Spreadsheet: Other
Category: Tech
Internal Category Tier: F to A Depending
Spreadsheet: Other
Category: Health Gain (B-Tier)
Internal Category Tier: D-Tier
Tier 3
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.