The Comprehensive Fractured in Alterac Valley Preview

 

Data Reaper Report - Rogue

Reconnaissance

Reconnaissance

This is a deceptively decent card. There are plenty of strong class deathrattles that you can find and play early in the game. You can either play this on 2, try to fish for a strong 5-drop to play on turn 3. Or you could Prep this out and try to maximize the mana cheating potential. What’s more is that this card scales well in the late game since you can find more expensive threats to develop. The problem of Recon is synergy. You need to play this in either a Thief deck or a Deathrattle deck. In a deathrattle deck, Recon doesn’t offer you a reliable and consistent plan to execute with your other deathrattle pieces. It’s basically playing a game of ‘what’s in the box?’. A Thief deck is a bit questionable due to the weakness of some of the other cards it has received. So, we’re a bit lukewarm on this theme in general.

Score: 2

Coldtooth Yeti

Coldtooth Yeti

Some players compare this to Evil Miscreant and consider Yeti lackluster, but the ability to play a 3-mana combo Yeti when cards like Foxy Fraud and Scabbs Cutterbutter are available sounds very enticing to us. With an early Yeti, Rogue can just completely overwhelm the opponent. Any deck with Foxy Fraud now has a turn 2-3 play in which they bust out 14 stats, and it doesn’t require aggressive build-around. If a deck has a couple of slots to fill and wants to run Fraud/Scabbs anyway, Yeti seems like a natural fit.

Score: 3

Double Agent

Double Agent

Developing two 3/3’s on turn 3 is pretty good, but what makes or breaks this card is how easy it is to activate on-curve. We have Swashburglar, Wand Thief, The Lobotomizer, Recon and Maestra. Swashburglar is a weak card that we will probably be forced to run in Thief Rogue but don’t want to touch elsewhere. Wand Thief is not easy to activate early. The Lobotomizer is terribly unreliable. Recon is a decent card but not amazing. Maestra requires us to pass our first couple of turns to play this on 3 (or we coin Agent out on 2). The whole proposition isn’t too exciting, but we will say that Double Agent’s strength relies on the strength of its activators. We can see this being quite good if the Thief package can be figured out in a deck that’s not necessarily all-in on the Thief theme, much like Underbelly Fence and Vendetta used to be.

Score: 3

Snowfall Graveyard

Snowfall Graveyard

This card has a powerful effect that seems worth building around, but does Rogue have the tools to effectively capitalize on it? It does have the ability to discount it and cheat it out. The problem might be the deathrattle targets themselves. Rogue’s deathrattles don’t have an immediate impact on the board, a generally desired property for the best results. We’d have to go all-in for Korrak the Bloodrager in the neutral set, which sounds sweet yet gimmicky on paper, or settle for a mediocre Lillian. More expensive neutral deathrattles seem like a optimistic propositions for Rogue since they don’t work with Sketchy Information. We think this card would be nuts in a different class, but in Rogue, this doesn’t seem as intimidating.

Score: 2

Contraband Stash

Contraband Stash

Tess Greymane wasn’t good enough, so now we get her effect in spell form, but this card is still so unbelievably bad. You’re required to spend so much mana on both generating cards as well as spending them that it’s going to take ages for the card to represent remotely good value. Add the fact that this ‘value’ is an assortment of randomly found garbage, and once again it seems like a dedicated “Burger Rogue” deck is being steered towards meme status. This is no constructed-worthy finisher.

Score: 1

Wildpaw Gnoll

Wildpaw Gnoll

Our evaluation of Gnoll is akin to that of Double Agent, in that it requires you to figure out a Thief package that is constructed-worthy. But Gnoll is more strongly enabled by Maestra compared to Double Agent (since the discount is permanent), and that is a consistent way of quickly discounting it. This strongly tempts us to include it in a non-Thief Rogue deck with Maestra, but we’re not completely sold with the idea because you still very much want to fully discount Gnoll by the mid-game rather than be content with a 3 mana 4/5 rush minion at ‘some’ point in the game. If we can figure out how to go “burger” without playing the bad burger cards, this could be a winner.

Score: 3

Forsaken Lieutenant

Forsaken Lieutenant

This is a strong enabler for Deathrattle Rogue. You play this on turn 2, hit face on turn 3, play a Deathrattle and then run the transformed 2/2 into something. It also scales well later in the game since it can always copy a more expensive deathrattle. The problem is, once again, the deathrattle minion pool. Rogue doesn’t seem to have a great way of cheating out early stats on the board through the mechanic, and even then, Lieutenant could end up being stranded if we don’t have immediate follow-up. Another card that would be broken in another class, which is why it’s in Rogue. We’re just not feeling that crazy about the Loan Shark coin prospect or the Plushies Ticket Master one.

Score: 2

The Lobotomizer

The Lobotomizer

This card is hilariously underwhelming. A 2 mana 2/2 weapon is awful and unlike Bloodseeker, its Honorable Kill ability has no impact on the board. We need to do all that work landing perfect kills for the pleasure of a random card from our opponent’s deck. Yes, it’s the top card of their deck which gives us “information”, but that generally carries little value. If this is what we must rely on to activate our Thief synergies, we’re in big trouble.

Score: 1

Cera’thine Fleetrunner

Cera'thine Fleetrunner

It’s important to note that Cera’thine’s effect is not equivalent to Deck of Lunacy since your minions do not keep their original cost. This means that Cera’thine is entirely random and there is no way to control her effect. The plan is to play her, play random discounted minions from other classes, and then repeat them with Contraband Stash. Somehow, that doesn’t look like a winning strategy to us, but more of a fun meme. The 5-mana cost also means that you’re unlikely to overwhelm your opponent with a blow-out play before they could find some answers, as a 2-mana Deck of Lunacy used to do. Add the fact that the whole strategy is reliant on you drawing the 1-of legendary, and the layers of inconsistency pile up. This card is the fattest 1, and if it ever sees competitive play, something must have gone horribly wrong.

Score: 1

Shadowcrafter Scabbs

Shadowcrafter ScabbsShadow Card ImageSleight of Hand Card Image

This could very well be the best hero card in the set. We think the hype has merit. This is a 7-mana card that casts Vanish, gives you 5 armor, develops two Jungle Panthers and gives you a pre-nerf Innervate built into your hero power. This is an unbelievably good deal for the cost. Rogue normally doesn’t have great ways to clear wide boards, and it’s a clear weakness for some of its strategies. Now it gets a reset button that invalidates all previous board development, and suddenly swings the game completely into proactive pressure on the opponent. Vanish for 6 mana wasn’t a great card by itself, and only saw play in combination with Preparation. A Vanish on turn 7 isn’t what makes this card good, it’s the additional 8 incoming damage from the Shadows that are developed in the Vanish turn. This threatens an immediate Battlemaster follow up for 16 damage. 16 damage with very little counterplay, and regardless of what the board state was just two turns before. Have we mentioned that we get a permanent pre-nerf Innervate you can use on the same turn you play Scabbs as well?

Outrageously good. There isn’t a single Rogue deck that doesn’t play this card.

Score: 4

Final Thoughts

Fractured in Alterac Valley Set Rank: 10th

Overall Power Ranking: 2nd

So, we’ve said already that no class set in this expansion is weak, it just so happens that quite a few Rogue cards look purely meme-worthy while only one card in the set truly floors us. It just so happens that it’s one of the very best cards of the expansion, and one that could carry Rogue to the top just by itself.

Shadowcrafter Scabbs is bonkers. It’s going into every Rogue deck. It’s going to make mediocre decks look good, and good decks look great.

And it’s not like other cards in the set are particularly weak. If you came from the future and told us Deathrattle Rogue ended up getting nerfed, we would not be surprised at all. There are some synergies in the Rogue set that could end up being extremely powerful, they’re just hard to predict and perhaps hard to figure out from theorycrafting alone.

When it comes to Deathrattle Rogue, we want to abuse Korrak as hard as possible as a target. This feels like the most unfair thing we can do with Sketchy Information, Counterfeit Blade and Snowfall Graveyard.

Thief Rogue looks like a bit of a meme, but if you strip down the questionable value stuff and keep the mana cheating part of the Thief package with Gnoll and Double Agent as payoffs, you might be able to construct a competitive win condition on top of it. It isn’t hard to do when Shadowcrafter Scabbs is around.

And then you’ve got Quest Rogue, which might be the best fit for hero card Scabbs, just because you already want to run Battlemaster in the deck. On top of that, if you’re running Foxy Fraud and 4-mana Scabbs anyway, Coldtooth Yeti looks like a low hanging fruit.

Of course, we can’t forget about Garrote Rogue, though it will be interesting to see whether it will start feeling its recent nerf more should some armor stacking strategies emerge. Cariel is also something to keep in mind.

So, Rogue should be fine. Its power ranking is more of a testament to how unlikely we think it’s going to be bad, rather than how certain we are about it being one of the best. It just seems too well-rounded to fall to the wayside.

 

 

 

6 Comments

  1. Owl decks going to have a huge surprise facing Priest, who has like 3 mass dispell cards now. It’ll be a great counter to every dethrattle deck.

  2. Exactly what biffle said. Warlock got a lot of meh cards but the amount of removal, healing and draw pretty much guarantees Phylactery Owl OTK is going to be an obscenely oppressive deck that refuses to die while drawing towards dealing 112 damage to face. Meanwhile Rogue gets a lot of meme cards that I will certainly have fun losing with but Scabbs alone is probably good enough to bring a tier 2 deck into tier 1.

  3. why don’t you think about what you’re saying for a few minutes and reconsider your comment. you can have the shittiest expansion set and be given one broken card that makes the existing cards amazing.

  4. Well, not that it’s a good deck by any stretch, but the Jaraxxus Tess loop deck most definitely does not want and won’t play Scabbs as it breaks the loop.

  5. Thanks for the excellent analysis. But I do not understand how it’s possible that a class which is the last in this expansion is the second overall … Rogue was not so good before this expansion, so being the worst now … same for warlock …

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