I’ve been given the opportunity to spoil one of the Epic Uprising cards: No Escape. I received this image this afternoon, and I am still figuring out just how crazy it is.
My first impression Dark Draft tier rating for this card is Always Desirable. This has a similar effect to Banishment, remove a champion and the current player gains a card in hand, but it breaks instead of banishes, it has a draw 2 option, and the +1 card effect is both more powerful and more conditional/exploitable.
It can be more powerful because if you play it on your turn, you can get back your Sea Titan in your discard pile, instead of drawing a random card. However, this does mean that you aren’t getting any closer to drawing through your deck to win, and if you don’t have a worthwhile champion to return, this becomes weaker.
If you play it on your opponent’s turn, the same conditions apply. If they have a strong champion in their discard pile, they can take that champion back. If they don’t (for example if you Amnesia them beforehand), too bad for them. This is the aspect of the card that intrigues me the most. In a heavy-discard pile hate deck this can effectively function as a break target champion on your opponent’s turn with no draw back. If there isn’t a great time to do that, it can function as a strong break target champion and get a great champion back into your hand. If there isn’t a great time to do that, it can always just draw 2 cards. In other words, this card has 3 potentially solid to amazing applications. (Man playing this to break an ambushed in champion before it can be declared as a blocker, and, gaining back your most situationally valuable champion in your discard pile would be sick.)
Another cool part about this card is that if you target your own champion on your turn, you could break that champion and then immediately return it to your hand with the second half of this card’s resolution. You would pretty much never want to do this…But, if your opponent has 3 demons in play and casts Psionic Assault on you, you could use this on your expended Markus, Watch Captain to break it and return it to hand. Then, at the end of your turn when you are forced to discard, put him into play as a prepared 10/10, banish the 3 demons, and potentially draw a card from loyalty. Bam! (I’m fairly certain this is correct.)
This is definitely a card I will want to draft. I have not had a chance to decide if I’ll want to add it to any of my constructed decks, but I probably will.
**EDIT** It was pointed out to me that, in my excitement, I didn’t realize that your opponent could always, at minimum, return to hand their champion that was just broken. This makes the card significantly less appealing to me. My Dark Draft rating for it drops to Always Acceptable, but I still think it is viable in constructed decks: Crystal Golem.*
I think Banishment’s the right comparison, the break mode is a last resort when off-turn (at best a 1-cost Vanish), but on-turn it’s nice. Bit more variance than Banishment, can be better or worse depending on your discard, but basically the same dynamic. And, of course, it’s Evil, so hits all those nice Evil loyalties and ally triggers. All-in-all, though, it’s hard to see why I’d take this over something like Necrovirus.