Air Guitarist
Instruments are influential weapons, but we don’t think any weapon is so good that you’d run a 1 mana 1/1 just to increase its durability by 1. This seems like the most niche effect possible.
Score: 1
Annoying Fan
There’s a better card in the Core set called Glacial Shard with a similar effect. This 1-drop is a bit strange because even though it’s a mech, it doesn’t really fit mech decks as it’s reactive in nature. Ideally, you’d buff it so that it would be harder to kill, making its target unable to attack for multiple turns. Menagerie decks might look for a couple of mechs and find Annoying Fan to be a reasonable fit, but it’s not a card you can expect to see a lot of.
Score: 1
Frequency Oscillator
This is a strong 1-drop for a Mech or Menagerie deck. It could also have some utility in decks running a small mech package in which there’s an incentive to reduce the cost of a specific mech. Oscillator’s discount persists until you cash it in, so you can play it on turn 1 and utilize the discount on turn 10. There’s no turn limit, which makes it flexible.
Score: 2
Classes: Mage, Paladin
Audio Medic
A 2 mana 2/3 rush is okay, but the bonus lifesteal on Finale can be nice. This is easily triggered on turn 2 and provides you with an early game swing. Its best fit is an aggressive deck looking to control the board in the early game and that misses some filler cards. Defensive decks are unlikely to use this since they’re already equipped with stronger forms of removal.
Score: 2
Classes: Aggro decks.
Hipster
This card could be better than it looks. The first thought is that a card that the opponent didn’t put in their deck has to be of a lower quality, but this is not necessarily true. You could play this on turn 2 against an aggressive deck and find removal from their class that they’d obviously not put into their deck. In a slower matchup, you can get cards that help you pressure. Of course, the discover pool will have cards that are unworthy of a constructed deck, but that didn’t seem to bother Pandaren Importer.
In addition, this card has great synergy in some classes, most notably Rogue and Priest due to their thieving tendencies.
Score: 3
Classes: Mage, Priest, Rogue, Shaman
Instrument Tech
A very important card for this expansion. Every class gets an instrument in this set, a key weapon that can often be a build-around card for an entire strategy. Having a stronger guarantee of finding it on time is a boost in consistency for these strategies. Often going to be ran as a single copy.
Score: 3
Classes: Potentially all of them but especially Demon Hunter, Druid, Shaman, and Warrior
Party Animal
A menagerie build-around card. Encourages decks to run high minion density as well as many different tribes. A 2 mana 2/3 with a hand buff is a very good deal, as you’re not sacrificing board presence to scale up your hand. The deckbuilding restriction is significant, but worth exploring.
Score: 3
Classes: Death Knight, Shaman, Warrior
Rolling Stone
This card offers decent board control for a deck that runs a lot of 1-cost cards and/or can generate them. The tribal tag could be relevant for a menagerie deck too. One class that comes to mind is Shaman, thanks to Schooling. Another is Mage, since its aggressive archetype likes to run many 1-drops on top of generating a decent number of Arcane Bolts. If a deck can consistently find a 1-drop on turn 1, Rolling Stone becomes very good follow-up on turn 2, ensuring you can fight off the opponent’s early game.
Score: 2
Mage, Shaman
Stereo Totem
This neutral totem has a relatively slow effect but one that can snowball if not answered. In other words, it’s a typical totem! Totem Shaman could be interested here, as well as menagerie decks in other classes that normally wouldn’t have access to a decent totem minion.
Score: 2
Classes: Death Knight, Shaman, Warrior
Cowbell Soloist
Congratulations to Cowbell Soloist, who manages to be the worst soloist of them all. We can’t see why you’d ever put this in your deck. For the signature card art, perhaps. It does look nice.
Score: 1
Outfit Tailor
This is strictly a handbuff card since the baseline stats are terrible. If we wanted to use something from the neutral set to buff our minions in other decks, the choice would be Rowdy Fan. Outfit Tailor’s upside is that it doubles up on any buff it has received in hand, making it scale very well with the mechanic.
Score: 2
Classes: Handbuff decks.
Paparazzi
This card would have been amazing in Death Knight if the discover bias for class cards still existed. Alas, there is no higher chance to find a class legendary, which means Death Knight’s amazing pool of options is highly diluted by trash neutrals. We expect players to try it in Blood-Ctrl Death Knight and for us to tell you it looks terrible.
Score: 1
Rowdy Fan
This is possibly the strongest aggressive neutral in the set. Its overall stat output is of a 3 mana 5/5, with 4-attack immediately transferred to a minion ready to punch on the same turn. Basically, this is a neutral Cold Blood with a built-in combo requirement satisfied.
Yes, when Rowdy Fan dies then the buff is lost but this guy has 5 health on turn 3. That’s quite difficult to kill and if you have a minion ready to attack with the buff, you’ve already gotten damage from it. If Fan ever lives multiple turns, the amount of damage it deals can be game winning for an aggressive deck. Potentially a staple.
Score: 4
Classes: Death Knight, Demon Hunter, Paladin, Priest, Shaman
Candleraiser
This card looks tempting due to its ability to create a very sticky board but is ultimately not that great. It’s conditional on being ahead on the board. It’s great on turn 4 if you can connect it, but as you reach the later stages of the game, an aggressive deck is going to have a more difficult time activating Finale.
Another important thing to note is that it doesn’t push damage. It’s banking on making minions stickier so that they can connect more damage over multiple turns, but there’s no guarantee that happens. Mass removal becomes much more effective against this card compared to a similar card of the past in Fungalmancer.
Score: 1
Merch Seller
This is a very bad ‘disruption’ card. You’re spending 4 mana on a terrible body to deny your opponent a draw from their deck. They still get a spell they might be able to use, and they thank you for wasting your time trying to stall their game plan.
Score: 1
Obsessive Fan
Rowdy Fan pushes immediate damage. This card doesn’t push damage. The Stealth keyword isn’t worth the investment required to play this card. A 4 mana 2/6 is awful. Can’t see this being used in anything but very weird decks you watch clips of on YouTube.
Score: 1
Pyrotechnician
This card generates a fire spell from any class. A 4 mana 2/5 that generates random garbage isn’t what we’re looking for when we’re playing constructed. This doesn’t reliably further our game plan and requires a significant investment of cards and mana.
Score: 1
Ghost Writer
This is a slow discover card but is quite a value engine. It fits a grindy deck, which should have no problem activating Finale consistently. We think players might be underestimating Ghost Writer because they don’t count the inherent cost associated with spending a card to do something.
Let’s say we have the option to play a 2-mana minion and a 3-mana minion, each discover a spell and pay a similar stat penalty for their effect. This card is better than running both, since it costs a single card to discover two spells. Now the drawback is obvious, as you’re not able to use those spells before turn 6 and you’re not developing bodies in the early game, but the bonus is that you have two extra card slots to invest in survival or fighting for board in the early game.
This is why Ghost Writer might be very strong for a grindy deck even though you can’t use the spells it discovers on the same turn. There are two decks that are particularly strong fits for it. Blood Death Knight because of the class’ strong discover pool. Control Priest thanks to Love Everlasting. Both classes also happen to possess Undead synergies.
Score: 3
Classes: Death Knight, Priest
Concert Promo-Drake
This is a card that’s meant to tell you that Tradeable is an evergreen keyword. It’s not meant to be played.
Score: 1
Amplified Elekk
This 10-drop is meant to be a target of Big decks. You’re never supposed to spend 10-mana to play this, only to cheat it out earlier. Big-Beast Hunter could use this. Outside shot for Big Paladin thanks to Kangor.
Score: 2
Classes: Hunter, Paladin
Festival Security
If this card’s effect was a battlecry and not Finale, we might have considered it in Handbuff decks since it scales well with buffs, but the condition is a killer. Investing buffs into a card you might not be able to use to its potential is a no-go.
Score: 1
Metrognome
This card is going to bait the creation of a lot of bad decks. The similarity to Spirit of the Frog makes it a candidate for the Shaman class, but the big difference here is that Metrognome does not specifically draw spells and is restricted to only one specific cost every time. This makes chaining it to further a win condition far less realistic. Another pretty big deal is that the card doesn’t work on 0-mana cards. This is much, much worse than Spirit of the Frog.
Score: 2
Classes: Shaman
Static Waveform
The only class that could feasibly play this card is Priest, thanks to silence effects such as Whispers of the Deep. Even then, this is no Incorporeal Corporeal. Costs 1 more mana. Isn’t an Undead. Has a worse effect.
Score: 1
Worgen Roadie
Why would we do this. Another Big Priest tech card for Wild.
Score: 1
Mish-Mash Mosher
This card basically keeps attacking the board until it dies, or the board is clear. This is a candidate for big decks, though in Paladin it clashes with Annoy-o-Troupe. A particularly interesting interaction is with The Jailer. An immune Mosher will clear the board every turn and get continuously buffed. Might become an interesting follow up to checkmate an opponent trying to race you post-Jailer, but this is a very situational scenario.
Score: 2
Classes: Big decks. Jailer decks.
Crowd Surfer
The deathrattle can hit an opponent’s minion, which makes Surfer a hilariously flavorful card but completely unplayable in practice. You can’t play this card unless you want to help your opponent.
Score: 1
Audio Amplifier
This card allows you to execute 11 mana turns in the late game that you wouldn’t normally be able to do. It specifically enables Death Beetle in Druid. As a 2 mana 2/3 that does nothing else, you need a very good reason to play this card. The increased hand size is just not worth it for Warlock.
Score: 2
Classes: Druid
Cover Artist
A condition-less Prince Taldaram for 4 mana. Cover Artist should mostly be useful to copy high value deathrattles or powerful static effects. The original Taldaram class, Warlock, is a prime candidate to utilize it in Chad Warlock. It makes it difficult for the opponent to ignore an Amorphous Slime or a Voidcaller.
Score: 3
Classes: Warlock
Freebird
Only Rogue can possibly think about running Freebird and continuously bounce it back to hand over and over, and that’s probably a terrible idea because it costs tons of mana to execute just to get to the point Freebird can threaten lethal. It’s not happening in a real deck.
Score: 1
Unpopular Has-Been
Very slow card and not any better than Savannah Highmane. We stopped playing these cards years ago. True to its name, kind of a Has-Been.
Score: 1
Photographer Fizzle
This is one of the greediest cards you can play in Hearthstone. Fizzle snaps a photograph of your hand and shuffles it into the deck. If you draw the snapshot, you can play it for 2 mana and fill your hand with the cards from the hand Fizzle copied.
This can be considered a value card for slow, attrition decks, but we’re not sure it’s even good for that purpose since these decks normally have a lot of cards in hand already. You might just be unable to cast the snapshot without burning most of its contents. Unless you can efficiently spend cards to empty your hand, Fizzle could just be mega bait.
There’s an option to run Fizzle in a late game strategy that runs a lot of cheap cards it can dump from hand, but these decks normally have a faster game plan compared to attrition and can’t afford to wait for a snapshot to be found. Ultimately, spending 3 mana on a 3/3 that shuffles a card you may never get to see is unlikely to have a good payoff.
The only cards that saw play with effects similar to Fizzle were some of the slowest decks in the format, such as Control Warrior. If you value copying certain pieces in your deck that highly, maybe it’s useful. For most purposes, this card is not reliable.
Score: 2
Classes: The greediest decks you can think of.
E.T.C. Band Manager
We’ve talked about this card a lot already. To cut it short, E.T.C is extremely situational and most often bad when utilized as a tech card Swiss army knife. It’s only remotely playable when the band members are easy/cheap to execute and help the deck pivot its macro game plan. The 4 mana 4/4 tax is significant. If a band member is normally a weak card in the deck, putting it behind the E.T.C tax makes it even worse.
A potential use that hasn’t materialized in Standard yet is using E.T.C to bypass a deckbuilding limitation. That could be the way E.T.C becomes a core card in a deck. Until then, it will be a popular card we’ll keep telling you isn’t very good.
Score: 2
Class: Every class can be baited by this.
Pozzik, Audio Engineer
Pozzik is a massive pile of stats for 4 mana. A 5/4 is hard to ignore and its deathrattle summons two 3/3 bots that spend their time chilling in your opponent’s hand until Pozzik dies. Your opponent can choose to play the bots to invalidate Pozzik’s deathrattle, but that means they are spending 3 mana on each of the 3/3’s. That’s not only impossible on curve, it’s a hard pill to swallow that could only allow you to further get ahead.
Pozzik is particularly strong in a hyper-aggressive deck, since it’s extremely focused on frontloading as much power as possible and doesn’t mind Pozzik’s decreasing effectiveness in the late game. On the other side of the table, Pozzik is most effective against slower decks that are passive in the early game, as the bots can end up clogging their hand and make it difficult for them to dig into their deck for answers.
Pozzik is a stressful threat on an opponent’s removal. The late game weakness is obvious. If the opponent has more mana to spend on the bots, Pozzik becomes a vanilla 5/4. If the opponent has more mana, they can also answer Pozzik more effectively. We suspect Pozzik will become a very powerful option for those hyper-aggressive decks with a short average game length. Meta defining, in fact.
Score: 4
Classes: Aggro decks.
Tony, King of Piracy
On the surface, this is a disruption card. You play it on turn 5, activate Finale, swap decks and randomly draw one of the opponent’s cards. They get to draw from your deck the next turn too. Once Tony is killed, transformed, or silenced, the decks switch back.
This seemingly strange disruption card becomes a scary win condition in combination with other cards. Warrior can play Tony and Fires of Zin-Azshari to flip decks and then transform the opponent’s deck, before nuking it from orbit with Steamcleaner. This is a turn 7 win button, should the Warrior be able to survive the opponent’s board and hand. If at any point Warrior manages to build a successful shell that is centered on this combo, there will be problems.
The other interaction is less talked about. It is Tony’s combo with the Jailer. This is most feasible in Druid thanks to Anub’Rekhan. If you’re playing against a deck that doesn’t have non-targeted removal that can deal with immune minions, you slap Jailer first to destroy your deck, then play Tony to put your opponent into fatigue. Since there’s no concern of Tony dying while immune, you get to draw from your opponent’s deck while they have nothing.
If you’re playing against a deck that does have the removal options to kill minions with immunity, such as a Blood Death Knight, you swap decks with Tony first and then play Jailer, nuking your opponent’s deck and putting you in fatigue. They get to draw from your deck but they’re staring down a massive board that’s about to kill them. If they clear the board and Tony dies, they get back their empty deck and start taking fatigue damage while you get to draw cards again.
While we have concerns over Warrior’s ability to execute its combo quite early in the game, potentially posing a future clock that’s difficult to handle, Druid’s wincon might be the more immediate threat.
But remember, the Jailer combo is technically available to any class, especially if it ever becomes capable of playing both cards in the same turn as Druid can.
This could get nerfed.
Score: 4
Classes: Druid, Warlock, Warrior
The One-Amalgam Band
This card can become a game ending play if you build around it aggressively. This isn’t easy to do as it requires a high density of minions on top of carefully building a deck that contains a wide variety of tribal minions. Minions like Mistake and Amalgam of the Deep only count once towards the Band, but they’re quite useful at filling ‘tribe’ slots and fueling the 7-drop more consistently. This makes Gorloc Ravager an auto-include in such a deck.
The One-Amalgam Band can have up to 8 keywords. A full-blown Amalgam is completely cracked for the cost obviously. Faster decks are going to struggle to recover from it, but it still potentially dies to a single removal piece from a defensive deck. A card that’s nice to have if your deck can support it and builds around Party Animal already, or other menagerie-linked cards such as Roaring Applause.
Score: 3
Classes: Death Knight, Shaman, Warrior
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