The Comprehensive Whizbang’s Workshop Preview

 

Data Reaper Report - Warrior

Quality Assurance

A 2-mana spell that soft tutors two minions is quite good. The only question is whether Warrior decks will have a taunt package big enough to support the inclusion of Quality Assurance. It is very unlikely that Odyn Warriors will run it. Taunt minions usually don’t possess battlecry synergies that’d make them suitable for Reno Warrior, but Inventor Boom (which indirectly interacts with taunt minions) could be a strong Reno Warrior card.

Quality Assurance seems critical for a specific Mech Warrior build centered on Boom Wrench and Testing Dummy. The main limitation of the deck’s power spike is whether it can find Testing Dummy, so this spell provides consistency in accomplishing that.

2-mana draw 2 is usually good enough for constructed.

Score: 2

Safety Goggles

Safety Goggles is an armor card that provides a mediocre amount for its base cost. If Iron Hide is a 1-mana gain 5 armor and Heavy Plate is a 3-mana gain 8 armor with Tradeable, then Safety Goggles’s baseline 2-mana for 6 armor is nothing to write home about.

What makes Safety Goggles powerful is its condition. If you have no armor, then the card costs 0-mana. A 0-mana gain 6 armor becomes a very strong card. There are two obvious use cases for Safety Goggles:

The first is general utility in an Odyn Warrior list. Post-Odyn, even a 2-mana gain 6 armor card is good enough to see play, since it’s worth a lot of damage. If it happens to cost no mana, it becomes particularly powerful alongside Razorfen Rockstar or Ignis, giving the Warrior exceptional reach. It can also help us activate Stoneskin Armorer.

The second, which might be more important, is its direct synergy with Sanitize. Sanitize’s primary weakness, especially after it was nerfed, is how inconsistent it can be in the early game. If you’re under a lot of pressure, you may not have any armor, or you may not have time to forge Sanitize. Safety Goggles means you can always deal 6 AOE damage with Sanitize in high pressure situations. That’s a game winning combo in a lot of matchups, much like Frozen Buckler and Shield Shatter used to be together.

This card is clearly strong in any Control Warrior deck.

Score: 3

Testing Dummy

Testing Dummy is a 6-mana taunt with reasonable stats and a powerful deathrattle. Dealing 8 damage randomly split amongst enemies is almost as much damage as a Mask of C’Thun. Even if it’s activated via deathrattle, giving the opponent a bit more control over the outcome, it’s quite difficult to play around.

Having said that, we probably don’t want to just plop Testing Dummy as a standalone card. Its value comes from synergies with Boom Wrench and Inventor Boom. It’s a 6-mana mech, so Inventor Boom can resurrect it and it’s a powerful combo with Boom Wrench, which allows you to trigger its deathrattle on curve.

This may require the emergence of a new Warrior deck that looks to maximize this interaction. There are some questions about whether such a deck can compete with the existing Warrior archetypes that may not slow down at all through rotation and possess very strong late game. However, we do think that Testing Dummy packs a lot of potential damage. Its damage is relevant in both faster and slower matchups since it can clear boards as well as hit face.

The possibility is also there to include some sort of Mech package in Reno Warrior. We think this minion can be leveraged quite effectively.

Score: 3

Boom Wrench

Boom Wrench is a slow weapon as a 4 mana 3/2, with a very specific deathrattle. It activates the deathrattle of a random friendly Mech in play. The immediate thought goes to Testing Dummy, which allows the Warrior to deal that 8-damage on curve, with more damage coming if the Testing Dummy is left alone.

That damage can come quite quickly thanks to Boom Wrench’s Miniaturize, since it provides us with a 1/1 weapon. This 1-mana weapon makes the Testing Dummy interaction potentially oppressive, since we can break the 4-mana weapon with the 1-mana weapon and trigger Testing Dummy twice in one turn, dealing 16 damage. The only counterplay here is to never leave Testing Dummy alone, but even that power spike can become unavoidable on or after turn 7.

There’s a lot to dislike about a 4-mana weapon that needs a very specific setting and curve to succeed. It seems that this package follows a very telegraphed curve. Sometimes in Hearthstone, you must adjust to the scenario. The opponent doesn’t sit there and wait for you to play cards. The Wrench plus Dummy plan doesn’t leave much room for adjustments. It will need to rely on its raw power to become competitive, but we do think there’s a lot of raw power that we can’t ignore.

Score: 3

Lab Patron

Lab Patron summons another baseline copy of itself the first time you gain armor in a turn. Notice that it’s not a copy, so buffs don’t transfer. For Lab Patron to be effective on curve, you need to be able to gain armor for no additional cost. Only Safety Goggles can accomplish this in the upcoming format. Otherwise, you need to look at turns 5/6 as more realistic timings.

But is summoning a couple of 3/3’s on turn 4 even good? Sure, each copy threatens to summon another Lab Patron the next turn, leading to Warrior flooding the board if left alone. The opponent must kill the Lab Patrons or risk being overwhelmed.

But killing a couple of 3/3’s on turn 4 isn’t hard to do for most decks. If the Lab Patrons are summoned later in the game, then the job becomes even easier. They don’t have any relevant keywords. There’s not even any immediate impact. There’s not even the ability to chain further summons in one turn, like their inspiration Grim Patron, since they can only activate once per turn.

It just looks very weak. A 3-mana Lab Patron wouldn’t even be overpowered, so 4-mana looks overly cautious.

Score: 1

Fireworker

The other Warrior Mech in the set that could fit alongside Boom Wrench and Inventor Boom in theory, but we didn’t bother to mention it. It contains a far weaker deathrattle that we’re just not interested in.

First, a 5 mana 5/5 is just horrible for constructed play. There’s nothing that Fireworker does when it’s played that protects us or responds to the opponent.

Second, a couple of Boom Bots might be slightly inconvenient to the opponent, but they don’t really apply a lot of pressure. Even the dream scenario where we activate Fireworker with Boom Wrench on curve leaves us with a mildly stronger play than a 7-mana Dr. Boom from 2014.

Third, Fireworker not having taunt means that we can’t draw it off Quality Assurance. There is no reliable way to tutor it even if we wanted to play it.

Fourth, it makes Inventor Boom, the marquee legendary for the archetype, actively worse. It’s a poor resurrection target for Inventor Boom. In fact, we’d rather skip Fireworker just to make sure it doesn’t pollute the resurrection pool for Inventor Boom. Testing Dummy is just so much better for both defensive and offensive purposes.

Score: 1

Wreck’em and Deck’em

This spell is meant to target a Mech with a big deathrattle, such as Testing Dummy. You get a random attack off, the Mech then dies and whatever deathrattle it has triggers. This can be powerful if you have a Testing Dummy up, for example.

The issue is that, unlike Boom Wrench, you can’t bank the cost of this spell on a previous turn. You need Testing Dummy on board, and you need it to survive a turn. A turn 9 combo is very slow, so unless your opponent ignores the minion (they won’t because of Boom Wrench), it’s going to be hard to cast the spell.

Beyond this utilization, this card seems extremely situational and is likely to be dead in hand for a long period of time. We don’t have much faith.

Score: 1

Chemical Spill

This is a very interesting spell, because it initially looks like a spell for a “big” deck, but it doesn’t impose a significant deck building restriction since it specifically summons the highest cost minion in your hand. You can still run cheaper minions. The ‘drawback’ is that the minion is dealt 5 damage, which makes a vanilla big minion an easy target for the opponent’s removal.

The key is to run high-cost minions that don’t see their power significantly diluted by taking this damage. It could be deathrattle minions, divine shield minions or minions that trigger an ability by taking damage.

A good example would be Grommash Hellscream, as it allows us to cheat out the charge minion and even copy it with Battleworn Faceless or Crimson Expanse. Another card that could work well with Chemical Spill is a Zilliax with Perfect/Virus module.

The issue with Chemical Spill is that it doesn’t mesh very well with existing Warrior win conditions, such as Brann, Odyn, or Boomboss. It also doesn’t have the greatest chemistry with the newly introduced Mechs in this set. Cheating out Botface could be viable, but doesn’t sound amazing, and Inventor Boom is a battlecry minion that you don’t want to pull with this.

This is the type of card that could quickly become very competitive the moment that Warrior has access to a high priority target.

Score: 3

Inventor Boom

Inventor Boom could be a massive resurrection card for the class. It resurrects two friendly Mechs with a cost of 5 or above. The Mechs attack random enemies upon being resurrected, which means they will hit the opponent’s face if the board is empty.

Easy math will tell you that Inventor Boom is worth a lot of stats. This is an 8 mana 7/7 that resurrects two minions of a minimum combined cost of 10 mana, while also having immediate impact through random attacks. The only caveat here is that you need to develop those two expensive mechs before you can play Inventor Boom, which means it might not be ready to go on curve.

As for juicy resurrection targets, Testing Dummy is an obvious one. Zilliax could be very strong with Perfect/Virus modules. Fireworker isn’t that great but could offer filler. Botface is a high value one but very expensive.

While a Mech Warrior deck is certainly possible, one must wonder whether Boom’s powerful battlecry could make its way to Reno Warrior. A doubled Investor Boom sounds quite intimidating, especially if it resurrects the perfect Zilliax.

Inventor Boom will likely find a way to be competitive, considering you don’t need to do a lot to make him work and it doesn’t impose significant restrictions on any deck it’s included in. A small package of 3-4 cards could be enough to fit Boom into a deck successfully.

Score: 3

Botface

A massively expensive Mech and a callback to a similar card from the past in Rotface, which was completely unplayable. Botface is significantly better. It has better stats and is a taunt, so it can’t be ignored. It also generates higher quality cards whenever it takes damage.

We know that Mini cards are the powerful parts of Miniature cards, so to get two of them every time Botface takes damage could represent a lot of value. The possibility of resurrecting Botface with Inventor Boom has not escaped our thoughts either.

But still, we have big question marks. This is a 9-mana card with 3-attack. It’s extremely slow to play from hand. We just can’t see that being a successful line in the format. Our conclusion is that for Botface to see competitive play, it needs to be cheated out with Chemical Spill, especially if we’re planning to resurrect it with Inventor Boom.

This is a turn 5 play that summons a 3/4 taunt to the board and generates two Minis. If Botface takes one damage swing to get killed, we get four Minis total. Playing a 5 mana 3/4 taunt is very bad, so those Minis need to be able to carry and swing the game back for us.

We don’t really see it. While Minis are powerful, some of them are very synergy based, so they wouldn’t do anything in Warrior. Imagine generating a Mystery Egg, Tabletop Roleplayer or an Amateur Puppeteer. These are complete blanks. When we do look at the whole pool of Minis, we struggle to see how the turn 5 3/4 taunt is consistently worth it.

Score: 1

Final Thoughts

Whizbang’s Workshop Set Rank: 10th

Overall Power Ranking:  3rd

Our mentality when it comes to Warrior is that the entire Whizbang set could be lit on fire, and the class will still be one of the strongest and most versatile in the game. The last year of sets have been extremely kind on Warrior with the focal points being Odyn and Deepminer Brann offering the class reliable methods of closing out games.

While Renathal is gone, the 30-card fast cycling build loses almost nothing in rotation. It will still be able to draw cards at a frantic pace, ensuring the consistency of its late game execution remains intact. Arguably, its survivability could be even better thanks to Safety Goggles potentially opening space for Sanitize to be included in the deck.

There is a bit more instability tied to Reno Warrior, mostly, because Astalor is gone, but the archetype is still capable of dealing a filthy amount of damage. As an example, Nostalgic Clown and Zola the Gorgon are worth 32 damage post-Brann. 24 damage for 6 mana in one realistic turn. Warrior can also just choose to take the Boomboss/Gatekeeper path and nuke the opponent’s deck. A card like Deepminer Brann is unlikely to fall off because battlecries are, on average, the most powerful effects in the game.

This is just us talking about tools already available to Warrior. If we’re talking about what Warrior is getting, then it is a mixed set with some powerful cards that could be the focal point of a new Mech Warrior deck. The damage potential of Boom Wrench and Testing Dummy is not something you can easily brush off. A Testing Dummy coming down is a major headache for the opponent, as it’s so annoying to trade into it, yet leaving it up carries its own major risk.

This potential archetype can also abuse Chemical Spill with sticky and expensive Mechs. Botface might seem a little sketchy, but alternatives can be found with a Perfect/Virus combination of Zilliax or, simply, Containment Unit. If we can avoid a Chemical Spill and Inventor Boom clash, then this deck’s late game can be quite scary.

Of course, since Inventor Boom is a battlecry, Reno Warrior could adopt a Mech package and establish a new finisher for its deck.

The possibilities in Warrior are vast thanks to the class’ resilience and strong sets throughout the year. Garrosh is going nowhere. Get used to it.

1 Comment

  1. Good read overall, but the write up on Timewinder Zarimi is a bit over the top. It just screams, “Blizz, if you’re reading our article nerf this card now!”, and I think it’s way too early to jump to that conclusion. Time Warp effects are strong, but it’s no more strong than OTK card strategies; one could argue it’s actually weaker cause you need two turns in a row to win when other decks can OTK.

    A weakness with Timewinder Zarimi that shouldn’t be ignored is its reliance on dragon tribe. Can’t just put in any deck, must devote enough other cards to get to 5 dragons.

    TLDR – Let’s try not to put a target on cards to nerf before they’re actually a problem.

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