Has Tourist access to: Demon Hunter
Cards can be played by: Death Knight
Malted Magma
This AOE spell is flexible and only hits enemies, which is the best part about it. The damage to mana ratio isn’t great, comparable to a Consecration at 4 mana or a City Tax at 2, but the ability to split the damage over several instances makes Malted Magma stronger than those cards, especially when we add spell damage to the equation.
The main thing going against it is that Shaman does not lack strong AOE spells, with Baking Soda Volcano looking like the better Fire spell as a standalone card. However, with Frosty Décor looking like a mandatory inclusion at the 5-mana slot in Shaman decks, a 4-mana spell with overload could be an awkward fit. Should Buttons become a competitive card in Death Knight, then Malted Magma will be included, as it’s the only Fire spell the class will have access to. This card will prove to be deceptively strong.
Score: 3
Meltemental
Permanently frozen means that Meltemental can never attack, unless silenced. Minions that can’t attack are usually very bad, because they can’t determine trades, nor do they threaten the opponent. However, there’s a point in which the minion is so big that we start paying attention. Meltemental has 8-health on turn 3, which is almost impossible to get through at this stage of the game. We think a Shaman deck that is looking to stall into a Hagatha/Frosty Décor curve may consider this.
What might have been the intention with its design is to give Death Knight access to a Slippery Slope enabler, but we’re not eager to get behind this idea. If Buttons does get included in Death Knight decks, we don’t think it will be for the sake of this card.
Score: 2
Matching Outfits
You can think of Matching Outfits as a similar card to Faceless Manipulator. It is a copy spell with an evolve effect attached to it. Its utilization will be similar. We’ll be looking to use it on a discounted minion, such as a giant, to spawn overwhelming stats in play.
Shaman doesn’t seem like a class that’s in a great position to leverage such minions. It doesn’t have a good location to discount Seaside Giants, nor does it have great targets for it in its Evolve shell. You could argue that it’s less important to have good targets for it, as you can use it on an injured minion after a trade to “heal” and copy it, but the card is too expensive to be flexible.
This card has a better chance of being played in Death Knight, as the class is decently equipped to utilize both Seaside Giant and Stitched Giant. However, that requires us to run Buttons, which isn’t a good fit for a deck that tries to be dense with minions and corpse generators. The worst part is that Buttons can’t even draw this spell as it has no spell school tag.
We do think that Matching Outfits has a good chance of becoming competitive at some point in the future, but our suspicion is that it won’t make an immediate impact unless Death Knight doesn’t mind running an ill-fitting card to include it.
Score: 2
Siren Song
Generating 2 spells for 2 mana has rarely been a good line of play. You’re looking at Jackpot being the outlier case due to the relatively narrowed card pool and synergy with Trickster. Shaman does get a way to discount spells, but not to the same extent that can enable massive board swings on turn 4.
Siren Song has the added downside that it doesn’t have a spell school itself and requires you to first play spells from Shaman’s familiar spell schools to increase your chances of finding inaccessible ones. If you play Siren Song on turn 2 and generate a Nature spell and a Fire spell, you haven’t done much to scale up your Razzle-Dazzler or set up Cabaret Headliner for success. This makes it so much worse than Discovery of Magic, which is a cheaper card that gives you greater control over what you can find.
If Spell School Shaman takes off, Siren Song will see play, but it’s a pill the deck will have to swallow, rather a card that we’re excited about.
Score: 2
Cabaret Headliner
Headliner’s mana discount ability is extremely powerful and can lead to various strategies taking root. Simple math will tell you that the total discount potential of this 4-drop is crazy. Headliner discounting 3 spells is enough for it to cost a net negative mana, but there’s a strong likelihood that we’ll be able to discount even 4-5 spells with it on a relatively consistent basis.
Discounting such a substantial amount of mana can help us accomplish many things. The most obvious one is ramping up Razzle-Dazzler far more quickly than we’d normally be able to. However, Headliner’s combo potential is where we think the card might be leveraged in a more dramatic fashion. The most promising direction is discounting Sigil of Skydiving, Conductivity and ‘JIVE, INSECT!’ to set up a 3-mana triple Ragnaros combo. This win condition seems tailor made for Headliner and we expect to see heavily experimentations revolving around it.
With such massive potential, it would take a colossal class failure for Headliner not to make headlines.
Score: 4
Frosty Décor
In the future, when we talk about “stabilizing” in a Hearthstone game, you should picture Frost Décor in your mind as the perfect example of a single card that can do it by itself. This spell packs 8 health across 2 taunts, on top of 8 armor when the taunts die. Overall, Frosty Décor is worth 16 effective life across 2 bodies for just 5 mana. That’s an incredible deal. A 2/4 taunt that gains 4 armor on its deathrattle would be a nice 3-drop, so to summon two of them for 5 mana is well above the budget.
We think this card is going to be permanently included in every Shaman deck going forward, perhaps apart from the fastest and most aggressive strategies we can think of. Any Shaman deck with late game aspirations wants to run this card because it slows down aggressive opponents to an exceptional degree.
What’s more is that Frost Décor instantly becomes the best spell to run in a deck alongside Hagatha the Fabled. It serves as perfect follow-up to the legendary, which has been buffed to 4-mana for this very moment, it feels.
Perfection.
Score: 4
Natural Talent
While Shaman does receive a few impactful Naga minions in this set that can be potentially generated by this card, the likelihood of finding a specific Naga is slim considering the large pool of Nagas in Standard, which will stand at 23 once the expansion launches. Getting a random spell is a complete crapshoot, as it can be a spell from any class, with the very small upside of potentially finding a spell from an inaccessible spell school.
When we investigated the potential generation pool, we noticed that the average card quality of a random Naga is mediocre. Half of them can be considered good outcomes, while the other half are bad outcomes. What also tempers expectations is that Shaman has no shortage of Nature spells, so Natural Talent isn’t highly desired for its tag.
There’s a chance it will be included in a very specific build path, but beyond that, it will be skipped. For Death Knight, the Naga pool is so much worse that we would consider the card to be unplayable.
Score: 1
Razzle-Dazzler
Razzle-Dazzler can be best compared to Elemental Inspiration, which is a very similar card that works under the same condition. The main difference is that Razzle-Dazzler comes with a baseline 4/4. We suspect that a random 5-drop is comparable in power to a 4/5 with a single random keyword.
As we all know, Elemental Inspiration fell out of favor in Rainbow Mage because it was too slow at 7 mana, while being susceptible to mass board clears that came online by the time we got to play it. Instead, Mage pivoted to its combo win condition in Sif, which has proven to be more reliable.
It’s very possible that we’ll see the same story transpiring in Shaman, with Cabaret Headliner enabling a couple of combos that represent a ton of damage that we might prefer over playing Razzle-Dazzler and hoping it closes the game out.
An argument supporting Razzle-Dazzler is that it can be tutored and discounted by Fairy Tale Forest. However, the card still requires us to spend mana on spells to juice it up before we play it, so we’re not sure how ready we will be to play it by the time we tutor it.
Score: 2
Carress, Cabaret Star
A very similar card to Lady Naz’jar. Carress is slower to activate, requiring us to play two spells to fully upgrade, but becomes more powerful once we do since it has two effects. This legendary was designed with Rainbow Shaman in mind, an archetype that will try to pack as many spells from different spell schools as possible, to leverage Cabaret Headliner and Razzle-Dazzler.
Lady Naz’jar was a fringe card in Rainbow Mage. We expect the same from Carress. It can only be effective if our deck has the spell density to be able to activate it quickly after it’s drawn. Its prohibitive cost means we won’t be able to do many things on the Carress turn, unless our game plan is already in good shape, and we’ve discounted a lot of spells with Cabaret Headliner. Another downside to the card is that it doesn’t keep switching between forms as we play spells. Whatever spells in hand you have, will be the ones that shape the card (floating mana because you don’t want to play spells is a bad idea).
Score: 2
Carefree Cookie
The path to gain access to the Demon Hunter set, Cookie has reasonable synergy with the set it unlocks. With Demon Hunter centered on charging pirates at the start of our turn, Cookie is a serviceable minion to drop to the board and run those pirates into enemy minions. This will kill them and summon random 2-drops. Similar plays can be done with any board we have in play, should the opponent offer us favorable trades. We expect Patches the Pilot to be a very popular card in both classes, so Cookie has a great chance of seeing the light of day.
But Cookie’s value gets a big boost just by being an entry point to the Demon Hunter set. The reason is that it offers Shaman consistent access to Shadow and Fel spells, both of which might become crucial pieces to Shaman strategies going forward.
Not only is Rainbow Shaman more consistent through Cabaret Headliner and Razzle-Dazzler by running Cookie, Sigil of Skydiving and Skirting Death could both become crucial pieces to the class’ win condition. Sigil of Skydiving is the perfect setup card for Conductivity/Jive, while Skirting Death has its own lethal combo with Conductivity.
We expect Shaman’s Tourist usage to be one of the highest, relative to its overall popularity. Feels mandatory for the class.
Score: 4
Final Thoughts
Perils in Paradise Set Rank: 4th
Tourist Synergy Score: A
Overall Power Ranking: 6th
The Shaman set, as well as the class’ collaboration with Demon Hunter, are works of art in the colors of rainbows. Shaman is receiving a well-rounded bundle of cards that provide it with a diverse set of opportunities to thrive. From early aggression to late game scaling, as well as threatening win conditions. Shaman is back on the Hearthstone map and might be too fun to ignore.
A forgotten class, Shaman desperately needed this set. Access to the Demon Hunter set is perfect in so many ways. It provides Shaman with a stronger early game that can help it devise an aggressive deck focused on pirates. But rather than being strictly tribal in nature, Shaman can add multiple finishers that provide it with multi-dimensional gameplay.
The synergy with a Spell School Shaman is perfect. At the deckbuilding stage, Shaman can access every single spell school in the game (Watcher of the Sun grants access to Holy spells). With Cabaret Headliner, it’s got the ability to leverage that spell diversity into immense swing turns, while Razzle-Dazzler is a solid, board-centric win condition that will be hard to deal with for any deck that doesn’t possess multiple forms of mass removal.
But the great thing about Shaman’s set is that, should the format’s lethality prove to be high, with short late game clocks, it can pivot to builds that possess Shaman’s own takes on high lethality and burst damage. In fact, Shaman has two great win conditions for different matchups that it can fit into a single Spell School deck. One that exploits a passive, non-board playstyle (Conductivity/Jive), as well as one that uses the opponent’s minions against them (Conductivity/Skirting Death).
But we can’t forget about Shudderblock’s new friend, Incindius. Should the format prove to be a bit slower, Shaman has access to another OTK that can occur as early as turn 8, at a consistent rate. The caveat is that it requires two big setup turns that leave us vulnerable.
Shaman has been an empty, abandoned class that has failed to interest players. Perils in Paradise has the potential to transform it into a class that everyone will be eager to try, thanks to the diverse set of playstyles it may offer.
