Read about the rest of the Death Knight cards in The Comprehensive Death Knight Core & Path of Arthas Preview.
Necrotic Mortician
Discover effects are going to be very good in Death Knight because of the smaller card pool. Mortician can get you a very powerful card, on average, and it has good stats for a 2-drop. It’s going to be difficult to activate on curve, but you can still drop it early to fight for board in faster matchups, and it scales extremely well in the late game. It is trivial to activate later as Unholy Death Knights are swimming in undead minions, and you can also just Ghoul Charge on 4, run the Ghoul into something and play Mortician. The Undead condition is just easier to meet for Death Knight compared to other classes. Should be a staple card in Unholy.
Score: 3
Acolyte of Death
This is a Frost rune card, but Acolyte feels more like an Unholy card. Unholy decks are far more likely to swarm the board with undead minions to potentially leverage them into draw, while Frost Death Knights are a bit lacking in that department. The question is whether Acolyte of Death and Defrost are important enough draw engines to push Unholy decks into tapping into Frost, and we’re not entirely convinced. Blood and the 3rd Unholy rune provide massive payoffs, so competition will be stiff. This does combo well with Army of the Dead on turn 8, so we’ll give it a chance.
Score: 2
Soulbreaker
A 3 mana 3/2 weapon with powerful upside for Death Knights. Soulbreaker can potentially give us 4 corpses over 2 turns and has an attack value that should deal with almost every early game minion out there. This might be the best corpse generator available in the Blood tree and should be an important card for both Blood Death Knights, as well as other Death Knights tapping into a single Blood rune, an option that looks very good.
Score: 3
Vampiric Blood
This card might be the greatest incentive to run Blood Death Knight. Gaining health means this spell increases your maximum life total too, so if you’re at 25 life early on, you will end up at 35 life with the ability to heal to 40. With Renathal and two copies of Vampiric Blood, we can increase our maximum life to 60, and that’s not including potential discovers of more copies. Blood Death Knight could become the most resilient archetype in the game, capable of taking as much punishment as Control Warrior in its prime. The only question mark about this deck is how it’s supposed to close out a game. If it can do that, the skies are the limit.
Score: 4
Corpse Explosion
Potentially massive AOE effect that’s only limited by the number of corpses we generate. This is likely going to be an important card in the defensive toolkit of Blood Death Knight, but the steep corpse requirement is going to highly encourage the deck not to neglect this resource even though it’s not going to be swarming the board like Unholy does. We think a Blood Death Knight that’s built well should be able to accumulate at least 4-5 corpses by turn 5, making it a good card, but not as oppressive as Blood Boil.
Score: 3
Boneguard Commander
Bone Commander might be one of the best corpse payoffs available to the class. Its ceiling is an absolute game changer, spawning a board full of taunts that’s impossible to get through. You’re looking at a maximum of 14 attack and 20 health in taunt across 7 bodies. This should end games in faster matchups on the spot, perhaps more consistently than the corpse hungry Marrowgar. In addition, the Risen Footman may not leave corpses, but they sure infuse everything in your hand, giving Blood Death Knight a potential path to utilize Denathrius. This is an amazing reward for both Unholy and Frost Death Knights who decide to opt into the single Blood rune that we’ve been hyping throughout. Delicious.
Score: 4
Meat Grinder
If you manage to overcome the psychological barrier of Meat Grinder’s effect, you’ll realize it can be very effective for a specific role. Shredding a minion in your deck carries no importance, even if it’s a key minion, as it’s the equivalent of putting that minion at the bottom of your deck. If you don’t reach fatigue, it basically doesn’t matter, and since there is no control over which minion gets shredded, it has no bearing on your draw.
Once you get that out of the way, Meat Grinder looks like one of the best corpse generators available to Death Knight, with the caveat that you’re not looking to play those drawn-out games. It is a total of 4 corpses on a Spider Tank, and the 3 immediate corpses can help you play an activated Tomb Guardians on turn 4 or juice up a Corpse Bride/Army of the Dead on 5. Particularly enticing for an Unholy deck that simply wants to frontload as much power as it can in the mid-game.
Score: 3
Soulstealer
Twisting Nether on a 5/5 that also generates corpses off enemy minions destroyed. That looks like an extremely powerful board clear. Seems like an unconditional Entitled Customer that hands you resources. You can play this, clear the board, and then use the generated corpses to follow up with Boneguard Commander, sealing the game. Soulstealer firmly establishes that it’s going to be incredibly hard to stick a board against a Blood Death Knight, since they have so many powerful options to remove threats, and this could be the best one. A defensive nuke that deals with any state of the board while also handing you initiative with a sizeable threat. No brainer.
Score: 4
Blightfang
This card is ridiculous and might be oppressive against any other board-centric deck. It’s enough for Blightfang to hit 2 enemy minions to generate insane value for a 3-drop. While those stats aren’t immediate, once a single enemy minion dies and spawns a 2/2 Zombie for you, it’s likely to snowball the board in your favor. Your opponent will be forced to fight against the spawning zombies, losing more of their minions in the process, triggering more deathrattles and losing their grip on the board.
Those Zombies not only protect you, but they also generate corpses. If it wasn’t already obvious that Unholy Death Knights were going to dominate board control, this card seals it. We can see Blightfang being one of the first Death Knight cards that get hit with the nerf bat in the future because of how punishing it might be to play against.
Score: 4
Alexandros Mograine
This is a very slow win condition, somewhat fitting of the Blood archetype. In a long, drawn-out game, Mograine can be worth a lot of damage. It allows us to play defensively, knowing that creeping inevitability is in our favor.
The key phrase is drawn-out, because Mograine is unlikely to be good enough against late game strategies with stronger inevitability and lethality. Three damage points per turn are not going to kill a combo deck before it manages to find its core pieces. It is also clearly useless against aggressive decks without taunt or rush, though Blood Death Knights should have enough tools to take care of those matchups and can afford to run a few greedier cards.
A better way of looking at Mograine is not as a sole win condition, but more of a way to soften up an opponent before landing the killing blow. It could also set up a faster clock when you combo it with Brann on turn 10. Might be good enough to see play in a slow format but could be irrelevant in a fast format. Questionable.
Score: 2
Final Thoughts
March of the Lich King & Core/Path of Arthas Set Rank: 1st
Overall Power Ranking: 1st
It’s a bit strange to only rate the cards that Team 5 decided would be included in the March of the Lich King set, so we’ve rated Death Knight’s entire set and where we think it might be in terms of power level. This is an abnormally long summary as a result.
We’ve seen some comments flying around that Death Knight looks a bit underpowered. We can’t disagree more. The class looks very powerful and well rounded. Most cards it received are worthy of competitive play, and we see the potential of a multitude of successful strategies from the class.
First off, let’s look at Unholy. Unholy Death Knights might give rise to the strongest board-centric strategy in the format. Their ability to seize early board, by getting ahead and staying ahead, or by wresting control from the opponent with cards like Plague Strike, Tomb Guardian, Army of the Dead and Blightfang looks impressive.
We can see Unholy Death Knights experimenting in different directions. They can be lightning fast, as Aggro Druid, trying to leverage Grave Strength in the best possible way and rushing the opponent down. They can play a Handlock style in which they look to accumulate corpses as quickly as possible to develop Corpse Bride alongside Stitched Giant.
They can adopt a Renathal/Denathrius style as well, mirroring Control Shaman or Beast Hunter, where they have a bit of everything in the toolbox. Unholy Death Knight’s minion density and focus on corpse generation seems to be the perfect fit for a Renathal/Denathrius shell. It only makes sense that the class that has infuse as a global resource would look to adopt that style. That shell can be very flexible depending on how fast the format is. A single Blood rune can significantly expand Unholy Death Knight’s late game options, specifically.
Then we have Frost, which seems to have the most options when it comes to late game win conditions thanks to its strong card draw options as well as mana manipulation. Frost Death Knights can’t generate as many corpses as Unholy Death Knights. They trade away board dominance for off board dominance. Lots of AOE effects, direct damage effects as well as stalling through freezes. Frostwyrm’s Fury is a cornerstone card for its strategies and represents them well.
Some Frost Death Knights are expected to run a spell-centric Burn shell. It could leverage Deathchiller, Marrow Manipulator or spell damage synergies to devastate the opponent’s board, as well as their face. Though it doesn’t look as aggressive as Unholy, Frost Death Knight could also adopt a more aggressive minion shell, topping out at Manipulator/Fury and constantly pressuring the opponent.
We anticipate a lot of experimentations with all sorts of late-game combos from Frost, since Horn of Winter opens a lot of possibilities there, and they have the best card draw options available. Some slower Frost Death Knights are still expected to experiment with Denathrius in some capacity, along with Astalor. Horn of Winter allows Frost DK’s to combo Brann and Astalor on turn 10, for example. This is likely where Bonelord Frostwhisper will see the most play in the class.
Finally, we have Blood, which seems to be written off by many based on a showmatch in which it got hard countered in a warped micro-meta environment. We don’t think this experiment accurately reflects Blood Death Knight’s power. The archetype has insane survivability and removal tools and can answer to every board state the opponent can potentially present. Ladder can’t be that greedy, so Blood’s removal package and life gain can absolutely dominate aggressive strategies, as well as slower strategies that don’t carry infinite value and damage. Thanks to Vampiric Blood, being at 60 life will be a common occurrence.
The main question surrounding Blood Death Knight is its ability to close out late-game matchups. If it can maintain its insane longevity and survivability with some level of inevitability, we think it can do some serious damage and be one of the strongest strategies around. After doing some theorycrafting, we think it can exert good pressure on the opponent if built well, and not necessarily stand around waiting to die like Control Warrior does these days.
Overall, Death Knight should be a top tier class in March of the Lich King, and we would not be surprised if it became the best class. It’s got everything necessary to succeed through multiple paths.
Glad you could make it, Arthas.
