The Comprehensive Fractured in Alterac Valley Preview

 

Luminous Geode

This card looks very bad. The initial body is awful for 2 mana, and the ability is difficult to execute in a meaningful way. Geode encourages extreme aggression and yet requires support of healing cards. It’s just a weird combination.

Score: 1

Deliverance

Priest has a great removal toolkit, and Deliverance is a bit too conditional to our tastes to see use. The class is also not great at damage-based removal, which means it is difficult for it to execute honorable kills. Likely to fall through the cracks because of superior options elsewhere.

Score: 1

Spirit Guide

This is a great draw engine in Control Priest decks, especially when they’re likely to utilize the deathrattle mechanic thanks to Xyrella and Undying Amulet. Drawing two spells of different schools means you are very likely to hit some valuable cards if you skew deckbuilding just a bit. It makes Control Priests suddenly excellent at drawing through their deck. A 5 mana 5/5 taunt that draws two cards is just good.

Score: 3

Bless

This card is so ridiculously strong that it can give rise to an entirely new archetype. We’re not sure about the return of ‘Inner Fire’ Priest, but an aggressive Priest deck centered on high health early game minions already has a decent shell. The problem of the deck is the lack of lethality and consistent early game pressure. Bless can lead to early blow outs with 1-drops such as Frazzled Freshman and Imprisoned Homunculus looking like prime targets. In a way, Bless is stronger than Inner Fire as a standalone card, but doesn’t have a Divine Spirit partner to get super crazy when it comes to finishing combos.

But the card isn’t necessarily restricted to aggressive strategies. Miracle Priest probably instantly includes it. Its combo with Samuro is absolutely disgusting, to the point we wonder whether it can have other applications in Control Priest decks that would make it worthwhile. In any case, if Frazzled Freshman becomes meta, this is the reason why.

Score: 4

Stormpike Aid Station

This card seems highly optimistic. It’s hard for us to envision a Priest deck that can effectively flood the board and snowball the game with Aid Station, before buffing its board with Luminous Geode in a Savage Roar fashion. It just seems like a fantasy. Then again, Lion’s Frenzy also looked like a fantasy win condition a few months ago, so maybe we’re missing something. Or maybe this card is just trash.

Score: 1

Undying Disciple

It’s important to note that Xyrella does repeat the deathrattle of this card, dealing the 3 AOE damage that an unbuffed Disciple normally deals. This gives the archetype a way to clear the board with Xyrella, which is important since we’re spending 8 mana on that turn. With some Undying Amulet shenanigans, Disciple can certainly lock out games, but we’re not too excited about it. It’s a serviceable card but the stats make it slow, and it’s very weak on an empty board. We think Lightshower Elemental is the better 6-drop in general.

Score: 2

Gift of the Naaru

This card is nuts. For the price of Renew, a card that was nerfed at some point, we’re getting a healing effect for all characters that is tied to a ‘conditional’ draw effect. The condition is very easy to trigger, and if our opponent decides not to hit us in the face because they’re so scared of it, we’re quite happy too. We also do not care about healing our opponent whatsoever. We’re playing Priest. The game plan is to make them concede.

So, Priest is getting a heal for 3 and cycle for 1 mana. That’s going to be inserted into almost every Priest deck without question. Even an aggressive deck might play this. It’s that good.

Score: 4

Shadow Word: Devour

This card works extremely well with both Shadowcloth Needle and Bless, so we think it has a chance of finding use in either defensive or aggressive decks depending on the shell. The interaction with Needle is outrageously good and might help the card we saw a lot of potential in see more use. With the addition of Bless things become more interesting. Not only does it give you the ability to clear enemy minions, but it also fuels your own win condition. There are many scenarios in the early game where Devour on your 1-drop can be a backbreaking swing. You could always leech off your own minions to get a big Bless off later as well. Pretty flexible.

Score: 3

Najak Hexxen

A new way to yoink! Hexxen is a worse body compared to Cabal Acolyte, but its ability is targeted rather than being random. The obvious problem? The mind control effect is temporary unless you work around it with a silence effect, such as Focused Will, or can trade away the minion you stole, which is very optimistic. It’s a bit hard for us to accept silence effects as core cards in a Control Priest deck, especially if the deathrattle theme becomes important, but this isn’t an outright horrible card to utilize. It just lacks a bit of synergy with what we seem to be encouraged to do in Alterac Valley. Priest can be an unpredictable class, and this is another unpredictable toy it can pull from the drawer at any time.

Score: 2

Xyrella, the Devout

Xyrella offers a big payoff for a Control Priest deck running a Deathrattle theme, and there’s not a great deck building sacrifice to utilize her well. She just works great with Undying Amulet. We don’t need to take drastic measures to ‘juice’ her up, like we do with Magister Dawngrasp, since it involves developing minions on the board as part of our natural curve. So, she should be solid on-curve and have great late game scaling. With Lightshower Elementals, she can offer a massive heal. She can clear the board with Undying Disciple. She can draw cards with Spirit Guide. Xyrella can basically do anything you want her to do and is only limited by the current card pool.

Having said that, she doesn’t have quite the same late game lethality that Dawngrasp can get to, but the hero power helps at wearing down the opponent. Having a Mind Blast every other turn is strong and might be the best part of her. Xyrella is strong, but her relatively slow pace and impact makes her just a touch below the giga-nutty hero cards for us.

Score: 3

Final Thoughts

Fractured in Alterac Valley Set Rank: 9^th

Overall Power Ranking: 10^th

Priest got some very powerful cards. No class set was really a ‘dud’ set. It’s just that the Priest strategies that we can see emerging in Alterac Valley have question marks hanging over their heads. Then again, we thought that Aggro Shadow Priest would be a pile of garbage in Stormwind, and that deck was so good that it got nerfed, so what do we even know!

Control Priest decks got some finishing potential. Undying Amulet was already here, but Xyrella is a big boost to that deathrattle-themed controlling strategy. You can now draw like a maniac thanks to Spirit Guide and Gift of the Naaru. You have unbelievable healing potential and incredible resilience. You can grind out anyone to dust and having a Mind Blast every two turns helps a lot in closing games.

But is grinding out decks going to be a viable strategy? United in Stormwind introduced a great deal of lethality and inevitability while Fractured in Alterac Valley is injecting more of that. It’s less likely for a new set to slow down the meta significantly. The meta usually slows down with rotation and balance changes, less so with new cards. So, if the format retains fast-paced late game strategies, then Control Priest is going to struggle, even with all the good grindy cards in the world. Especially, without Illucia.

There’s another avenue, a proactive one, which might carry more promise. Bless and Shadow Word: Devour are terrific cards for Priest decks searching for early game power. There’s certainly an aggressive non-Shadow Priest deck brewing with this set, along with an upgraded Miracle Priest. But their ability to close games consistently against decks with strong removal kits is still shaky.

So, Priest got good stuff. Whether that good stuff lines up well with all the other good stuff is what concerns us. If the meta skews towards grindy board battles, ranking Priest 10^th in power is going to be wide off the mark.