Looking Back at Dragons - Episode 93

News Chat

• Free card! If you logged in on May 20, you got a free Fight Promoter. The reaction from the community was pretty interesting. A lot of people asked why they decided to do this, and Ben Brode said he was inspired by Free Comic Book Day. Just wanted to give something random away to inspire interaction and have fun.
• Wild Tournament Weirdness - Big uproar from some people who wanted to participate, specifically in Australia and surrounding regions. They had gotten to legend on Asia servers, and Blizzard announced that you had to have been playing on your country’s region, and Australia was considered Asia. This is odd because Australian players’ accounts default to the Americas server. But Blizzard was great and changed it for those players affected with some complicated rules that basically change which server is “home” to make more sense. Seems like this Wild Tournament is just being oddly announced and oddly implemented, which is a shame, cause it’s such a great idea!
• Yong Woo made it to legend with his Divine Fire Dragon deck this month. Check out his twitter feed for the deck. (https://twitter.com/ywoo_dev/status/867094183990841344)

 

Dragon Priest

 

• We saw the first Dragons, outside of the classic ones (Faerie Dragon, Twilight Drake, Azure Drake, Ysera, Malygos, Alexstrasza, Nozdormu, Onyxia and Deathwing), in the Blackrock Mountain expansion. It seemed like the Hearthstone team was trying to make dragon decks a thing but each individual card wasn’t powerful enough and didn’t synergize well enough with each other to make a reliable deck so Dragon decks didn’t really impact the meta in a significant way back then. BRM did give us Dragon Egg, Blackwing Technician, Dragonkin Sorcerer, Hungry Dragon, Blackwing Corruptor, Drakonid Crusher, Volcanic Drake, Nefarian, Chromaggus, Dragon Consort for Paladin and Twilight Whelp for Priest so you can see the bones of the later priest deck but we didn’t quite have enough dragons yet. The Grand Tournament gave us very important tools in Twilight Guardian and Chillmaw but priests’ overall weakness against the other very prominent decks of the day prevented it from coalescing just yet. Priest got Wyrmrest Agent and Warrior got another tool in their aggro belt; Alexstrasza's Champion. They kept adding dragons in Old Gods with Midnight Drake, Scaled Nightmare and Deathwing Dragonlord, none of which really hit the mark but this is when I really started to try and make the deck work. I liked the idea of a huge end combo with Deathwing Dragonlord drawing a bunch of huge bodies out after his death and I put Classic Deathwing, Ysera, Chillmaw and every dragon I owned into a deck with priests’ hard removal and aoe to live long enough to see it happen. And I was able to pull it off quite often. Mostly I think people were surprised someone was playing priest and they didn’t know how to defend against it but I did hit 10 pretty quickly that month.
• Karazhan gave us Netherspite Historian which turned out to be huge. Discover is such a powerful mechanic and with the limited number of Dragons narrowing down the pool of cards you are drawing from and most dragon cards quite powerful it was an auto include. Bookworm also made it into a lot of decks for easy removal of annoying 3 or lower power cards, something priest was already good at.
• And then we come to Gadgetzan and two cards that sealed the deal, Drakonid Operative and Dragonfire Potion. The Hearthstone team realized that all the dragons they had first introduced in BRM were about to cycle out in the next standard year along with TGT dragons and their dream of a synergistic dragon deck breaking through the meta was fast disappearing so they admit they made a very powerful card for priest that wasn’t going to last long. This was their last shot and it worked. We joke that Priest doesn’t have great cards of their own so the best decks they have involve stealing their opponents cards, it often works.
• This was the most fun I had ever had in Hearthstone. I love tempo decks where you play something strong and valuable every turn on curve and that was Dragon priest. Netherspite Historian was a fun way to start every game if you could get it but it was even more powerful if you could discover two dragons with Brann. Brann made almost every dragon in the deck more powerful in fact, Discovering two cards with Drakonid Operative, getting double the health with Kabal Talonpriest and many more. Most of the dragon cards had Battlecries.
• Dragon priest had tons of early taunt to deal with aggro, lots of value minions to stand up to mid-range and tempo decks, hard removal, huge aoe and powerful endgame. It seemed to have tools that could beat every deck, and especially with the pros, it did very well. And it was fun, who doesn’t like dragons?
• The final incarnation of Dragon priest was about putting powerful, hard to remove minions down every turn, getting extra dragons that could answer your opponents off of Netherspite Historian, stealing their best cards with Drakonid Operative, removing their board without touching your own with Dragonfire Potion, lots of end game threats and card draw as well as priests’ ability to heal and keep themselves and their minions alive. Sounds pretty unbeatable right? I gotta admit my biggest challenge was the mirror match. I reached rank 5 that month and eventually Golden Priest.

Community

The Dust Bowl

To keep:

• Awaken the Makers - Andrew
• Gluttonous Ooze

 

To dust:

• Sudden Genesis - Andrew
• Frozen Crusher (golden)

 

Question

Decklist from listener Scott B.

http://www.hearthpwn.com/decks/823657-funnest-deck-ever-pay2win-priest

 

On the ladder I have been playing kiblers http://www.hearthpwn.com/decks/823657-funnest-deck-ever-pay2win-priest I swapped out one of the cabal shadow priests for madam goya. I have been floating between rank 12 and 15. I need to change it to deal with pirate warrior but I don’t understand the meta enough to make the change.

 

iTunes Review

None. :’( Swing by and leave one this week! :D

Card of the Week

Deathwing