The Comprehensive Across the Timeways Preview

Ebb and Flow

A 3-damage spell for 2 mana that can go face is already a strong addition to Druid in the current format, since its most competitive strategy involves killing opponents over the top with an OTK involving direct damage spells. This spell becomes an easy inclusion in Spell Damage Druid without reading the rest of the text box, providing redundancy for Swipe and Living Roots.

The armor bonus is not important for Spell Damage Druid, but it could be important for other Druid decks interested in stabilizing cards. The Nature tag means it can be included in Imbue Druid, where the armor bonus is more likely to be triggered.

We will note that it is almost impossible to gain the armor on turn 2, so we need to think about Ebb and Flow as a basic early game removal tool that scales later in the game. We can even see Aviana Druid running it, as the deck is desperate for survival in the early game and it can proc the armor bonus post-Aviana.

Score: 3

Contingency

Without any special synergies, Contingency is an Arcane Intellect. We have no control over our deck order, so we are essentially drawing cards randomly. Arcane Intellect is not a constructed worthy card, so without specific synergies, Contingency will not see play.

But we do not judge cards in a vacuum. Contingency happens to work extremely well with Krona, Keeper of Eons. This spell is crucial to make the Druid legendary work alongside Waveshaping. Krona discounts the bottom cards in our deck to 1 mana, then Contingency pulls them out of our deck and allows us to immediately play them to potentially swing the game.

We are high on Krona, so Contingency gets our approval through association.

Score: 3

Druid of Regrowth

A 6 mana 3/5 is utterly horrendous, so Druid of Regrowth needs to do something very special with its battlecry. It does not. Most Nature spells are extremely cheap and low impact, especially when they randomly target characters. A Rewind keyword does not substantially improve the average outcome, which is weak.

Even if Druid of Regrowth had better stats, it does not further any game plan with any consistency. The best we can do is ramp to it and try to cheese opponents, but Nature spells have a wide variety of outcomes. In comparison, Fyrakk’s spell pool is far more predictable and only targets enemies, so you can expect to blow up enemies and gain card advantage when you play it. It is funny that this card is being added to the game when Druid can simply ramp to Naralex/Fyrakk and get a much better payoff. No chance this sees play.

Score: 1

Waveshaping

There are two ways of looking at Waveshaping and we should evaluate both. The first is the standalone approach. Waveshaping is a 1 mana Nature spell that discovers a card from our deck, which is basically Tracking with a spell school. That is already a powerful card on its own and would see play in most late-game-oriented decks in the format if it were available to them. Tracking is often balanced by the class it belongs to, as Hunter is often aggressively slanted and does not value the effect as much.

Discovering a card from our deck is usually budgeted at 2 mana with a bonus (Soul Searching, Thrive in the Shadows, Cultist Map). An unconditional effect for 1 mana is a format staple.

The act of putting the other cards at the bottom of our deck does not matter. Since these cards are randomly presented as options, we have no meaningful control over it, just like we do not have control over the order of our deck. In the context of evaluating Waveshaping compared to Tracking, they are the same.

In the context of this Druid set, Waveshaping is even more powerful, as we can use it to divert our most expensive cards to the bottom of our deck, play Krona and then pull them with Contingency. In a Krona deck, Waveshaping is a crucial enabler.

This spell will be a staple in Spell-Damage Druid, Imbue Druid, Krona Druid and any other Druid deck that is not purely aggressive. From now until March 2027.

Score: 4

Kaldorei Cultivator

Cultivator is meant to be a set up card for Krona, as it puts two large beasts at the bottom of our deck, ready to be discounted to 1 mana and pulled with Contingency. The issue is that unlike Waveshaping, a strong card on its own merits, Cultivator is completely useless without Krona.

Furthermore, we believe Krona Druid will do better building its deck around Krona by adding late game haymakers to the deck that we can find every game, rather than discovering random junk. A 1 mana big beast without special keywords is not guaranteed to win us the game. A Carrier is far more threatening.

Score: 1

Endangered Dodo

An active Dodo is massive. A 5 mana 20/20 taunt across two bodies is a crazy minion to play, but the condition is so difficult to reliably achieve. Druid has no self damage effects that can control its life total. It often uses armor for sustain, which has anti-Dodo synergy. Druid does not even want to put itself that low, as it is a class that is extremely vulnerable to aggression and does not have great AOE, unlike Warlock.

The opponent can easily play around it too, by setting us up above 10 life and building a board that can kill us from that total. The Druid can technically hero power into a minion to damage itself, but that costs an additional 2 mana to its turn. A baseline Dodo is a 5 mana 5/5 taunt, which is worse than Druid of the Claw. Completely useless.

If the threshold was 15 life, we would be significantly higher on the card, as it becomes difficult for aggressive decks to avoid it before trying to finish us off. Even Pain Warlock instantly healed itself from 10 to 15 after dropping Molten Giants because there was a great danger it could be killed.

Close to greatness, but not quite there.

Score: 1

Alternate Reality

This is a joke card, like Renounce Darkness. Random Choose One cards are not going to win us Hearthstone games at an acceptable rate, even with a 1 mana discount. There is no way to reliably leverage this spell for any coherent strategy. Nothing else needs to be said.

Score: 1

Highborne Mentor

Mentor is a very expensive minion, even for a Ramp Druid deck. An 8 mana 6/6 is not an acceptable play on turn 8, even if it has the potential of swinging the game the turn after. Clearly, Mentor is meant to be a Krona/Loh target. The question becomes how powerful expensive Druid spells from the past are to justify a strategy that looks to discount Mentor.

We took an extensive look, and we can confidently say that the spell pool is extremely powerful. Druid has the strongest variety of expensive spells in the history of the game. The percentage of great Pupil discovers is high enough that every Pupil will likely offer us one choice that can swing us Hearthstone games.

This establishes Mentor as one of the better Krona targets we can have in a deck, so it is more likely to see play than players may realize when initially looking at the card. If Krona is not competitively successful, then this card will not see play.

Score: 2

Lady Azshara

Lady Azshara contains two 4-mana locations and a legendary that interacts with them. These locations can be considered ramping payoffs, as they are stronger at the later stages of the game.

Zin-Azshari copies a friendly minion, so it is only strong when we have a large minion in play. The Well of Eternity is only strong when we have a lot of mana to spend on the temporary spells we get.

Azshara herself is a vanilla 5 mana 5/5. She upgrades one location into a more powerful version and destroys the other. These upgrades do not change the timings in which these locations are useful.

This fabled package seems slow. Azshara is particularly punishing to play, as she has no immediate impact on the board and seems drastically worse than Mistah Vistah, which we only play in Druid decks to get Tourist access to Mage cards.

But there is one saving grace for this fabled package. Zin-Azshari is a more reliable location to copy Owlonius in Spell-Damage Druid than Elise. With Elise, we are still at the mercy of some RNG to provide us with a copy option and we also need to spend mana on Elise to get there. Here, we have a 4-mana location in our deck that always does what we need it to do.

Considering that Elise requires us to play a couple of bad cards to activate her condition, putting Azshara and the Well of Eternity in our deck, which are useless in Spell-Damage Druid, might be a price worth paying.

We think this legendary becomes a staple for Spell-Damage Druid and may only see play in the future if Druid gets more accelerated forms of ramp to take advantage of the Well of Eternity, such as Overgrowth or Nourish.

Score: 3

Krona, Keeper of Eons

Krona discounts the bottom five cards in our deck to 1 mana, which immediately makes us think of a deck that resembles Loh Druid, to take advantage of this massive discount effect. We only need to remember From the Depths, a tamer discount card, to understand how powerful of an effect Krona possesses. Its competitive aspirations are dependent on our ability to tap into the bottom of our deck after playing the legendary, as From the Depths was both a discount and a digging card.

Thankfully for Druid enjoyers, Krona has great support cards. Waveshaping helps us direct our best Krona targets to the bottom of our deck. Tortollan Traveler, either on its own or alongside Oaken Summons, can ensure we find Krona as consistently as Aviana Druid can find Aviana. Krona will be dropping to the board on turn 4-5 every game. Contingency is a game-winning follow-up to Krona, while Druid also possesses multiple minion tutors that can perform a similar role post-Krona, such as Story of Barnabus and Reforestation, with the hopes of hitting a discounted minion.

Considering how powerful From the Depths was and the fact we can find Krona so consistently, we must give this legendary the maximum respect. Krona has potential to do similar things to Loh, though admittedly, it is not as dramatic of a slam dunk. Krona only discounts a small portion of our deck and is harder to utilize. Good thing we will be playing Loh in this deck too.

Here we go again?

Score: 4

Final Thoughts

Across the Timeways Set Rank: 3rd

Overall Power Ranking: 7th

Druid’s success this expansion is tied to perfecting a new strategy while not collapsing under the pressure of a more aggressive meta composition.

We respect Krona and believe this card can potentially bring back Loh Druid in a slightly different form, though we recognize the archetype may suffer from some consistency issues. The reliance on Contingency and Waveshaping are the main concerns here. We will have to see whether Tortollan Travelers will be enough to pull Krona every game, or whether Oaken Summons will also be required.

Should this archetype prove to be competitive, it will become an absolute menace for any slower strategy. The best way to combat it will be to rush it down. We do expect aggressive decks to become more powerful, which is why we will be surprised if Krona Druid ended up as an elite performer. But we suspect this is the kind of archetype that can become popular and influential even with a modest win rate.

The other promising avenue for Druid is Owlonius. This strategy is receiving a big boost in consistency thanks to Zin-Azshari, Waveshaping and ‘Ebb and Flow’. No longer will Druid be at the mercy of Elise RNG of finding the right location. It can copy Owlonius every game now. That is a big deal in late game matchups and should not be underestimated. Spell-Damage Druid is also less vulnerable to aggression compared to an expected Krona Druid build, so if all else fails, Druid should be competitive through this path.

There is a small possibility of Imbue Druid coming back or Aviana Druid becoming slightly better, but our expectation is that these strategies did not receive a meaningful enough power injection to move them to the forefront.

Overall, we expect Druid to sit in a middling position. If aggression underperforms, it has a great chance of shooting to the top. But if Krona Druid cannot deal with aggression, the class may only have Spell-Damage Druid to maintain a competitive place in the game, a deck that is notoriously skewed to higher levels of play and does not have wide appeal.