Soul Searching
A Bottomless Toy Chest that is reliant on having corpses to spend instead of spell power. This would be an amazing card for a defensive Death Knight deck if it weren’t for its rune restriction. Its double Unholy runes means, in Rainbow Death Knight, we either give up the Blood rune package (Eliza, Runes, Threads), or we give up the Frost rune package (Reska and Corpsicle). It’s probably impossible to give up the Frost rune package. The good news is that Soul Searching is a Shadow spell that can be tutored by Buttons.
For Frost or Blood-Ctrl Death Knight, this card is obviously irrelevant, but Plague Death Knight can fit it in.
While Soul Searching doesn’t seem strong enough to build an entire deck around, we can see Rainbow DK experimenting with a UUF build to accommodate it. We can also see a deck such as Insanity Warlock interested in its copy effect as it has fewer concerns around corpse usage or rune restrictions. You can never have too many Crescendo.
Score: 2
Travel Security
This is clearly a deathrattle build-around card. With no rune restrictions, it’s available to all Death Knight archetypes, although it’s more likely to be utilized by an Unholy Death Knight build focused on Death Growl and Yelling Yodeler, as well as Deathrattle Warlock.
Travel Security reminds us of Mechanical Whelp, which saw play in deathrattle decks in Rogue and Hunter. The big advantage of Travel Security is that it has taunt, so it can’t be ignored by the opponent. On the other hand, it’s still incredibly slow. At 6-mana, it’s difficult to play it alongside other cards.
In Death Knight, we’re hoping to have minions in play, play Travel Security between them, Death Growl, then run our minions into trades, instantly spawning random 8-drops. This scenario seems hard to execute, especially when our opponent will make a conscious effort to clear our board at a point in the game that efficient AOE comes online.
In Warlock, this card is even more difficult to use, while looking like a worse payoff than other expensive deathrattles, such as Wretched Queen or Enhanced Dreadlord, which also work with Nemsy.
We don’t have high hopes here.
Score: 1
Eternal Layover
Note that Eternal Layover affects enemy minions too. You can look at the card in two different ways. The first is an enabler of deathrattle strategies. This requires us to have deathrattle minions in play, play Eternal Layover to trigger those deathrattles, leaving our minions with 1 health. This seems like a very clunky game plan, because Layover is expensive and requires us to have a board that sticks.
The second usage is to treat this card as an Equality. We’re basically setting all minions in play to 1 health, while potentially triggering all deathrattles. This usage also seems terrible, as a 4-mana Equality that’s weak against deathrattles should not be an acceptable constructed card.
Eternal Layover seems bad no matter what roles it fulfills. The only thing it has going for it is ‘versatility’, but we’ll pass on the versatility of being bad in different ways and go for good cards instead.
Score: 1
Final Thoughts: Unless the value of Soul Searching outweighs the Blood package in Rainbow Death Knight, we don’t expect to see much movement in the class from what it currently does. Deathrattle Warlock is so far away from being competitive that we’ll be shocked to see something there.
