The Comprehensive Festival of Legends Preview

 

Data Reaper Report - Warrior

Razorfen Rockstar

Razorfen Rockstar

First, let’s settle that this card has no applications in aggressive decks. Warrior might care about tribal tags, but not to an extent that it would play 1-drops that don’t synergize with its game plan. If you’re looking at Control Warrior, this card is worse standalone compared to Armor Vendor. Considering the drawback of Vendor is irrelevant for such an archetype, it provides immediate armor gain. For Rockstar to generate as much armor as Vendor, you need to invest in two additional sources of armor. That’s a bit sad.

Vendor might be the card that saves Rockstar from being completely unplayable, as they work well together. It seems to be meant to facilitate Drumkit, an instrument we’ll mention later, since Rockstar activates it twice every time. We are whelmed.

Score: 2

Verse Riff

Verse Riff

This is a 2-mana Claw. If you happen to activate Finale at a later stage in the game, it repeats as one of the other Riffs. That might not be completely terrible, but riffs are not relics. There is no hard scaling on the cards, there is no Relic Vault to boost them further and there is no Xy’mox to build up to. If you play this in the mid-game after Chorus Riff was played, it becomes a reasonable constructed card. If you happen to play this in the late game after Bridge Riff, it sounds great, but we’re talking about landing Finale after turn 7.

We’ll go one step further and say that if you took out Finale from this card, it wouldn’t be anywhere near broken. If you reduced its cost to 1 mana, it wouldn’t feel egregiously offensive either. This could have been better.

Score: 2

Drum Soloist

Drum Soloist

This might be the ‘strongest’ soloist of them all! The reason we say this is that Drum Soloist at its baseline still does ‘something’. It’s a 5/5 taunt. That’s not great, but you can drop it if you need to, and it still offers you some protection. Once it’s active, it’s quite powerful. A 7/7 with rush and taunt is a good mid-game swing. Warrior’s likely passivity in the early game makes the condition easier to swallow and the card is a great target for Blackrock & Roll. The tribal tag could also be relevant, as Warrior was missing a dragon in a potential menagerie deck.

To avoid giving every soloist in this set a 1, we’ll give the best one a slightly different score.

Score: 2

Chorus Riff

Chorus Riff

Remember Call to Adventure? That Paladin spell that saw very fringe play? Chorus Riff is worse because its minion draw effect isn’t even targeted. If you play Verse Riff on turn 2 into a turn 3 Chorus Riff, you get a free Claw, which is barely worth 1 mana and puts this card on par with a serviceable constructed card. The Riffs only become strong when the option is available to follow a Bridge Riff after turn 6. That’s the biggest payoff of this package.

Again, a simple question is whether this card would be too good at 2 mana? Nope. Alternatively, would this card be too good if it didn’t have the Finale keyword and always repeated the last Riff? Once again, we don’t think it would be too good.

The good news is that these cards will be buffed if they bomb. Relics had a rough start too.

Score: 2

Power Slider

Power Slider

This reminds us of Rhyme Spinner, the Rogue card with a similar ability but works on combo cards. Power Slider feeds off different minion tribes you’ve played this game, which seems like a more difficult condition to pull off considering it limits deckbuilding quite substantially. Slider doesn’t feed itself and doesn’t have cards like Breakdance and Shadowstep to scale up.

In fact, you must commit to a full Menagerie deck to juice up Power Slider, considering that even if you played 3 minions with different tribal tags, this would only be a 3 mana 4/5 rusher, which is hardly game breaking. That’s basically a single charge of Construct Quarter!

This card isn’t terrible, but it could have been so much better without destroying the format with its oppressive stats.

Score: 2

Kodohide Drumkit

Kodohide Drumkit

Drumkit doesn’t upgrade based on the armor count, but every instance of armor gain. If you play Shield Block, that’s one upgrade. If you play Armor Vendor, that’s one upgrade. This weapon works best with Rockstar since the 1-drop doubles up any instance of armor gain from another card.

Let’s think of the simplest scenario. If we play Drumkit on turn 4, a single source of armor alongside our hero power upgrades it to deal 3 damage on the 2nd swing. That’s a reasonable effect to go along with a 3/2 weapon for 4 mana. The problem, of course, is that this AOE effect is delayed, which makes it less powerful since there will be moments you need to clear the board immediately or risk taking too much damage. You can think of a situation in which you draw this off the top of your deck while staring at an opponent’s board. It won’t save you in those moments and it gets significantly worse when you draw it after turn 4.

The good news is that if your opponent avoids playing more minions into Drumkit, you can hold the charge and continue upgrading it while your opponent stares at an increasingly powerful board clear coming their way. You can continue banking mana upgrading the effect and choose to swing it when you can develop a board on the same turn. It’s no Shield Shatter, but it’s okay.

Score: 2

Roaring Applause

Roaring Applause

Roaring Applause is best compared to Impending Catastrophe. At its baseline, it draws one card, with the number increasing with every minion type you control. So if you have a single tribal minion on the board, this card already draws 2 for 2 mana. If you control two different tribal minions, you’re drawing 3, which is very good.

Impending Catastrophe is arguably easier to trigger and requires less of a deckbuilding investment, but we’re talking about one of the best draw engines in the format. There’s no shame in being slightly worse than that.

In fact, Roaring Applause may have a use that’s broader than Catastrophe. After all, you can slap tribal tags across many different types of Warrior decks and you’re not forced to run a specific package to support it. Its floor is already so good (this card should always draw a minimum of 2 cards) that it’s probably going into every Warrior deck that plays minions.

Don’t over fixate on the menagerie aspect. This is not a Power Slider. We don’t need 8 different tribes in our deck to make Applause a very powerful draw engine. It’s going to range from very good to insane, depending on the makeup of the deck.

Score: 4

Bridge Riff

Bridge Riff

The final and most expensive Riff. Bridge seems to be the subtle payoff of the package, as the most powerful thing you can do is play Bridge Riff on turn 6 and then connect Finale with one of the other Riffs, repeating Bridge Riff, on turn 7.

A 4/3 rush and a 3/4 Taunt for 6 mana passes the smell test assuming you’ve played a cheaper Riff earlier in the game and you’re connecting Finale here. The card is very comparable to Hunter’s ‘To My Side’. The card is worse without the Finale effect though. Considering it’s good only if you’ve played a bad card earlier in the game, we think that this package could use a little tuning up.

We will say one thing. If Tony Warrior becomes a competitive deck, it will play Riffs because of its minion tutoring utility. Other decks are less likely to touch this package as it is currently constructed.

Score: 2

Rock Master Voone

Rock Master Voone

Voone was a bad card in Rastakhan’s Rumble and it’s likely to be a bad card now. The issue with Voone is that it’s an extremely greedy card with terrible stats and no immediate impact on the board. If you’re playing a slow deck with big threats, are you even going to have time to play all of the copies that Voone gives you or are you going to die because you basically passed on turn 4?

In a faster deck, Voone is more passable in terms of application because you copy a lot of cheaper minions, but once again, you’re playing a 4 mana 4/3 in a deck that absolutely does not want to take turns off. What’s worse is that in a fast deck that develops minions in the early game, there’s no guarantee that Voone will even give you that much card advantage.

The bottom line is that Voone’s stats and cost suck. Sometimes it’s better to leave the “soul of the card” behind if that soul sucks and prevents it from being played. A 3-mana Voone is the way to soothe this soul.

Score: 1

Blackrock ‘n’ Roll

Blackrock 'n' Roll

This might be the biggest sleeper of the set because of the class it’s in. Blackrock ‘n’ Roll is a legitimate win condition for a slower Warrior deck running a heavy top end of threats. The class is filled to the brim with high-cost minions that scale exponentially with this buff, such as Trenchstalker and Remornia. Turn 5 Blackrock ‘n’ Roll puts a serious clock on the opponent, as it cannot afford letting you get to the late game and find that game winning threat. If the Warrior is given time, they can play Blackrock ‘n’ Roll, followed by Lor’themar Theron and have a 34/34 Trenchstalker waiting in the deck. Remornia becomes a 24-attack weapon. Those are single cards that just kill your opponents on the spot.

Sure, this seems incredibly greedy and optimistic. Blackrock ‘n’ Rock is a turn 5 “do nothing” card. But there have been plenty of turn 5 “do nothing” cards that have proven to be incredibly powerful and meta warping. It all depends on how powerful the payoff is if you don’t manage to rush down an opponent who has spent that one turn doing nothing. Luna’s Pocket Galaxy is a very similar effect that operated in the same timing.

We’re not sure whether this card sees immediate play because we have serious reservations about the rest of the class, but Blackrock ‘n’ Roll offers real inevitability to Warrior in a single card. This has been something it has painfully missed for the last 10 months and it’s something it should appreciate eventually.

Score: 4

 

Final Thoughts

Festival of Legends Set Rank: 9th

Overall Power Ranking:  11th

We’re not throwing the towel on Warrior, but we’ll admit that things look rough for the class. We will say that some of the cards it has received are getting a bad rep simply because they’re associated with Warrior. The main problem of the class is no longer how it wins, but how it survives until it gets there.

Indeed, there’s a twist of fate when it comes to evaluating the class. For months, Warrior has had the defensive shell capable of housing a win condition, but not the win condition itself. Now that it is getting two potentially very strong win conditions that some other classes would envy, it may not have the survivability package required to support it, as many of those tools are rotating out.

Let’s talk about Tony, King of Piracy. Tony/Fires of Zin-Azshari is a turn 7 combo that transforms the opponent’s deck. If your opponent kills Tony, you play Steamcleaner and put them in fatigue. If the opponent cannot kill the Warrior with their board and hand, they’re done. This is a very fast clock, but Tony Warrior looks incredibly fragile. Very atypical of a Control Warrior, it’s very tough for it to survive the sustained pressure that most other classes in the format are capable of dishing out. We wouldn’t be surprised if this combo gets nerfed the moment Warrior gets the strong defensive tools to support it, but its current tools are at the level of a 2014 Control Warrior.

This is why we have more faith in Blackrock ‘n’ Roll. Since the defensive toolkit of the class isn’t stellar, we can use big threats to control the game for us. Warrior has a variety of beefy minions that become completely insane when they’re buffed by the legendary spell, some of them capable of ending the game on the spot. A Blackrock & Roll Warrior can be built in different ways. It could be a “big” deck that’s very dense with minions, possibly even running Renathal just to tide it over the early game. Or it could have a highly curated package of minions, preferably taunts that get drawn by Last Stand and can shut down aggressive decks. You then top off the deck with Trenchstalker and Remornia to kill the slower decks.

Warrior also has early game options. A menagerie package could birth a new Warrior deck that resembles Rush Warrior from Forged in the Barrens. The issue here is the absence of hand buffs or board buffs that can help it close out games. It’s certainly got the card draw to support it thanks to Roaring Applause. Enrage Warrior is also around, though there are doubts on whether it can find new cards that both upgrade and complement its strategy.

Yes, Warrior is not in the best position on paper. Yes, Riffs probably suck. This expansion could be a painful transitional period, but there are signs of steps being made in the right direction. A competitive Warrior deck emerging next week wouldn’t even surprise us. Just believe in Rock ‘n Roll.

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