There are two ways I see of playing this card. The first way is just as a decent value card in a beast hunter deck, trade off some beasts and get them back or play with unleash the hounds to get twice as many hounds. That is probably how I’ll end up using it but it can also be used as a combo card in deathrattle hunter, ideally played after Flarks Boom Cannon so you can keep your huge minions after they clear the board but it can also just be used with cards like carnivorous cube to get more devilsaurs.

I am not confident this card will be good unfortunately. While the effect is really good it is unfortunately a 3 drop and beast hunter has a lot of good 3 drops including a new one that might be really strong.

I like Zul’jin he’s like a more controlled yogg and I’m sure he’ll see play in spell hunter decks but I can’t see myself playing him while I still have Deathstalker Rexxar as an option but we’ll see.

On to mage. Mage has some cards pushing for a new hero power archetype that we haven’t seen since GTG (and it wasn’t really good in constructed back then). The thing I want to do with these cards is Odd Hero Power Mage. I think combining these new cards with an upgraded hero power seems like a fun strategy though it may not work. I’ll also try it out in wild since I still have all the good inspire cards from GTG.

With Baku the 3 drop will have an easier time activating, the 1 drop will deal 3 damage for 3 mana and Jan’Alai will only need me to use my hero power 4 times in a game to activate. By running baku I do miss out on using the spirit but I don’t think the spirit is that great and certainly not better than Baku.

Most of the Paladin cards are either big spells or healing and even if I was interested in making those decks I do not have the supporting cards from other sets to make it work. So I’m not interested in any of the paladin cards except for one.

Back in ungoro I opened the Paladin Quest and at the start of each expansion I try to make it work, so far its always been bad but immortal prelate might give it what it needs to be playable, its main problem is that the quest often cannot win on its own so it needs a backup wincon and Immortal Prelate provides that. Will quest pally finally be playable? Probably not but I’m going to try it anyway!

On to Priest. One meme deck I have always had is steal priest, a deck that only runs cards that steal or copy opponents cards and Rastakhan is adding two cards for the deck.

Seance is going straight into that deck. I ran convert before and it was okay but Seance being able to target minions I’ve already copied/stolen is a big deal and makes the card much better.

Unfortunately I don’t actually think Princess Talanji will be going in the deck unless I happen to open one. I don’t think the card is bad but I also don’t think the card is good enough to make me want to craft it for the deck.

Those aren’t the only priest cards I am interested in from this set. A deck I tried to get to work in the frozen throne meta was Zoo-Priest and I was actually quite surprised that it wasn’t actually that bad, not a meta strength deck but not trash either. Since then priest hasn’t really gotten a lot that makes me want to try it again but Rastakhan has changed that.

Surrender to Madness is the main thing that makes me want to try zoo priest again. Giving +2/+2 to all the minions in your deck is incredibly strong, as we know it is from seeing rogues bounce keleseth the downside of this card is that it destroys your mana crystals which sets you back quite a bit but I think if the curve of the deck is very low you could minimize this cost quite a bit.

Spirt of the Dead is the other card that I think will make zoo priest work. Play this trade off some minions and then play your surrender to madness and enjoy drawing some beefy 1 drop minions. If nothing else this deck will be fun to try out.

I’ll be skipping out on rogue as I don’t really care for pirate rogue and there isn’t much else there. Shaman doesn’t have much I find interesting either so on to Warlock and I am really happy that finally we have some controlled discard effects. I enjoyed playing disco-lcok back in the Karazhan meta but the one thing I always wanted for the deck was a way to somewhat control my discards and we finally have cards that do that.

Reckless Diretroll and Shriek both discard only the lowest cost card in your hand which allows for more control over what is discarded and ideally I want that card to be the clutchmother which being only a 2 cost shouldn’t be too difficult. I think more of these style of discard cards might also make it possible for control discard warlocks to exist but as it is now I think we’ll be stuck with zoo and maybe midrange. I’ll be trying this deck out in standard and maybe wild too.

I have no interest in warrior this time around so on to neutrals!

Da Undatakah is easily my favourite legendary of the set and I can already think of 2 decks I want to put this in. The first deck is deathrattle hunter which actually doesn’t have that many different deathrattle effects (I don’t run eggs in mine) meaning undatakah will just copy the few really powerful deathrattles that are in there. The second deck I want to put this in is Hadronox druid, at the moment I only have 3 deathrattes which means I can essentially use this as a second hadronox being an 8 drop it does compete for space in the deck as I already have 2 primodial drakes and lich king but I think I can squeeze it in.

I want to talk about this card not because I want to play it. I don’t and outside of arena I don’t think I will play it. The reason I want to talk about it is I’ve seen people claim this card is terrible and I don’t think it is because thanks to tavern brawl I’ve played against this effect before and it was horrible to play against. For those of you who don’t remember that card was Spectral Steed. From the Headless Horseman Tavern brawl

(Note: Sorry for the card being so big here I don’t know how to resize cards in tumblr and due to getting this card image from a different source its much bigger.) Spectral Steed could really mess up combat math, it often forced me into making bad trades because I had to get it off the board and I couldn’t reliably kill it with what I wanted to. This is actually stronger than the steed to since the steed only affected minions and this can redirect hero attacks. So yeah I think people are underrating this effect.

Finally I wanted to talk about this card. Drakkari Trickster is great for both Burgle Rogue and Steal Priest, it has strong stats and those decks can utilize their opponents cards better than the opponent cant utilize their cards.