Fan Club
For 1 mana, we get two charges of a 3 health heal to all characters. This is basically two Gifts of the Naaru without the draw. The value of the self-heal alone is enough to give it a strong consideration in a defensive Priest deck, so the board heal tips it over the edge for significant use in any deck that is interested in overhealing, especially faster decks that look to snowball off the keyword.
This should see play in a variety of Priest decks. Solid and cheap location.
Score: 3
Idol’s Adoration
Two battlecries of Tour Guide without the body seems very appealing in two different Priest archetypes. The first is a Shadow Priest deck, which loved to utilize Tour Guide back in the day because having a free charge of the hero power was very good for early board control. The second is an Overheal Priest deck that looks to snowball through the mechanic. Idol’s Adoration provides it with the ability to activate many of these minions on curve, so they don’t have to survive a turn to get value.
This instrument is a glue card that’s going to be very helpful for these Priest decks to start off their assault.
Score: 3
Power Chord: Synchronize
Séance with upside on Finale. The Finale keyword here means that you can’t play the copy on the same turn unless it costs 0 mana. Séance saw play in Nomi Priest back in the day, to copy Grave Horrors and Nomi. Unless we see a Priest deck that’s laser-focused on a couple of win conditions, this is not too likely to see meaningful play. For an aggressive deck, this is comparable to Hand of A’dal, and seems far worse on the surface since the draw is much more valuable than copying your 1-drop.
Should be niche. Sometimes Séance is good enough.
Score: 2
Dreamboat
This card fits an aggressive deck that looks to snowball the board, but just how good is it? If you have two minions on board to overheal, this is a 3/4. That’s…. not great. For this card to be intimidating, you already need to be in a winning position. That doesn’t strike us as a card that will define an archetype. A complementary piece at best.
For a good comparison, look no further than Travelling Merchant. The effect is a little different, but the result is similar. Merchant saw fringe play, but Dreamboat is admittedly significantly stronger. Being a mana cheaper and having some healing utility that can help you value trade, control the board, and activate overheal, makes it a more playable card. Even if it doesn’t have the tradeable tag.
For an aggressive Priest deck, either Shadow or Overheal in particular, this has a chance.
Score: 2
Shadow Chord: Distort
This card is a bit complicated. The bottom line is that if your target minion has 5 health or less, or 5 attack or less, it dies. If neither apply, the minion shrinks by 5/5 stats.
When you consider functionality, in many situations, this card’s effect is the equivalent of dealing 5 damage to a minion. If it doesn’t kill it, it’s comparable to a very bad version of Righteous Defense. We can’t consider this to be a reliable form of removal and it feels like one mana too expensive to be good. ‘The Light! It Burns!’ and Cannibalize sandwich it in mana costs and look like superior options.
There’s a chance that Priest wants all the removal it can get, but it’s more likely that this is a useful discover option, but not something you run in your deck on purpose.
Score: 1
Harmonic Pop
Let’s think of this as the minion having a battlecry.
A 3/3 that deals 6 AOE damage is very comparable to Entitled Customer, which is a card every Control Priest deck would run. Sure, the ceiling isn’t as high when it comes to the AOE, but this has no condition. It’s extremely reliable on curve and should wipe out almost any kind of board you’re facing in the mid-game.
A 6/6 that deals 3 AOE damage can be compared to Undying Disciple, which saw play despite the fact its AOE effect was inside a deathrattle. It’s obvious that Harmonic Pop is the stronger effect here.
Both versions of this card are incredible. The only drawback is that it switches every turn, meaning you need to plan ahead and understand what kind of effect you will have on turn 6 (it depends on when you drew the spell). We think this should not dissuade any Control Priest deck from running it. It’s too good.
Score: 3
Hearthrob
A 3 mana 2/5 doesn’t get anywhere by itself, so Hearthrob needs an Overheal set up to be strong on curve. We can compare this to Hawkstrider Rancher and argue Heartrob can be played on turn 3 without setup and threaten follow up, but the difference is that Hearthrob is far less of a snowballing threat. Rancher procs off every minion you play, while healing isn’t an efficient play for the board.
Fan Club can help us summon a random 3-drop, which makes it a reasonably strong play. Tour Guide is also an option to summon a random 2-drop. In an aggressive deck focused on the overheal mechanic, this could be good enough. The Undead tag could be relevant here if we’re looking to support a draw package centered on Grave Digging, but Undead minions in general don’t fit this archetype particularly well.
Score: 2
Fight Over Me
This is a much worse spell compared to Hysteria, which could often clear full boards. Fight Over Me eliminates two minions at most, and occasionally will only clear one minion. The upside of getting these minions in your hand must be important enough for it to see play.
Therefore, a Control Priest deck running a Thief package is the most likely deck to be interested, as it provides both removal and fuels its synergies. Other decks are less likely to be interested, since Priest has so many good removal options and there’s a limit to how many you can run in a deck.
Score: 2
Love Everlasting
Control Priest might have received one of the best cards in the set. Love Everlasting looks like an extremely powerful enabler of incremental mana advantages. It is very comparable to Shadowcrafter Scabbs’ hero power. You get a 2-mana discount on the first spell you play every turn for the rest of the game if you keep chaining one every turn. This isn’t too difficult for Priest to accomplish considering its defensive archetypes have been consistently filled with spells as well as minions that discover spells.
But what really makes this trivial to keep constantly active is Sister Svalna. If you play Love Everlasting and then Svalna, you get a permanent 1-mana spell that discovers a Shadow spell at the start of your turn, and you never have to worry about chaining Love Everlasting again.
Indeed, this spell will bring Love Everlasting to a Control Priest player: The ability to play a key AOE spell two turns before it normally comes online; the option to clear an opponent’s minion while developing your own; being 2-mana ahead of your opponent every turn is a crippling advantage. This is a 3 mana Overgrowth for Priest and the card you’re looking to draw in every game. Meta defining.
Score: 4
Heartbreaker Hedanis
Hedanis is a very flashy card that doesn’t have anywhere near enough support to be as impactful as it’s screaming to be. At its baseline, it’s a 4 mana 4/4. A slower and worse Injured Blademaster. You can play it on curve and trigger a free heal to have a stronger minion in play, but it’s still not doing anything other than being a mediocre pile of stats.
If you manage to heal for over 4, which is not an easy thing to do with the tools available to the class, you get to shoot for 5 damage. It’s random. You can’t reliably direct it to the opponent’s face. It can hit a small minion and do almost nothing. Hedanis works best with Flash Heal, but Flash Heal is a terrible card for aggressive decks and not even particularly useful for Control Priest now that Xyrella is gone.
We just can’t see it. If someone finds a way to consistently win games with Hedanis, well done to them. Guess the karma points all went to Love Everlasting.
Score: 1
Final Thoughts
Festival of Legends Set Rank: 8th
Overall Power Ranking: 9th
Priest is a mixed bag. It’s received a lot of attention for the introduction of the Overheal mechanic. Yet, we suspect that this mechanic could have a rough start at the competitive level, leaving Priest with fewer options to complement some of its other strategies; but there are some very meaningful additions for the class to compete.
An Overheal focused deck just doesn’t seem great to us. Aggressive Priest decks need real finishers. They can either have burst or a significant amount of off-board damage, such as in Shadow Priest, or overwhelming buffs that leverage their board-centric game plan, such as Divine Spirit or Boon of the Ascended.
Overheal Priest doesn’t seem to have that lethality. It’s also somewhat forced to play healing cards that are not very good by themselves when it comes to trying to kill the opponent. It’s a bunch of minions that look to snowball the early game, but what happens if the deck faces removal? These are glaring issues that pop up when you try and build such a deck, so we’ll have to see if players come up with solutions.
Team 5 has very clearly attempted to help Undead Priest endure rotation. Darkbishop Benedictus, which was about to rotate out of Standard, was kept in the Core set and given both Tour Guide and Idol’s Adoration. Most of the Undead Priest shell is available, with both the burn variant and the swarm variant looking like viable options on paper. However, Voidtouched Attendant, the archetype’s very best card, is gone. This has massive ramifications for the deck both in its early game snowballing and late game reach. Can a deck recover after losing its best card? Not a lot of them do.
The good news for Priest enthusiasts is that their favorite archetype, Control Priest, looks lovely. Control Priest tends to shine when rotation occurs and there’s a fall in inevitability and power. Love Everlasting is one of the best cards in the new expansion, capable of completely taking over the game next to Svalna. Harmonic Pop is an amazing AOE effect. The amount of value and generation available to the deck means it can go forever. It can even opt for disruption through Dirty Rat if it ever needs to deal with a late game strategy equipped with an inevitable win condition that beats the normal Priest grind plan.
Strangely, what might be missing from Control Priest that could become a problem is healing! Fan Club is a good card, but there’s not quite the amount of sustain that you’d expect from Priest and many of the healing cards that remain are losing utility due to the retirement of Xyrella.
Priest has a lot of adjusting to do. We don’t think it’s going to be one of the strongest classes in the format, but it should be relevant and competitive.
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