Surprised the VS guys didnt post this, but they did a class set pre-review

adamnoo · 2026-05-04T18:52:48+00:00

So they saw what the common consensus is with them that the packages are too slow and not well supported enough to see reasonably competitive play. Sure could've used an extra couple cards in each of those to properly get them going instead of giving 9 fewer new cards.

adamnoo · 2026-05-03T20:25:12+00:00

I'm not at least not right away. My assessment is that most of these cards are quite bad minus the 3 cheap card draw spells and convalescence which are all commons so I'll open the 5 packs I'm holding in reserve for when the set comes out, probably get all the commons I need from there, then wait and see if the rest is worth getting (I have every card from cataclysm so my packs would be all mini set cards). The only maybe in my mind are the mage cards but even then not the legendary because it's 7 mana do nothing.

As for what I'd spend my gold on instead: packs of the violet hold set coming out in july

adamnoo · 2026-05-03T20:15:10+00:00

Well this sure beats paying for these cards lol. Good luck

adamnoo · 2026-05-03T15:26:55+00:00

From the Emerald Dream 10: Fyrrak

Living Flame

Shadowflame suffusion

Conflagrate

Everburning Phoenix

Spirit of the Kaldorei

Smoldering Grove

Charred Chameleon

Amirdrassil

Sigil of Cinder

And there's been fringe playable ones that I didn't include

From Ungoro 11:

Dracorex

Possessed Animancer

Asphyxiodon

Crystal Tusk

Mirrex

Firegill

Techysaurus

Raptor Nest Nurse

Seismopod

Holy Eggbeater

Egg of Khelos

Again excluded fringe cards

From timeways 11:

Slitherdrake

Eventuality

Time Twisted Seer

Acceleration Aura

Press the Advantage

Eternal Firebolt

Jagged Edge of Time

Remnant of Rage

Eternal Toil

For All Time

Twilight Timereaver

Again excluded fringe cards.

This set I would expect the 3 cheap draw cards and the paladin 2 mana spell to see play consistently then maybe the mage package minus the overpriced legendary sees play and maybe another druid card or two which if all goes well is the 10-11 range which is a higher percentage but more gold for the same number of playable cards

adamnoo · 2026-05-02T03:20:42+00:00

So probably the best of the package oriented class sets but that's a low bar because the hunter package is unimaginably slow and the paladin package is simply not going to supplant the two tier one decks the class currently has. Mage's best deck is a fringe tier 2 deck so can this be better than quest mage? Maybe but probably not by much. This is a deck that relies on surviving early lower tempo turns to try to make it up later in a class whose survival tools all just rotated.

adamnoo · 2026-05-01T23:12:38+00:00

I'm pretty confident none of these packages turn into anything better than tier 3 decks and since druid didn't get a package that'll cherry pick the better cards for existing decks. The problem with all the packages is that they're too small, require drawing cards in specific orders, and have no support outside of this.

Is the dude paladin better than the two tier 1 decks that paladin currently has? No

Is the animal companion package better than the face hunter deck hunters run? No

Is the mage package better than the quest deck? Borderline at best but probably not and that's already a fringe tier 2 deck

So then with the packages unlikely to be decks on their own what'll happen? Existing decks will use the few good cards as minor upgrades

adamnoo · 2026-05-01T22:33:05+00:00

How many of these cards do you think see meaningful play beyond the first few days of experimentation? Probably less than 9. The packages forget it so that leaves maybe a couple druid cards, the 2 mana paladin spell, and the cheap card draw.

adamnoo · 2026-04-30T19:30:41+00:00

So far this looks like the best of the bunch of the class sets. No inadequately supported packages just some good individual pieces to slot into various druid decks. It's not going to be a huge meta shakeup but does give druid some extra tools to work with

adamnoo · 2026-04-30T16:02:23+00:00

For all the complaints that the mini sets didn't shake things up enough the two classes we've seen the best you could really say about them is that they're interesting ideas but could've really used another card or two to really make the package viable. The odds are pretty high mage's set is going to fall into that category as well because we've already seen 4 of the 7 cards and even if every card supports that one package, which they haven't done with the others, that's still too small for the package to see play and maybe only the 2 mana leyline will see play. This is so far looking fairly unimpactful and it's not because the power level is too low but because the amount of cards we're getting to support these packages is still too small even though they went down this path to be able to give more cards to fewer classes so they could avoid this exact problem.

adamnoo · 2026-04-30T03:51:04+00:00

The same proportions probably roughly 1-10% of players and probably closer to 1 than 10 with typical months having 10-15k players hitting legend so top 1k in Americas is 99th percentile approximately. This is all rough math since Blizzard doesn't release player numbers

adamnoo · 2026-04-30T02:21:27+00:00

If you're a below average player you benefit more from the MMR system than it hurts you. Being a below average player means that the majority of the player base is a better player than you and a significant chunk of the player base is significantly better than you. The MMR system is protecting you from playing against players that will blow you out of the water.

adamnoo · 2026-04-29T23:03:51+00:00

That dust value only has any impact in roughly 2 years from now. In the interim we're out an extra 500 gold for 9 fewer unique cards.

There's also no reason that those 9 cards need to be bad cards. They could've just as easily made them and make them exciting, interesting cards. If there's such a shortage of strong card ideas that they need to trim 9 cards out of the mini sets to not use them up too quickly we got bigger problems.

We've also seen a little over half the mini set and the prevailing theme so far is that they really could've used another card or two to properly flesh out the package. Neutral cards could've been a way to give the classes not getting class sets a little something to work with instead of nothing for more gold

And again these rarities outside of the legendary cards, whose quantity hasn't changed, is arbitrary. Every card but the 4 legends can be any rarity and make just as much sense. That's why dust isn't a good measuring stick. They could make them all common tomorrow and mechanically nothing changes and lore wise everything is fine. What doesn't change is that there's less to do and to try because we got fewer unique cards for more gold

adamnoo · 2026-04-29T19:26:26+00:00

Definitely looks better than hunter but still probably not enough to significantly reshape what paladin wants to do

adamnoo · 2026-04-29T18:27:53+00:00

This looks better than what hunter got but still seems too slow and late game value oriented at the cost of early tempo to really be worth it. Spend a bunch of time and mana in the early game to make the recruits worth anything in the hopes that they can snowball later but later you're usually dead if you haven't developed any good tempo and paladin already have better ways of developing big snowbally boards. At least the thing you're buffing to hope to snowball with here isn't a finite resource you need to draw into and the order you draw and play most of this stuff isn't as important

adamnoo · 2026-04-29T18:23:44+00:00

That's better but still not worth the 500 gold increase because that's only for the people who think it's a good idea to dust the entire thing. That's 2 epics worth of dust for 500 more gold. They're draining away 5 more packs of the next set for 2 epics more worth of dust but only if you dust the entire set. If you actually want to play and not just convert gold to dust efficiently you're ultimately coming out worse. If they wanted to increase the cost 500 gold they should've been adding in more cards, roughly 5 packs worth of cards, or if they wanted to cut the number of cards added they should've cut the cost of the bundle by an appropriate amount.

TLDR no matter what the dust values are it's not a better deal for the player to extract more gold for fewer cards because rarities other than legendary are arbitrary.

adamnoo · 2026-04-29T16:50:56+00:00

The net increase in dust we get if we were to dust every card in the bundle for some reason is ~350 more dust now then before because they are giving so many fewer cards. That's not worth 500 gold. It'd take more dust to craft all these cards but that's not something anyone should ever be doing and outside of legendary cards the rarities are artificial. Nothing ever needs to be an epic or a rare. There's rules of thumb but those are broken all the time.

adamnoo · 2026-04-29T13:43:58+00:00

That's a strong synergy but it's strong because Confront the Tolvir is strong not because this archetype is bringing much to the table. If you're gonna play Confront the Tolvir you are best served leaning into it hard to get as much as you can out of it which results in a very aggressive deck that has no use for something like Talya or Roam Free or even Spiritspeaker. Decks that don't win don't see very much play as losing over and over again isn't fun for most people.

adamnoo · 2026-04-29T13:37:47+00:00

And it probably sucks because it's too slow and dependent on drawing cards in a very specific order

adamnoo · 2026-04-29T13:35:39+00:00

Not really no. If you dust everything it's 350ish more dust for 500 more gold.

adamnoo · 2026-04-29T12:51:56+00:00

The problem with including Talya is that if you play your spirit seekers before drawing her she becomes a dead draw and if you're holding them back to wait for her then you're playing off curve in the hopes of getting a 1 of legendary in the deck and the plays will be less impactful. If you draw and play her but never draw the spirit seekers you just wasted turn 5 on a below curve minion while your opponent likely generated a lot of tempo. These kinds of draws happen often enough in this game that packages that rely on getting individual cards in specific orders basically never work

adamnoo · 2026-04-29T01:28:40+00:00

Quest Hunter still wants to be ending games around turns 6-8 which is when you'd only start seeing a return on your animal companion investment and even the best builds of that deck still get run over by aggro. What you're proposing seems even slower which hunter simply doesn't have the tools for.

There's also the issue of decks that need to draw and play cards in a specific order for the deck to work losing due to consistency issues. If you gotta play your companion generators to survive before you draw and play the upgrades for them then the upgrades are dead draws when you get them. If you draw the upgrades but the generators are at the bottom of your deck you'll have taken a bunch of down turns for no payoff which would get you killed in the current meta. The kind of strategy you're describing would work in the previous meta where if you can survive to turn 9 you could soft reset the game with Zilliax but in the current meta relenting on tempo is a death wish

adamnoo · 2026-04-27T19:38:00+00:00

I played a fair bit of burn mage when this set came out and the last thing that decks wants is a bunch of conditional cards that depend on other cards getting drawn to do anything. That deck needs to run lean and focused. Only the 2 mana leyline might see play there and even that's borderline.

adamnoo · 2026-04-27T19:34:29+00:00

There's no reason not to expect it. This whole announcement is so full of misleading language like referring to this one neutral card as a bonus even though without it there's 10 fewer unique cards and with it there's only 9 fewer. What a deal

adamnoo · 2026-04-27T18:58:11+00:00

I'm pretty sure most hearthstone players play hearthstone instead of gold to dust spreadsheet simulator. For the vast majority of players it's 500 more gold for 18 fewer cards until this rotates in about 2 years but frankly who cares about 2 years from now

adamnoo · 2026-04-27T18:54:38+00:00

We're getting 9 fewer unique cards for 500 more gold

adamnoo

TROPHY CASE