The Comprehensive Fall of Ulduar Preview

 

Tentacle Tender

This is another Chaotic Tendril generator that we struggle to get behind. Tender has the Rancher statline with 5-health for a 3-drop, which means it’s quite difficult to kill on curve and might be able to generate more than one Tendril. However, we struggle to envision the big picture here. Miracle Rogue has a spell-centric shell that can discount Yogg-Saron quite quickly to ramp the Tendril late game, but defensive Warlock strategies aren’t structured in a way that takes advantage of Yogg particularly well.

The most important point might be that Warlock late game strategies have no need for Yogg since their late game win conditions are already very fleshed out and effective. The class basically never runs out of resources and is blessed with multiple complementary plans to Symphony/Sargeras that carry strong inevitability. We just don’t see the appeal of Tendrils in Warlock.

Score: 1

Curse of Flesh

This card might offer the most cost-efficient way to instantly lose the game. For 1 mana, we give the opponent the chance to completely overwhelm us. Correct utilization of Curse of Flesh seems like pure fantasy. For the card to be remotely effective, we need to have a significant board and our opponent needs to be close to death. If we’re playing an aggressive deck and cast Curse of Flesh, nothing stops the opponent from using spells to clear the board and heal up. There is just no world in which we run this card in Imp Warlock when it’s a dead draw for most of the game.

In defensive strategies, this is even worse, since you don’t even pressure your opponent to the point using health as a resource becomes a serious problem for them. We suspect the biggest highlights from Curse of Flesh will be when the first Chaotic Tendril randomly casts it. We might be a bit upset this spell has entered the pool at the timing it did.

Score: 1

Encroaching Insanity

At 3-mana, this card has no impact on the board or the general state of the game. This is strictly a combo card, which might be used for two different purposes that could end up overlapping.

The first usage is amplifying the fatigue package. Encroaching Insanity ramps up your fatigue cards to be more powerful. The downside is that it costs 3-mana, does nothing else, and can just kill you if you don’t have Harp equipped or a Void Virtuoso in play. The upside is that by ramping your fatigue clock, you can turn Crescendo into a serious late game nuke. A slower Warlock might consider the Fatigue package for that reason, though you could argue that Abyssal Curses do a better job at closing out games for defensive strategies. That requires testing.

The second usage is abusing the card with Lady Darkvein to OTK your opponent. This is a bit tricky to do without killing yourself, but playing Lady Darkvein, Devourer of Souls, Void Virtuoso, and Coil+Defile after casting Encroaching Insanity will deal massive OTK damage to the opponent. We’re talking about a number that’s either 52 or 68 damage depending on whether you play one or both copies of Encroaching Insanity during the game. You could build your deck to top out at Sargeras and Darkvein, so that Movement of Pride will occasionally draw you a 0-mana Darkvein. It’s an optimistic combo, but it’s cute enough to try.

Score: 2

Final Thoughts: Encroaching Insanity should see experimentation with the Fatigue package, but executing OTK’s with the card seems to require a lot of combo pieces. The rest of the set is forgettable. Warlock will stick to Sargeras/Symphony as its primary late game win condition.