The Comprehensive United in Stormwind Preview

 

Data Reaper Report - Rogue

Loan Shark

Loan Shark

This is a highly questionable card for various reasons. It gives your opponent mana immediately, which you don’t want to do. It has vanilla stats and doesn’t affect the board or protect you in any way. The payoff might come in too late to matter, especially if the opponent simply ignores the Shark and goes for your throat. It’s not a threatening body so they shouldn’t be pressed to remove it. Unless crazy synergies work with it, we just can’t see it in a competitive Hearthstone deck.

Score: 1

SI:7 Operative

SI:7 Operative

This is the first of the SI:7 cards, and it’s a solid 3-drop. You can use it to value trade into a minion, and the stealth it acquires allows you to do it again the next turn. So, it’s a solid defensive minion for board control. The main issue is that it’s weak in slower matchups, where you might be the one looking to pressure. If we want the SI:7 package, we want this.

Score: 2

SI:7 Informant

SI:7 Informant

This is probably the worst SI:7 card, and even in a dedicated deck for this tribe, we would be reluctant to include it because it means we’re giving up Kazakus. Informant is unlikely to be stronger than a bad vanilla minion on curve. Even if you get the perfect curve and play two SI:7 cards, a 4 mana 5/5 is not worthy of constructed format. The scaling in the late game is hardly noteworthy. This is just weak.

Score: 1

SI:7 Extortion

SI:7 Extortion

This card is okay. You probably wouldn’t run it in Miracle Rogue for the same reason you’re not running Backstab. There’s no space for it and Brain Freeze is important for enabling Field Contact. But, in a dedicated SI:7 deck, this would make the cut. It doesn’t make you want to play this deck, but you’re not unhappy to run it.

Score: 2

Sketchy Information

Sketchy Information

Sketchy card. Could possibly do some crazy things in Wild, but in Standard, there’s no enticing target for it that makes us want to build a deck around. The idea of playing Shark and getting free coins is cute but spending 3 mana so we can add two coins to our hand sounds like a way to lose Hearthstone games quite reliably. Ticket Master sounds like another slow plan. There’s no great board development here. You want a Devilsaur Egg that can put immediate stats on the board. There’s nothing like that around. Lillian’s not enough.

Score: 1

SI:7 Assassin

SI:7 Assassin

This is the best SI:7 card, as it offers the deck a Vilespine Slayer level of payoff that can allow it to swing back the board. The problem here is that unlike Vilespine Slayer, one of the strongest Rogue cards ever, you are reliant on playing two SI:7 cards early enough to get it up to par. The late-game scaling is juicy, but if we’re playing a quest deck, we’re all about stopping the bleeding early. A turn 9 Assassin that costs 3 mana doesn’t matter as much as the one we can play on turn 5 or 6. But obviously, if you ever want to run an SI:7 Rogue, Assassin will be the main reason.

Score: 3

Garrote

GarroteBleed Card Image

This might be the most interesting Rogue card just because of its one-dimensionality. It’s only good at one thing, and it’s good at the thing most good Hearthstone decks do not prioritize, which is pure, inflexible face damage that ignores the board. But the amount of damage Garrote can do in Rogue decks that excel at drawing cards makes it a win condition consideration. Both Miracle and Poison Rogue, for example, would ponder running this card to increase their damage potential. Miracle Rogue currently is forced to run a 9-mana Alexstrasza and an awkward Tenwu paired with valuable Shadowsteps to finish off a defensively-minded opponent.

The problem is that Garrote is bad with Secret Passage, and it’s also not a burst damage card. Defensive decks can heal through it over time. So we suspect that most Rogue decks would pass on its damage potential, or avoid playing it as long as they can, but historically, that doesn’t translate to a good performer.

Score: 2

Counterfeit Blade

Counterfeit Blade

Never underestimate high damage weapons in Rogue. Even if the synergy doesn’t seem to be quite there, which is why Sketchy Information looks sketchy, Blade doesn’t need much to be useful. Even the smallest upside could be enough to encourage aggressive Rogue decks to utilize this weapon over the backloaded Self-Sharpening Sword. Sneaky Delinquent and Infiltrator Lillian carry some of that small upside.

Score: 2

Find the Imposter

Find the ImposterLearn the Truth Card ImageMarked a Traitor Card ImageSpymaster Scabbs Card ImageFizzflash Distractor Card ImageHidden Gyroblade Card ImageNoggen-Fog Generator Card ImageSpy-o-matic Card ImageUndercover Mole Card Image

This might be the easiest quest to complete, since the requirement is to run SI:7 cards that could be worthy enough for competitive play by themselves. The Spy Gizmos are also useful along the way, offering you some powerful cards that slightly offset the card disadvantage resulting from playing the quest. This is balanced out by the fact that the reward isn’t the kind of inevitability you can find in other quests, but this makes Find the Imposter a more realistic proposition.

And there’s certainly some lethality in playing Scabbs and buffing him with Noggen-Fog Generator. We can even Shadowstep Scabbs the next turn and do it again. Paired with the disruption that the other Gizmos offer, you can irritate an opponent quite effectively.

The main question is whether we should make the early sacrifice. Quest Rogue is going to find it difficult to fit a Field Contact package into its build and may have to seek an alternative card draw package. It’s also unlikely to be able to house other win conditions. If Scabbs can be milked to beat most opponents in the format, then this could work, but if the meta has a significant percentage of defensively wired decks, it should fizzle out.

Score: 2

Maestra of the Masquerade

Maestra of the Masquerade

Maestra is the most hilarious card of the set, and probably one of the funniest designs of all-time. We’re not here to talk about that, but whether this card is genuinely strong. The way we see it, Maestra’s mulligan confusion is highly overrated for a few reasons. The first reason is that most decks in the format have mulligan priorities that focus on their own game plan. That doesn’t make them linear, but it’s far better to formulate your own plan in Hearthstone and find your strongest cards, instead of keeping a card that may or may not be effective against an opponent depending on their draw. This is a mistake many players are making everywhere on ladder, by overly prioritizing answers and settling for mediocre plans.

Furthermore, if Maestra is ever effective at confusing your opponent, it would be in an aggressive Rogue deck. You’d have to randomly roll a class that is known to play slowly in a specific meta and get a reactive opponent to make greedy decisions. Think of how situational and minuscule that success rate must be. Any Rogue deck that isn’t lightning fast is less likely to benefit from such mulligan decisions from the opponent, and it would not be worth running a 2-drop you never want to draw and doesn’t further your own game plan.

The bottom line, Maestra is likely to end up a weak competitive card and is just around to be funny. Very funny.

Score: 1

Final Thoughts

United in Stormwind Set Rank: 8th

Overall Power Ranking: 5th

They say Quest Rogue was broken during playtesting and received multiple nerfs to get to where it is today. We can kinda tell. We like its ease of execution and how interesting its win condition is, but we don’t feel the kind of power and inevitability that strikes us as dominant. We mostly question its ability to balance itself between the need to shore up the early game, so it doesn’t get rolled over like most quest decks do, and then pack a big enough punch to close out the late game against control decks.

The Rogue set doesn’t have room for much else, so if the SI:7 package isn’t a huge winner, then there’s not too much left to get excited about. The deathrattle synergies introduced in Stormwind feel incomplete. Garrote could end up not seeing the light of day depending on developments, and while Maestra is one of the funniest cards of all-time, we don’t think it’s a serious competitor.

Fortunately for Rogue, it’s got a good foundation to fall back on. Miracle Rogue is highly flexible and doesn’t need a lot of added power to stick around, and while Garrote feels like a bait, it could be enough damage to put a serious clock on opponents. Of course, we also have aggressive shells that could reappear with some small tweaks, as well as Poison Rogue lurking. It’s got the kind of game plan that can really obliterate some silly quest decks running about.

The bottom line is that it’s hard for us to envision Rogue fading out of existence. We don’t think it’s going to be obscenely powerful or a top meta player, but its middling position during most of Barrens is likely to repeat.

 

 

9 Comments

  1. I really see the shaman quest slotting into mostly the current doomhammer shaman list. The deck already runs notetaker to get a similar effect and the double cast on stormstrike or rockbiter is a massive finisher.

  2. I feel like you could add the Priest Quest into any existing Priest deck and it would complete it. It usually generates a bunch of cards and lasts many turns anyway, so what’s playing a diverse cost of cards for a direct win condition really hurt anyway? Definitely better than a 1, at least

  3. @Frozad : The problem with celestial alignement is usually not to win once you get there, it’s to get there in the first place.

  4. After all you guys said about Bolner, I even expected a 6/5, but it ended up a 4/5. Am I missing something?

  5. I feel that you are not considering the interactions with celestial alignment (1 cost all) and the new cards, like oracle (!) and sheldras, maybe they could be better in that archtype.

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