the second player draws 5 cards. First turn only.
My Thoughts
I love the flavor, I’m hooked by the strategic depth, and I’m overwhelmingly impressed by the balance.
This game is just fun, and a large part of the reason behind it is the excellent storytelling evoked by the card names, flavor text, and art. While my opponents are taking their turns, I’ll just start giggling as I think about what I’m going to build, like the Coal-Powered Street Sweeper with “Gold” Plating or the Wood-Burning Treebuchet On Stilts (which the flavor text acknowledges is actually a Ballista). I also can’t help smiling as I think back to the time I built a Doom Cannon, to corral some mechanical bison as you do, just to have a sentient statue throw a brick at it to break it immediately after I got it online and finished that job.
However, even if you stripped out all of the flavor of the game, I’d be sad, but I’d still want to play based purely on the gameplay. The workshop enables interesting dynamics between cards as you consider whether to buy a Left/Right card for its on-play effect, its Full Construct effect, and/or its possible connectors to your Center cards that you either bought for its connection effects, its Full Construct effect, or conversely, its possible connectors to your already purchased Left/Right cards. Further, you need to consider whether to buy multiple types of Left, Right, and/or Center cards: more cards of each type enables more connection effects but prevents you from keeping a specific card in your workshop for its Full Construct effect. For even further consideration, you need to decide when to leave cards in your workshop because while they’re in your workshop, they don’t get shuffled back into your deck, so you can’t trigger their on-play effects again (for Left/Right cards). Even further yet, you can keep track of what your opponent is doing and whether or not you need to buy cards to disrupt their workshop and/or prevent your opponent from buying them.
Or, you can just buy the cards you have enough gold to afford and see how it unfolds. As long as you pay some attention to the connectors on your cards and get some of each type of Left/Right/Center that can connect to each other, powerful things will happen. Making connections in your workshop and getting a Full-Construct also just feels good. It’s incredibly satisfying just watching your Doom Cannon go brrr. In the late game you can also have ridiculous turns with massive chains of connections as you draw hands full of non-starter cards; you get to initially play them for their on-play effects and then swap them into your workshop for connection effects, either of which might draw you more cards to keep going. Whether you go for a mass connections strategy, a targeted Full Construct strategy, or something inbetween, you’re doing it right because the game is so absurdly well-balanced.
Out of all of the games I have played only one of them wasn’t close, and I mean really, really close. Aside from that one game where I got a Doom Cannon literally as early as possible and it lived up to its name for my opponent, every one of those games ended where the next player would have won on their turn, every one, including when I played solo. EVERY ONE, HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE IAN?! I am still legitimately shocked by this, especially since I actively pursue as many different strategies as possible when I play games, and this is no exception.
One aspect of the game that enables this is the cards that give bonus/alternate effects if you have less spark than your opponents. While this may be a turnoff for some people, it has never felt bad when playing it, even when I was the one ahead at the time, partly because those effects immediately switch off if that player pulls ahead, which can cause them to stall out as you rocket past them again to secure the win after they ended at 99 spark (good times). Further, endgame spark generation can reach 30+ spark in a single turn, so there have been multiple games with last-second come-from-behind wins, that are just cool to watch play out regardless of which side of the table you’re on, at least in my experience.
Conclusion
I highly recommend this game. It is currently on Kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/furioustreegames/widget-ridge-emergence) for a new three character-pack expansion which enables cooperative campaign play, but you can also get everything else that has been released so far: the invention expansion set which has amazing cards like the Treebuchet, two story packs, and the Walkabout expansion with locations that affect the marketplace, all great stuff. Ian Taylor, the creator, has also written a bunch of excellent short stories in the Widget Ridge Universe if you, like me, want more of that delicious flavor. (Widget Ridge can also be bought from that website if you see this after the Kickstarter ends.)
For an illustration of how much I enjoy this game, this is the first game review I have done since October 2017, with the last complete review more than a year before that. I’ve received no compensation for this review, I just want more people playing it because it is awesome.
A 14/14 ambush champion that turns into an 8/8 or an 8/8 that boosts a champion for one turn. The most straightforwardly-valuable thing about this card is that it can ambush in front of Kong/Sea Titan/Steel Golem (or almost any other champion) and break them in combat. Then, as an 8/8 it wins fights against a lot of other utility champions including all of the 6/8s (Medusa, Palace Guard, Ice Drake, etc.). Unfortunately, if your opponent’s gold is up and you play it this way, it’s vulnerable to fast targeted (non-damage) removal (Erase, Banishment, No Escape), however, that category is not currently valued highly.
On the other hand, using it on a champion you’ve already declared as a blocker is fairly safe and solid (assuming the attacking champion doesn’t have breakthrough). If your opponent has the targeted removal, you’ve already locked the block in, so you won’t take damage to your face, and, if they spend their gold just removing your blocking champion to save their attacking champion, you still have an 8/8 to block this turn then attack next turn. However, if you use this to effectively save one of your champions and break one of your opponent’s champions while their gold is up, you risk overextending right into a board clear. Further, this also relies on you having another champion in play that can block, but demon tokens become 10/10 and wolf/zombies become 8/8, so that isn’t actually too hard.
On the attack, this is probably most useful as the first of a double burn-out. For example, if you have this and Flame Strike in hand, your opponent is at 16 and you have a wolf in play, you attack with the wolf, if unblocked buff it to hopefully deal 8. If your opponent has 1-cost health gain, they can dodge the Flame Strike to the face on their turn, but you still at least developed an 8/8 to attack with next turn.
Spending all of this time thinking this card through while typing this up has convinced me to tentatively promote it to an internal C-Tier over D-Tier. That being said, I can’t imagine wanting it in constructed. Fighting for the board with non-evasive 8/8s in constructed has never been a thing (although it is a human for Faithful Pegasus), and a 6/6 buff by itself doesn’t seem anywhere near enough. (Briefly expanding on the 8/8s not being a thing in constructed, they are either overshadowed by big Wild champions, chump-blocked by tokens/0s, or flown over. Mid-sized, non-evasive bodies in competitive constructed Epic are essentially meaningless.)
Maybe it finds a home in a deck with Royal Escort if Kong/Sea Titan make a major resurgence in constructed, but including a 1-cost card that is only reliable when you have another 1-cost card in play against a tempo deck is doomed to fail. (On rereading, it is even more doomed to fail since you couldn’t target your Canopy Ranger with Canopy Ranger’s tribute while you have Royal Escort in play, whoops.) Competitive constructed games are way to fast right now to manifest such small targeted synergies. You need to be immediately moving towards a win as soon as you spend your first gold with Aggressive/Midrange Wild and Kark being the two most represented decks. If you can’t deal damage, you’ll get Karked out (unless all 3 copies of Kark are near the bottom of your opponent’s deck). If you get hit once by a single big Wild champion, you’re in range to be burned out. That being said, those aren’t the only two decks in the meta, and there might be exceptions.
Invoke Pact in Good, but it can only target Good champions and has an Or that gains health instead of drawing cards, boooooooooooooooo … that primary ability is sweet in Good champion-based Midrange though … … dang it, why must I love things that will only disappoint me.
Rant
First off, I personally do not like the direction of printing cycle-like cards where Good gets shafted by being the only alignment that doesn’t get a draw 2 stapled to it (to be fair, this is only a two-card “cycle” and this is more of a rant against Angeline’s Will). If I’m in Good, I have much better specialized health gain cards to choose from if I want health gain. I don’t want my Good-Specific, incredibly powerful, interesting, and niche effects tied to health gain too, instead of card draw. If I’m in a game where I can’t get the niche effect to be valuable, I want to be able to cycle it (use it to draw cards), I don’t want it to either rot in my hand or be used to gain potentially meaningless health because I have no other off-turn gold play in hand. If this and Angeline’s Will didn’t require you to either have Good champions or Good 1-cost cards in your deck, the Or health-gain option might be more interesting, but when the Good pay-off cards have an option that is only valuable in specific archetypes, feels bad man.
Further, if you look at other events that don’t have Or Draw 2s attached, they fall into one or more of a few categories: Fail Case Still Advances Card’s Primary Function, Token Board Clears, Burn, Discard Reward, Cycle, and/or Bad.
Cards like Drain Essence, Hunting Pack, Wolf’s Call, and Insurgency fall into that first category. You include these cards because their optimal state is amazing, but you don’t cut them because even their fail case is helpful. Drain Essence, it’s in your deck because you want to remove a threat and gain health. If you can’t remove a threat, you can still gain Health. Same with Hunting Pack but gain tokens instead of health. Wolf’s Call always gives tokens, either on-turn with blitz to potentially punish a Wave of Transformation or off-turn to start with a board of tokens (that might force your opponent to Wave of Transformation). Insurgency works similar in that it ideally is your finisher on-turn as hard-to-remove tokens, but it can also be your initiator as off-turn hard-to-remove tokens. No matter what, you can always use cards in this category to advance your goal even if it is sub-optimal and your only gold play. I like these cards.
Token board clears work because the board clear is either incredibly valuable, such as being usable off-turn (Martial Law), and/or you’re a token deck, a deck that needs board clears (Reap or Sow, Law Claim) to stay alive and enable their onslaughts. Burn can always go face. Reduce your opponent to 0, win the game. Cards like Necrovirus are Discard Rewards because even if they sit dead in your hand, they are great fodder for discard against opposing Thought Pluckers or because you purposefully overdraw yourself. All of these can work well.
Then there are cards that can always at minimum Cycle themselves and they usually still gain a bit of bonus value, like Surprise Attack, Quell, and Temporal Shift. Surprise Attack can always be cycled for free anytime you would play a champion, so it’s fail case is never bad. Quell and Temporal Shift see a small amount of play because their effects are either excellent or reasonably powerful and the fail case isn’t completely dead, but they are very close to the final category: Bad. Bad cards have an unreliable/weak effect, no-value fail-cases, and can’t draw, sorry Chomp! and Angeline’s Will.
Breath of Life is dangerously close to that Bad category, but the pure power of it’s primary effect might save it. Now you might argue that gaining 12 health isn’t a no-value fail-case, but Kark. While Kark can kill with damage, it usually won’t, and if your Kark-opponent isn’t trying to damage you out, 12 health gain is literally pointless for you.
Review
Now that that is out of my system, this card’s potential is enormous, and I plan on experimenting with it and would even if there was no Or option on it, so that can be viewed purely as a bonus option (that taunts me with what could have been, ahem). This is a Resurrection that doesn’t need to be used immediately after your champion breaks! Since most people aren’t as in love with Resurrection as I am, it is a Surprise Attack-like effect in that it can let you play Slow (non-ambush) champions on your opponent’s turn, as long as they’re Good; unfortunately, most Good champions aren’t good (so far).
In Draft, I don’t want this card. There are very few Good 1-cost champions I want to draft and almost all of them have ambush, so using this on-turn to get them back is underwhelming, and using this off-turn is actually worse than playing that champion normally (since you give your opponent two human tokens for the privilege). Further, I don’t generally want a card that just gives 12 health, I want cards that affect the board or draw cards. However, if I’m on track for card draw and I’ve passed a lot of burn and/or I know my opponent likes drafting Burn, this can be a lifesaver. And, if you are at 7 or 8 cards in hand, 12 health can arguably be better than a draw 2. Finally, there are a lot of cards that aren’t yet on the app yet that I would happily draft this to support.
Which brings us to constructed. Silver Wing Savior, Silver Wing Lancer, and Silver Wing Paladin are all solid on-turn gold-punishers. Playing Breath of Life on-turn gives you a nice bonus of two chump blockers to protect against a potential swing-back attack (better than Invoke Pact). Being able to play them off-turn is also excellent, especially since the tokens you give your opponent either can’t block your champion or are a potential liability (and they’re less stats than Invoke Pact‘s demon for a swing back). War Lion of Valentia also abuses those small chump blockers, by threatening a major damage boost, assuming Lash/Rage support. Finally, we have two cards from Guardians of Gowana (rename of Epic Jungle): Respected Commander (a solid card for Good decks) and Bold Leader (yes, the four human tokens netted could all gain blitz from this on-turn). With so many of these champions drawing cards with Tribute/Loyalty effects, maybe this could see play as a card that’s neither a guaranteed champion nor guaranteed card draw, and maybe your handsize stays large enough that you might even want the health gain option over an “Or Draw 2.”
More realistically though, this could be a pretty reasonable card in Kark decks. 12 health for one gold, is a big deal. Replaying Angel of Light, is a big deal. Using Frantic Digging (a card some Kark decks already run) to win with Kark off-turn, is a real thing. In Kark, there are plenty of other excellent “Draw 2 Ands” you already want, so the 12 health gain is actually a potentially more desirable secondary/primary effect than card draw, which means it might actually make the deck for off-turn Kark wins over cards like Surprise Attack or Final Task that saw only fringe play.
Overall, I think it has solid potential for constructed play. The health gain effect isn’t something I generally want for my preferred playstyle, but it might enable the card to actually see play in a competitive deck. In Draft though, Good is currently just too weak to draft in general (almost always), let alone to draft a Good specific tech card.
While technically an alignment-independent re-establishing champion, 3 health on a 1-cost champion (especially a slow one) is a massive liability which threatens to remove the actual “establishing” part of the card. Since it can die to a lot of high-quality 0-cost removal or incidental effects that your opponent will generally want anyway, it becomes only a bit more than on-turn removal, that can’t be used in combat, and doesn’t have an “or draw 2” option.
In the current draft meta, 0-cost champions are valued significantly more than 1-cost champions, so having a 1-cost champion that generally aims to remove another 1-cost champion could leave you with a dead card for a while. Further, 0-cost cards that can answer this effectively like Wither, Consume, Fireball, etc. are all drafted highly, to answer those highly valued 0’s, so your opponent will be more likely to have an easy answer to the body.
In constructed, 3 damage sweeps are also common (Draka, Scarros, Draka’s Fire), as are 3 offense ambush champions (Brand and Mobilize). I haven’t even had much success with Palace Guard performing the same role, since reacting by spending your gold first just to remove 1 champion and gain a 6 offense champion (or 8) with no evasion is so unimpactful.
An alignment-independent card that clears all tokens, most 0-cost champions (Little Devil), most unblockable champions (Knight of Shadows/Temporal Enforcer), deals 4 damage to the opponent, and is a champion so a body persists that can be returned to hand to do it all again. You really can’t ask for much more from a card in Dark Draft, and I would absolutely take this over Scarros in all but the most super-duper Wild highroll decks. (Which reminds me, I added this line to my && explanation: “This happens incredibly infrequently and shouldn’t be relied on almost ever”)
This is also a perfectly solid card in Constructed; although, you would only want it if tokens/0-cost champions (particularly demons) are popular in the meta and/or you have a very specific role for it (and you have 1-cost slots available). If neither of those things are true, it’s too small and doesn’t do nearly enough by itself to be valuable. I used it in my 51 Sage AoE bounce deck (along with Javelin Thrower and Surprise Attack) to clear out any opposing 0-cost champions my bounce couldn’t deal with, and it worked great. Time Walkering this back to hand was pretty nice too (unfortunately that deck was too slow to outrace either Burn or Kark going in opposite directions).
The first Tech-Tier card. This card still scares me. Best case scenarios are deal 7 damage for 0, stop up to 10 breakthrough damage potentially from Lash/Rage for 0, save a champion that would otherwise break for 0, or use it on an incidental champion in combat to trade with an actual threat. All of those are actually really powerful. The problem though is that they’re all also preventable. If you give an unblocked attacking champion +7 offense, that champion can still be removed before it can deal damage, same with all other scenarios for this card. In other words, this card is never guaranteed to give value and it can put you into a position where you get two-for-oned (opponent uses one card to remove two or more of yours). However, if it does give value, it gives serious value.
A couple ways you can mitigate the risk are to
Use it on a low value token, when you’ve had tokens remain in play, unremoved, for a while; if your opponent hadn’t removed them yet, there is a better chance they can’t now, especially if their gold is down.
Play this on a breakthrough or unbreakable champion and follow it up with Priest of Kalnor with Loyalty (or Angelic Protector) before attacking.
Use it on an unbreakable 0-cost unblocked champion, such as Dark Knight.
In general, I wouldn’t actively draft this card unless I am an aggressive deck and/or I haven’t been able to draft a mass-discard pile banish effect yet. In either of those situations, I would say this card is actually A edging on S-Tier. Otherwise, probably D-Tier.
I have used it in constructed with a “Draw 2 And” focused incidental-token deck, and it was pretty solid at pushing damage through when my opponents weren’t expecting it. Theoretically, if my opponents start to expect it, Arm could work as a pretty nice deterrent to my opponents actually using their 0-cost removal on my cards otherwise, due to the threat of Arm, even if I didn’t actually have it in … … hand (couldn’t quite think of a Good Arm pun).
