This is a continuation of my ratings of all cards for Dark Draft.
A link to my full tier list may be found here. My reasoning for each card can be found here.
Final 8 Tyrants Cards
The Gudgeon Rating
Always Acceptable
Card draw is essential in limited formats. Getting a 2/1 unblockable champion that protects you from most burn (Flamestrike not Draka’s Fire), most discard pile banish (Amnesia/Grave Demon/Keeper of Secrets not Guilt Demon), and some discard effects (Psionic Assault/Thought Plucker-tribute not Knight of Shadows or Thought Plucker-deal damage trigger) is a nice bonus.
Generally, it is also much safer to draw 2 cards on your turn than your opponent’s. Unfortunately for The Gudgeon though, it competes with the other slow champions/on-your-turn effects like Kong, White Knight, Army of the Apocalypse, Divine Judgement, etc.
The best part of The Gudgeon is its interaction with Soul Hunter and Plague Zombies (to a lesser extent Fairy Trickster, Ice Drake/Frost Giant, and Scarros). For example, say you have The Gudgeon in play and your opponent has Soul Hunter in play. You Lightning Strike their Soul Hunter. What happens?
Yup, since you are untargetable, and your opponent must target a player to be affected by Soul Hunter‘s non-optional effect, they must target themself. Pretty nice. Soul Hunter and Plague Zombies are particularly nasty because it is less likely that the official take back rule will apply. If an opponent plays Plague Zombies (while you have The Gudgeon in play), attacks with a zombie, and then passes initiative, if you break all their zombies, it is too late for them to take back playing Plague Zombies, so your opponent must take the Plague Zombie damage to their face.
Cards that do not target a player are not stopped by The Gudgeon. This includes Blind Faith, Raxxa Demon Tyrant, board clears like Apocalypse, etc.
Zealous Necromancer Rating
Situationally Acceptable
Ambush + tribute -> draw a card is nice, but 4 defense with only 3 offense is not.
That being said, if your opponent can’t remove Zealous Necromancer or board clear you, this card can take control of a game. Gaining a zombie after each and every non-zombie champion breaks, including your opponent’s champions and both players non-zombie tokens, means that you can have a hard to exhaust horde of chump blockers if nothing else.
This is particularly nasty against decks with human tokens because you can block their human token with a zombie, break the human token in combat, and then gain a new prepared zombie token to block the next attacking human token. In addition, if your opponent chump blocks your champions with any non-zombie champion, you still get a zombie.
Zealous Necromancer has won games both for and against me, but I still don’t like drafting/playing it much. If I’m going tokens or I expect my opponent to be going tokens (or if the rest of the pack is bad), I’ll draft this.
Second Wind Rating
Always Desirable
5 health with recycle can frequently be just enough to keep you out of burn range for an extra turn or two. This is especially strong because a lot of burn wins can revolve around using 2 1-cost burn cards in a row, one at the end of your turn after you’ve spent your gold, and a second at the start of their turn before you can spend a gold. Not only can Second Wind save you here, but it punishes your opponent for wasting an entire turn not affecting the board with their gold.
Second Wind’s recycle is also indirectly stronger after Uprising because, with the addition of Erratic Research and Grave Demon (plus a seemingly faster game pace), it is much less likely to win by drawing through your deck. I particularly like this card with Memory Spirit.
Without recycle this would be so much worse.
Urgent Messengers Rating
Always Desirable
Off-turn draw 2 with a perk (usually 2 chump blockers). Great.
Temporal Shift Rating
Always Acceptable
A weaker Erase, usually. As fast bounce removal that maintains both players’ handsize, this can be a nice tempo play, and can theoretically be stronger than Erase in discard-based control decks. However, draw 2 is usually better than forcing your opponent to choose 1 card from their hand to banish.
An alternate use of this card is to target an opponent’s token. Not only do you remove the token from play, but your opponent still has to banish a card from their hand. While this is a nice trick and a reasonable card, I would still rather have Erase.
Vanishing Rating
Always Desirable
This can be brutal.
Use this to return an ambushed in Lurking Giant to hand, remove an ambushed in token chump blocker, return a slow champion like Thundarus to hand, or even return your own Rampaging Wurm (that started the turn in play) for a second attack. All of these uses are excellent.
Even when used to return an opponent’s champion to hand (net -1 card in hand for you and +1 card in hand for your opponent), the board advantage this can give you is huge. It’s also Sage and can draw 2.
Smash and Burn Rating
Always Desirable
One of my favorite cards.
9 times out of 10, I use this purely to draw 2 cards largely ignoring the +5/+5 buff. Then, a few turns later, I trigger it to break one of a plethora of 6 or less defense champions including Avenging Angel, Strafing Dragon, Thought Plucker, etc. This alone makes this one of the best “draw 2 and” cards in the game. Even if you only have 3 other Wild 1-cost cards in your deck, you’ll still probably get the trigger, or at least force the use of a discard pile banish card after you’ve already resolved the draw 2 effect.
+5/+5 can be nice too. I have used it to buff a champion to win a combat on multiple occasions, but I almost always do it only after my opponent spends their gold. It would be pretty awful to use this to buff a champion just to have your opponent Erase or otherwise remove it before it can do damage.
Wolf’s Bite Rating
Always First Pickable
One of my most included cards in constructed, and it’s pretty great in limited formats too.
This breaks Muse and recycles and gives you a wolf.
There are few cards that can trade with a Muse and put you ahead, for that reason alone, this card is amazing. It can also be used to enable Feeding Frenzy, finish off a damaged champion, create an emergency chump blocker, or even convince an opponent to make a game losing block.
I love this card.
Conclusion
And with that, I have finally re-rated all of the cards up through Uprising.
I still want to go through and clean up the now 46,032 word beast of an article with all of the ratings though (Epic Card Game: Dark Draft Card Ratings). I’ll make another post to let everyone know when it is complete…at least until the next expansion releases…followed by the inevitable re-rating of at least that expansion…
Excellent as always, thanks for these analysis and write-ups.