So, I am in the process of buying my first home (ideally a Condo in Minnesota). It has been monopolizing a lot of my energy recently, and I haven’t been able to keep up with my regular Duels ratings. I am officially putting them on hold, as well as my weekly streams on Twitch until I have purchased a place. However, I will continue to stream the monthly tournaments on the last Saturday of every month at 10am CST. (I might have that time wrong.) If there are other tournaments on the app, I’ll probably also stream those.
In the meantime, I’m still open to challenges on the app, any format: TomEpicGamin
A slow champion that puts a single token into play and has 9 or less health, why would I want this? I don’t.
That being said, 8/9 in the air is enormous stats when this sticks. It is hard to effectively block this and even harder to break it in combat, if it sticks. Drifting Terror and its token are also both Evil demons which opens up Raxxa’s Displeasure and Dark One’s Fury possibilities as well. Further, if you do use single target removal on the Terror (Drain Essence, etc.), the demon token is a considerable bonus left over too.
Overall, in Dark Draft, I don’t want to commit a precious slow champion slot for this because there are so many better/more impactful possibilities. If I’m late in the draft and low on slow champions or if I get passed four slow champions, there are still worse options than this. In constructed, same thing but even more so. It has been reasonable the few times my opponents have played it against me though.
Big airborne reestablishing champion. 8 damage is enough to break a lot of important champions and most airborne champions.
8/8 is also excellent stats in the air, since it wins in combat against all of the 6/8s on down. Only outright loses to two playable airborne champions: Draka and Sky Serpent. At 8 health it survives Whirlwind which is potentially a big deal for airborne champion fights. Finally, the airborne 8 offense threatens to kill your opponent very quickly while dodging more chump blocking.
This card was incredibly powerful in the no-core monthly tournament. At some point, I might make the argument that Hunting Wyvern is on the same level or better than Kong/Sea Titan in draft, but today is not that day. There are potential constructed metas where I would definitely make that argument.
This card is incredibly underwhelming. It does two average things averagely. Two ambush 2/2s is worse than a lot of similar effects, but two off-turn bodies for 0 is still okay. +5/+5 is reasonable damage + protection on an unblocked attacker or a solid combat trick, but there are a bunch of better ones. The best combination with this card is Hunting Pack to enable a 10 damage removal effect and gain 5 wolves, which is better value than a lot of two card combos, but that speaks much more to the value of Hunting Pack.
That being said, in constructed, you can combo this with Wolf’s Call, and by that I of course mean using the +5/+5 on one of your Wolf’s Call tokens since that is more damage than making the two wolves first and giving them blitz. Comboed with Keira, the two wolf tokens are slightly better and can be be played after Keira‘s two tokens attack as scouts, but *shrug*. In other words, this does not make wolf tokens constructed viable (and neither does Forest Dweller mainly because these wolf tokens don’t have blitz). [A potential way to push wolf decks hard could be a 0-cost event that puts a wolf token into play and gives all wolves (tokens) blitz this turn. Still almost certainly worse than Evil token combo decks though.]
So, I already went over this in my Forest Dweller rating, but after writing this review I immediately went and made a new wolf deck. The deck feels pretty reasonable so far, but I haven’t drawn/played Howl much yet. Tentatively boosting constructed tier from 7 to 6.
I do not like this card in limited for the same reason I don’t particularly like the non-Velden Loyalty-X’s in limited, except to a greater extreme. In order for this card to be actively strong as opposed to below average, it needs to draw 2. The only ways to guarantee that is for your deck to currently be 100% Sage or play this in deck 2 (when you know your next draw will be a recycled Sage card). Neither of those are practical restraints for inclusion. (If you draw both this and a Sage card in your opening hand, you could mulligan them in order to set yourself up, but that relies on you drawing Garbage Golem at the start of your turn and wanting to spend your gold on it, that turn.) Further, as an establishing card, it wants to be played as early as possible in a game. So the question becomes, at what Sage threshold are you willing to take the risk of it only drawing one card? 85% Sage – 51/60 or 26/30?
For constructed, even if you do get your deck to a Sage threshold you are comfortable with, 9/9 just isn’t big enough especially in Wild’s meta. Inherently losing in combat to Raging T-Rex, Scarros, Kong, and tieing Brachiosaurus just isn’t strong enough. It also gets removed by 9 damage effects Drain Essence/Hurricane. All of that being said, it is a potential “draw 2 and” champion you can get off of Mist Guide Herald, and that sentence alone is enough for it to be seriously worth considering.
0-cost Blitzing 5/5, not bad. 0-cost ambush 5/5, a bit better (Demon token cannibalization). Reverting to a 4/4 at end of turn is not ideal because it trades with other demon tokens and gets cleared by Pyrosaur/Ascendant Pyromancer though.
This card gets significantly better when combined with other Evil champions, especially 0-cost Evil champions like Zombie tokens. For one thing, it breaks the symmetry of token trades. If you both have zombie tokens, for instance after a Zombie Apoc, Wake the Dead, etc., yours survive in what would otherwise be a 1-for-1 trade. Further, since this effect isn’t tied to a champion like Champion of the Wicked, your opponent can’t remove the +1/+1 buff this turn; however, it can’t carry over into future turns.
In constructed, this is potentially a solid card with token creators (Eager Necromancer) and/or 1-cost token blitz enablers (The Risen/Demonic Rising). Even just this + Infest is 15/15 worth of blitz which makes this a more flexible punisher than Champion of the Wicked. Whether or not this will earn/keep a spot in midrange-combo Evil is yet to be determined.
Raxxa’s Curse, Siren’s Song, War Machine, if your opponent has any of these (and they are all ultra-high picks) this card is terrible. However, that is only 3 cards of some 300+, so they probably won’t, in limited (Raxxa’s Curse is quite common in constructed). Ignoring those cases, this card is fine, and as long as you don’t play it until you have 6 or 7 cards in hand it’s probably still fine, in limited. 9/7 is a great stat-line for bullying the 6/8s out there like Medusa, Palace Guard, Ice Drake, etc. It also hits for effectively a third of your opponent’s health, assuming it doesn’t get blocked.
In constructed, it fills one of your precious 0-cost slots in exchange for a non-evasive champion (bad against control) that is smaller than the most played Wild Champions (Raging T-rex, Brachiosaurus, Kong/Scarros). The only reason it isn’t lower for me in my constructed ratings is because of the potential with Jungle Queen and the upcoming 0-cost ambush champion that does the same thing.
Finding time to play a slow, 1-cost, 5/5 champion, whose board presence relies on having other Wild champions in play (especially a lot of Wild champions and/or Breakthrough champions) seems effectively impossible to me, even with the card draw attached. Further, even if you were able to play it, your opponent can immediately end the effect by removing this card, primarily with Scarros or Smash and Burn trigger (also potentially Lightning Strike, Draka’s Fire, Whirlwind, Hurricane, Kong, other re-establishing cards). That being said, since it doesn’t need to attack, it is effectively immune to combat removal and Spike Trap-esque effects. While it might be slightly harder to get rid of than I was originally thinking, it seems so hard to fit it into a required Wild shell.
The fact that this and most 0-cost Wild champions (wolf tokens) gets swept up by Scarros, Draka + 0-cost 2-damage effect, Draka’s Fire, etc. is devastating. You invest a bunch of time an resources into setting this up, and then your opponent incidentally stomps it all out doing what they want to be doing anyway, brutal. Further, against fast Wild decks, if you spend a turn doing nothing immediately impactful like this, you’re dead. Against control, they’ll usually be able to board clear you before you can gain significant value, although the card draw effect helps offset this, against Kark and eventually Scara’s Gift, you still don’t have the time to waste. Finally, Wild just doesn’t have other synergistic tools for extending the game long enough to potentially extract value from this. For instance, all of its in alignment board clears clear this too. Great with Hunting Pack though.
All of this being said, this has been played against me multiple times, and it has felt oppressive and terrifying. But, I won all of those games. … (I think. Correct me if I’m misremembering.)
Okay, so after I finished this and wrote up my rating for Howl dismissing the idea of a wolf deck, you can probably guess what happened. I made a new wolf deck. Got to say, deck has some legs (about 258). But in all serious, deck might have potential (if I could find more human opponents to test it against). I finally caved and put it in a Raging T-Rex, Brach, Smash and Burn shell, and the deck as a whole has felt solid so far. Boosted constructed tier from 7 to 5.
This is a Flame Strike that trades 1 damage for the 1-cost Fireball effect as an Or. Reasonable for clearing out non-demon tokens and other 3-health champions or finishing off the opponent. If I had to draft between this and Fireball, I’d take the Fireball because 0-cost removal is great as is 0-cost 3 damage on top of a 1-cost burn event to extend your reach. If you’re drafting an aggressive deck, this seems solid, reasonable in a midrange deck, underwhelming in a control deck, unless you think your opponent is going tokens.
For constructed, this actually would be a pretty decent choice for aggro Wild if you are afraid of aggro-combo human tokens. Human tokens are a terrible matchup for Wild generally speaking, so including another 1-cost card that can save you from an early assault is valuable, and unlike Hurricane etc., it can still go face for 7 instead. Is this better than Whirlwind for specifically that roll though? No, I’d say they are pretty equivalent, and Whirlwind has greater applications. However, against other aggro Wild decks, not taking 7 damage yourself might make this worth it. This card just doesn’t fit my preferred playstyle.
Apologies for missing my Tuesday/Thursday posts, but I have a solid chunk queued up after this one.
