Holy Embrace
Two spells in one card, Holy Embrace seems weak on the surface with a rate of 4 health for 2 mana, but the synergy available in the class makes it more valuable. Ruby Sanctum, Cleansing Cleric and Atiesh are all major benefactors of the spell. Dark Embrace, on the other hand, is individually strong. A 4-damage spell that can go face is a high-quality card for 2 mana.
These Embrace spells can serve both as removal and late-game nukes in an Atiesh deck, significantly increasing our damage potential in the current iteration of Control Priest. We also get both a Holy and a Shadow spell for the price of one card, which helps us further complete the Priest quest and activate Kindred synergies for these spell schools.
The more we think about it, the more we believe Holy Embrace will become a ubiquitous inclusion in Priest decks of different kinds. A potential synergy staple for the class going forward and a big boost to its finishing capabilities.
Score: 4
Specter of Despair
Minions that cannot attack are bad, as they do not allow us to dictate trades. They tend to look defensively tempting. A 2-mana 2/6 taunt will surely block the way for those pesky aggressive decks!
The issue is that this minion falls off hard later in the game and is useless in slow matchups, when opponents are not in a rush to kill us and have all the time in the world to develop bigger minions that can value trade it for free, or simply ignore it.
Spending mana on things that do not represent threats to the opponents, whether it is through pressure on the board, or accumulating resources that can threaten the opponent later, is a core principle for successful Hearthstone decks. Turn 2 against an aggressive deck is too small of a window for this card to be worthwhile even against a modestly diverse field.
Score: 1
Hold Them Off!
A buff that can be discounted makes for an interesting proposition, as the primary weakness of buffs is that they are reliant on one of our minions to stick to be able to connect. Their mana cost also makes it difficult for us to both connect the buff and push damage with it immediately.
‘Hold Them Off!’ can be Prepared to cost no mana so that our opponent cannot play around it. The sacrifice in initiative and risk at falling behind as a result of its preparation can be offset by its lifesteal effect. It creates a big, healing minion that must be dealt with if the opponent has any urgency to kill us. This makes all our minions stabilizing threats, forcing aggressive decks to overtrade into our minions.
This spell can also be combo’d with Schism to completely end our opponent’s ambitions to pressure our life total. Not an easy card to utilize as it requires a proactive build but offers a legitimate secondary win condition in faster matchups.
Score: 2
Undeath Sentence
With the right build, we can leverage this spell by only running deathrattle minions with a desired effect, turning the randomness into a guaranteed outcome. Does Priest have access to a deathrattle worth repeating for 1 mana?
Absolutely, thanks to the addition of Soothsayer. The appeal here is to cheat out Soothsayer early by preparing it, then triggering its deathrattle to summon a random 6-drop and heal us for 6. This represents a big, stabilizing swing turn.
Other options include Karov the Broken and The Egg of Khelos. Undeath Sentence is an excellent way to copy Egg of Khelos, though we may want to wait until the Egg matures into a later phase before casting it to have a chance of summoning an advanced copy.
This card is also a Shadow spell, though its usefulness at specific timings does not make it a great quest progressor. Its synergy with the reward is not appealing either. Regardless, the cheap cost and potentially high impact make Undeath Sentence a likely competitive card.
Score: 3
Mind Sweeper
This is the first support card for Azalina Soulsever, as it relies on easy access to cards from the opponent’s deck. This is not a realistic prospect for a deck that only dabbles with a Thief package, as the uptime of Sweeper will be too low.
The effect is good on paper, though not as strong as it could be, since a 2-damage AOE is significantly inferior to a 3-damage AOE and does not reliably clean up early-game boards. Add the fact that we need to spend mana on a different card to activate it, and Mind Sweeper’s timing window does not seem that powerful against aggressive decks.
Considering the steep deckbuilding requirement (Azalina), we do not consider it to be enough of a needle mover.
Score: 1
Soothsayer
A significantly more powerful version of Lightshower Elemental. When you consider the Prepared discount, they both cost the same amount of mana. However, Soothsayer summons a sizeable 6-drop on its deathrattle and only heals slightly less with its deathrattle. More importantly, Soothsayer can be cheated out on turn 4 just by preparing it on Turn 2 or 3.
Priest tends to be passive in the early game, so Prepared cards carry subtle synergy in a class that often does not have anything to do in the early game besides healing the opponent and emoting. A turn 4 Soothsayer into Undeath Sentence is an excellent line of play against aggressive decks, one that they may struggle to overcome due to the sheer healing and stat output.
We think this minion is deceptively powerful and may form a partnership with Undeath Sentence in different kinds of Priest decks. Besides avoiding other deathrattle minions, nothing else is needed to support the pair.
Score: 3
Enthralled Shade
A second Azalina support card, with the purpose of discounting some of the cards we have copied into our deck from the opponent. However, this only works on those that made their way to our hand, making the discount less powerful, especially when it is on a delayed deathrattle.
Realistically, we may have only drawn 2 or 3 of these cards by turn 3. Is discounting a couple of random cards from the opponent worth playing a 3-mana 4/3? It might be a worthwhile inclusion in an Azalina deck, but the effect is not nearly powerful enough to make us want to play Azalina in the first place.
The fact this card would not even appeal to us as a battlecry establishes it as underwhelming in our minds. We certainly have no interest in running Undeath Sentence just for the sake of triggering this deathrattle.
Score: 1
Unshackle Soul
We saw the AOE and now we see the single-target removal. This spell is completely unplayable at its baseline cost but gets discounted to 1 mana if we play a copied opponent card while holding it.
A single-target destroy effect is barely acceptable at 3 mana and obviously strong at 1 mana, but the card does have a hidden cost of needing to spend mana on another card to activate. This is okay if we managed to find a cheap card, but things get a bit more awkward if we do not have a good activator in hand.
What is more important is that Unshackle Soul, like the rest of the Azalina support cards, does not dramatically encourage us to run Azalina. It is as if playing Azalina herself is its own reward, while the support cards are serviceable bonuses. Competitively, we pass on the opportunity bestowed upon us.
Score: 1
Karov the Broken
Karov is a 6-mana 6/6 vanilla body that has no immediate impact on the board, whose only reward is a deathrattle effect that may take multiple turns to resolve. At this stage of the game, especially if the opponent is aggressive in nature, they could simply ignore it.
The reward is three miniature random legendary minions. It is important to note that many legendary minions rely on their size to be good, so a random miniature could be entirely useless. For this to make up for playing a 6-mana 6/6, we need to get miniatures that possess impactful battlecry or static effects.
There is no guarantee of this as the legendary pool is large and varied. The suggestion to play Karov alongside Undeath Sentence is not appealing either, as Soothsayer looks like the superior target that represents a real win condition in faster matchups. Karov is too slow in fast matchups and does not represent a remotely reliable win condition in slow matchups.
How to make a spin-off for The Countess that is completely unplayable.
Score: 1
Azalina Soulsever
Azalina offers Thief Priest enthusiasts the possibility of plundering the opponent for their cards without performing a single action in-game. We build our deck with 20 cards, then get 20 random cards from the opponent’s deck to complete a deck size of 40.
There are many reasons why an Azalina deck does not constitute a competitive platform. The first is that it becomes wildly inconsistent, significantly more so than a Renathal deck that runs 40 cards of choice. We end up with 20 cards of our choice diluted by 20 cards that seek to do something else entirely. This is particularly bad if we are playing against an aggressive deck, as it represents low value.
So, despite the fact our deck is less reliable than a Renathal deck, we get no health cushion or a different sort of compensation at the start of the game. Instead, we rely on mediocre payoffs to make up for the sacrifice, payoffs that rely on us drawing and spending mana on random opponent cards.
Team 5 asserts that a population of players will run an Azalina deck regardless of how bad it is. They have good reasons to believe so, since Thief Priest is a popular archetype. However, it is also an archetype that they have no interest in making competitive. And so, half of Priest’s set is spent supporting a deck that is meant to fail. We will be shocked if this is not the case.
Score: 1
Final Thoughts
Violet Hold Set Rank: 8th
Overall Power Ranking: 9th
Priest’s set is split into two. One half provides the class with good cards that can help the class inch closer to competitive viability. The other half is Azalina and friends.
We think the Thief Priest archetype is doomed to fail. Azalina turns our deck into an inconsistent mess without any real start-of-game benefit. Its best-case scenario is being played at Platinum and below by casuals. We do not believe Team 5 would intentionally make this archetype competitive due to “play pattern concerns”, which has been Priest’s issue recently. It has not been allowed to be good.
Some cards in this set are strong, and the hope is they will be enough. Soothsayer/Undeath Sentence is a solid survivability pairing that can be slapped anywhere, provided we do not run other deathrattle minions. Undeath Sentence can help Priest try to build around Egg of Khelos too.
Holy Embrace should be solid in most Priest decks, but it will be particularly powerful in current Control Priest running Atiesh. The damage potential goes up, but whether this is enough to lift the archetype from its current standing, when other classes also get better, leads to reasonable doubt.
We need half a set to do some serious heavy lifting to change Priest’s standing compared to Cataclysm. Otherwise, it will be more 45% win-rate decks and half-hearted buffs until we kick the can down to another expansion.
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