The Comprehensive The Great Dark Beyond Preview

 

Data Reaper Report - Rogue

Spacerock Collector

Spacerock Collector is a Rogue Common Draenei Minion for 1 Mana with 2 Attack, 1 Health and has text - Battlecry: Your next Combo card costs (1) less.

A 1-drop that’s not difficult to evaluate considering that many of these types of cards have been printed before. A 1-mana battlecry discount on a future specific card, with no time limit on when we can use the discount. These cards are usually strong and find competitive play eventually. Collector is essentially a “free” 2/1 that helps us outpace the opponent by making it easier for us to execute a play with a future combo card.

A good comparison for this card would be Foxy Fraud, which was more expensive as a 2 mana 3/2. While its discount was more powerful at 2 mana, it was only limited for the turn it was played. Fraud was a staple 2-drop in Rogue for almost its entire time in Standard. The combo cards currently in Standard don’t work as well with Collector (Swindle was Foxy Fraud’s best friend), but we believe it’s a matter of time until Collector finds usefulness.

Score: 3

Scrounging Shipwright

Scrounging Shipwright is a Rogue Common Draenei Minion for 2 Mana with 3 Attack, 2 Health and has text - Deathrattle: Get a random Starship Piece from another class.

We won’t lie. We were disappointed to find out that Rogue’s starship is just an amalgamation of random starship pieces from other classes. The reason isn’t that we dislike the thief mechanic, but rather that it’s more difficult to leverage random pieces to their full potential. Putting these pieces behind a tax of mediocre cards doesn’t help either. A 2 mana 3/2 that adds a card to our hand on a deathrattle isn’t terrible on paper, but we wish we could choose what starship to get on a battlecry, making the card comparable with Kaja’mite Creation. Instead, it’s a bit of a lottery on whether we’ll get a useful starship piece in a specific matchup.

There are 10 starship pieces from other classes. Some are clearly better than others because they don’t rely as much on synergy. Getting a Starlight Reactor, for example, is going to feel bad.

Score: 2

Barrel Roll

Barrel Roll is a Rogue Common Spell for 3 Mana and has text - Deal 5 damage to an undamaged character. Costs (1) if you're building a Starship.

5 damage to an undamaged character for 1 mana is okay, but it’s probably one of the weakest starship secondary payoffs. We would only rate Suffocate as a worse card than Barrel Roll because of its high cost and questionable need. Shadow Strike used to see some play as a 3-mana spell with the same effect, but that was 8 years ago. It would never be considered today.

Barrel Roll is cheap and can help us get ahead in the early game, even if it doesn’t get full value for its damage. Note that we can hit the opponent’s face with it, if they’re at full health. That does make us feel a little better about it. There’s some early cheese potential here.

Score: 2

Starship Schematic

Starship Schematic is a Rogue Rare Spell for 1 Mana and has text - Discover a Starship Piece from another class.

This spell gives us the option to discover a starship piece from another class, making it much more likely that we can hit a desired piece for a specific matchup compared to Scrounging Shipwright. It can also help us find a complementary piece for whatever we ended up generating from Shipwright. Unfortunately, this spell costs a tax of 1 mana. While other classes can play their pieces for their baseline cost, Rogue needs to pay a toll of 1 mana to get through.

This doesn’t feel great either. The only advantage of having a scavenger ship is that it works well with thief payoffs like Velarok and Tess Greymane. Playing it on turn 1 means we’re almost guaranteed to get a turn 2 activator for a turn 3 Velarok.

Score: 2

Eredar Skulker

Eredar Skulker is a Rogue Rare Demon Minion for 2 Mana with 1 Attack, 3 Health and has text - Combo and Spellburst: Gain +2 Attack and Stealth.

This is a very threatening 2-drop that can deal a lot of damage nearly by itself. When the combo ability is triggered, Skulker becomes a 2 mana 3/3 with stealth, which represents strong stats for the cost. But if we hold on from triggering its spellburst until the next turn, we can hit the opponent for 3 damage, then re-stealth the Skulker with 5 attack. That’s 8 uninteractive damage in a 2-drop. Cast Shadowstep on Skulker and we can repeat the process, now dealing 16 damage for the net cost of 2-mana over 4 turns.

Skulker looks like an incredible early game minion for an aggressive deck, but it can also be an effective board control tool. A 3/3 can trade favorably with most early game minions, while re-stealthing it turns it into a mid-sized minion killer.

It’s not intuitive to find Skulker a home in potential Rogue strategies immediately, but it will undoubtedly get there with how strong it is as a standalone card.

Score: 3

Pressure Points

Pressure Points is a Rogue Rare Shadow Spell for 3 Mana and has text - Deal 3 damage to a minion. Reduce the Cost of Combo cards in your hand by (1).

Bulk mana reduction combo cards? Pressure Points looks like an incredible enabler of combo synergies. A 3-mana spell that deals 3 damage to a minion is obviously a weak baseline effect, but it helps us deal with most early game minions in the format. The important note is that there is no condition for the discount. It always happens if you hit a minion. No need to kill the minion either. We can even hit our own minion if the opponent presents nothing in play.

The discount is massive. It’s not too difficult to envision a Rogue deck that will have 3 combo cards in hand, which would make Pressure Points pay for itself. This is a huge boost for a combo-centric archetype, but the card looks truly nuts when you think of its potential in specific OTK combos.

Rogue currently has 3 direct damage spells that are also combo cards: Eviscerate, Tentacle Grip and ‘Oh, Manager!’. Reducing them to cost 1 mana means they can be doubled up with Sonya Waterdancer. A Sonya/Mini-Scoundrel/Cover Artist combo can deal an incredible amount of damage with just a couple of these spells discounted, especially when we squeeze in a 1-mana Ethereal Oracle that was discounted by Shadowstep.

We won’t go overboard on the details, but we’ll just give you the bottom-line example. Sonya/1-mana Oracle(x2)/Mini-Scoundrel/Cover Artist(x2) followed up by one copy of a discounted Tentacle Grip and one copy of a discounted Eviscerate is worth a total of 44 damage for 9 mana. Add ‘Oh, Manager!’ to the equation and we have 4 extra coins to use on the kill turn. Even armor gaining Warriors will struggle to stay out of kill range. We can easily deal 60+ damage in one turn without even blinking twice.

There is only one way to rate this card.

Score: 4

Lucky Comet

Lucky Comet is a Rogue Epic Spell for 2 Mana and has text - Discover a Combo minion. The next one you play triggers its Combo twice.

We should split and evaluate both effects separately to try and gauge the value of Lucky Comet. The first effect discovers a combo minion. This is a relatively small pool of cards (10), but not one of high quality. A 1-mana spell that discovered a combo minion would be a borderline playable card. The other effect doubles the combo effect of the next combo minion we play. This doesn’t have to be the minion we discovered! Combo effects are usually worth around 1-mana, but occasionally they can scale higher. At face value, Lucky Comet is barely worth its cost.

But when we add context of synergies, we believe that a more favorable outlook can be found. For example, Lucky Comet is a superb fit for Shaffar Rogue thanks to its synergy with Bargain Bin Buccaneer. It is very strong with Rhyme Spinner, a forgotten minion that may have finally found some critical synergy in this set. Finally, it can turn Elven Minstrel into an exceptional draw engine.

If we had to place a bet, this card sees competitive play in the immediate term thanks to Shaffar but can find other uses down the road.

Score: 3

Quasar

Quasar is a Rogue Epic Spell for 6 Mana and has text - Shuffle your hand into your deck. Reduce the Cost of cards in your deck by (3).

The most extreme and thought-provoking card of the Rogue set. Quasar shuffles our entire hand into our deck, leaving us empty, but discounts all cards in our deck by 3 mana. This is a significantly stronger effect than Incanter’s Flow, with a 3-mana discount on every type of card.

Quasar’s cost is high and leaves us stranded for resources. For a normal deck, this is never a consideration, but Quasar doesn’t go into a normal deck, it creates an abnormal deck. If we build our deck with an abundance of card draw, we’re more likely to refill our hand post-Quasar. Card draw finds more draw, which means our ability to churn through our deck would compare favorably with post-Questline Stormwind Demon Hunter. With such an extreme mana discount, killing our opponent shouldn’t be difficult.

Furthermore, we can set up Quasar better. A placed Knickknack Shack on the board. An equipped Quick Pick ready to swing after Quasar. Preparation can help us play Quasar on turn 4. Turn 2 Quick Pick into turn 3 Shack into turn 4 Prep/Quasar sounds perverse.

We’ve said it at the height of Stormwind, but what makes combo decks particularly lethal and rapid is bulk mana reduction paired with an abundance of card draw. Rogue coming into this expansion possesses these two traits. Quasar reminds us of Celestial Alignment, which started out as a meme card, but turned into a serious meta contender eventually.

Never underestimate this kind of card.

Score: 4

Talgath

Talgath is a Rogue Legendary Demon Minion for 4 Mana with 4 Attack, 4 Health and has text - Undamaged enemy minions take double damage. Combo: Get a Backstab.

Talgath seems strangely underwhelming. A 4 mana 4/4 that requires combo activation to get us a Backstab, with an aura effect that’s more restrictive than Tar Slick. At its baseline, we can have a 4 mana 4/4 that deals 4 damage to an undamaged minion. How does that compare to old Gormok the Impaler?

If we valued the aura effect on enemy minions, we would just play Tar Slick, which costs 1 mana and is far easier to combo with other effects. Even with Lucky Comet, Talgath just turns into a pseudo-Crabatoa.

We don’t see a great reason to include this legendary in any deck. It certainly doesn’t belong in the typical Rogue decks we’ve seen in the last few expansions. Its only chance is in an aggressive deck centered on the combo mechanic, the same one that theoretically runs Rhyme Spinner. We doubt it even goes there.

Score: 1

The Gravitational Displacer

The Gravitational Displacer is a Rogue Legendary Minion for 5 Mana with 4 Attack, 3 Health and has text - Starship Piece When this is launched, summon a copy of the Starship.

The only unique starship piece for the class, and it’s a legendary minion. When Displacer is added to a starship, it gets copied when it launches. On paper, this offers us back the mana we lost while acquiring starship pieces from other classes. It makes a starship Rogue deck very robust in terms of late game value.

However, this minion is unbearably slow. A 5 mana 4/3 is up there as one of the most atrocious stat lines of the set. No immediate impact on the board, just a 5-mana minion with a battlecry of “fall significantly behind and hope to catch up later”.

When building Starship Rogue, it feels mandatory to include the card for its potential late game value. Rogue does seem to have the most potential when it comes to near-infinite resources in its starship archetype thanks to Exodar and bounce effects. Displacer compounds it further by providing a huge magnifier of all that value.

Will a slow, grindy game plan work this expansion? Considering the current state of Excavate Rogue, a similar deck on paper, we’re not too optimistic. Post-rotation, this kind of strategy could get stronger.

Score: 2

Final Thoughts

The Great Dark Beyond Set Rank: 5th

Overall Power Ranking: 2nd

Rogue’s set opens many possibilities. It is probably the class that has inspired us the most when it comes to theorycrafting, with two cards looking like huge standouts. It’s also the class that has already benefitted from the new expansion, with Shaffar Rogue looking like a serious threat.

Quasar is a controversial card. Some players write it off as a meme, but we think underestimating this effect is very premature, considering what we know from Hearthstone’s history. The vulnerability to aggression is there, but the potential domination of late game strategies is massive. Unlike Celestial Alignment at Barrens, which took two more expansions to become truly competitive, Quasar is already being released with strong support available to it. Quick Pick and Knickknack Shack, as well as the abundance of other sources of card draw available to the class, can lead to the creation of a highly lethal strategy. Potential finishers should be easy to find with this level of mana reduction.

While Quasar is a bulk deck reduction effect, Pressure Points offers targeted hand reduction. This makes the card less explosive, but more reliable, as we don’t need to fully commit in the way we do with Quasar. The finishing potential enabled by Pressure Points could be similarly oppressive to slower decks, but the deck may fare better against faster ones too. Pressure Points, in combination with the new early game that the combo package is receiving, could also lead to the creation of an aggressive deck centered on the forgotten Rhyme Spinner.

Some of the neutral cards in the set are perfect fits for Rogue. Ethereal Oracle is an incredible addition to almost every Rogue strategy, while The Ceaseless Expanse looks terrifying in a Gaslight Rogue shell that can rapidly discount it while possessing four bounce effects to replay it. Ceaseless Expanse may offer what ‘Yogg-Saron, Unleashed’ offered to the class before it was reworked to cost a flat amount of mana.

Starship Rogue does not exhibit the same level of lethality of other potential Rogue decks, but we expect it to possess the strongest longevity out of all starship decks. Its value generation seems downright absurd, rivaling Thief Rogue in its prime.

Aggression could hurt Rogue’s viability in some directions, but the class could become one of the most diverse in the format.

2 Comments

  1. So Yrel can’t give the Libram of Judgment, 7 mana weapon? Then text on this card is misleading and deceptive.

    • I believe the “timeline” wording is supposed to be what implies it’s only the ashes librams.
      Timeline > set, so she only gives the cards that shared a set.

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