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Nefarian’s Laboratory #1: Get Resurrekt

by - 9 years ago

Nefarian really, really loves experiments—specifically mad experiments. He loves them so much that he’s had himself re-animated and is now back from the dead, fully ready to resume his twisted work. Join Dannie Ray as he takes the role of Dragonman Maloriak, assisting in the design of some quite twisted Hearthstone cards that are bound to break the game in one or more ways.


Welcome to Nefarian’s Laboratory! Since this is your first time here, I’ll take some time to introduce myself. My name is Dannie Rayloriak, Dragonman at the service of the great Master Nefarian. As an assistant on this glorious laboratory, I’m tasked with research and design of some of the beautiful experiments that are developed here.

But that’s enough of an introduction, lets get to today’s job. I’ve heard that you’ve ventured down to the halls of those filthy Dark Iron Dwarves and looted a magnificent Priest Card, lets take a closer look at it.

resurrect

Oh yes, this is quite exquisite indeed.

The sheer power of this card can be appreciated at first sight. At a mere 2 mana, you can bring back any minion to life. That means that you could get huge bodies on the board for just a fraction of the cost. Resurrect could net you a huge tempo advantage, and this is what makes it a highly valuable card.

But you say you are not that happy with it? Oh well, I guess the card does have its drawbacks. Resurrect brings back to the board a random friendly minion that has died this game, this means that just like it can bring out the big threats, it can also bring out your early game minions. Resurrect is impacted somewhat negatively by popular cards such as Sludge Belcher, Piloted Shredder, and Dr. Boom.The extra minions that these guys summon can often be less valuable than the big threats you’d ideally want Resurrect to get out.

sledgebelcher1piloted-shredder doctor-boom

Like that wasn’t enough, Shadow Madness and Cabal Shadow Priest are two staples of Priest, but they exhibit negative synergy with Resurrect as you add some extra small value minions as possible targets for your Resurrection spell. Even Thoughtsteal could end up giving you a minion that ends up being a liability.

Cabal Shadow Priest shadow-madnessThoughtsteal

 

Other important factor to consider is that the minions will be summoned rather than played, this means that you won’t get the powerful battlecries of creatures such as Dr. Boom and the aforementioned Cabal Shadow Priests. But that’s not completely negative, this means that you can dodge detrimental battlecries like those possessed by Arcane Golem, Injured Blademaster, Millhouse Manastorm, King Mukla, and my personal favorite, the Hungry Dragon.

king muklaHungry_Dragon_transparentInjuredBlademaster

So you want me to take this cool new little spell to its limit? Well, lets see what I can do for you. Lets continue the analysis on Resurrect, and then we can get on crafting cards that have great synergy with it.

The biggest issue with Resurrect is getting a small and weak minion back, you’d be tempted to the drop small minions and just play bigger ones. The problem with that is that your early game might be too weak, and you’ll be already out of the game before your bigger minion start popping. Without the ability to ramp up your mana curve like a Druid, you are more reliant on smaller creatures to get you through the early stages of the game.

Can we craft a smaller minion that could still prove to be valuable as a resurrect target? Of course, that’s why I’m here for! You could have an Injured Blade Apprentice, or maybe you could have minions that get a considerable attack debuff as a battlecry. Perhaps you want to be blunt and just create a Priest minion with the text “Cannot be Resurrected”, I’d prefer a more subtle approach myself but who am I to argue with results? Another idea would be to have a card that gets stronger if another copy of it has died during this game, that would perhaps be a welcome addition to any class, as the second copy of the smaller minion would have an added punch if you draw it during the late game. It could also get synergies with Shaman and their own reincarnation shenanigans.

But could we skip playing smaller minions altogether?

I know we can’t just give Wild Growth and Innervate to Priest, but maybe there’s something we can do about it. Maybe we can draw inspiration on cards such as the Void Caller, the Alarm-o-bot, and Ancestor’s Call. If we can get our minions into the field without having to play them, we can get even more synergy from minions that work well with resurrect. Maybe if we tie in a way to accelerate them we could be golden.

Or perhaps we could have a card that summons a minion from your hand and then promptly destroys it. Now that would be an interesting experiment, it could lead to rather disastrous situations for your opponents.

Now that we have our components, lets mix and stir, apply heat!

 Stop the Aggro!

RisenDefenderNefLab

First out we have the Risen Defender, this small taunter is meant to prevent you from falling too far behind against aggressive decks. You also don’t have to worry about him popping out of a Resurrect in place of a bigger minion. Perhaps the text should read “Cannot be summoned by other cards”, so this is safe from other alternate summon Mechanics that can be introduced in the future. Plus we really want to avoid our Alarm-o-bot bringing this up, right?

What does kill me, makes me stronger.

NightElfAvengerNefLab

Up next is the Night Elf Avenger! This single-minded elven warrior might be just a simple 2/3 the first time you play it, but he will return with newfound strength to avenge his fallen comrades.  If you get the Avenger out of a Resurrect it will at least be a 4/3, which is a very nice deal for 2 mana. But the Avenger could also be a 6/3, or even an 8/3 if you somehow manage to resurrect him twice.

 Under a Curse of Weakness

NefsLab1Card5

 

Now we move into more generic minions. When you play the Accursed Combatant from your hand he passes the Vanilla test as a 4/3 for 3 mana, but our weakened fellow will show his true form when Silenced, or Summoned by alternative means such as Resurrect. Important to note is that 2-mana and 4-mana versions of these guys would affect Piloted Shredder and Skygolem by adding very strong minions to their summon pool. Perhaps you’d like a stronger curse for flavor, and perhaps the card would look neater if the battlecry gave it -3 attack instead. What? I never said these experiments would be perfect, everything needs refining.

 

 I Need you out there NOW!

BorrowedTimeNefLab

Ramp Priest here we go? This allows you to play a four drop for 2, which sounds kind of like Innervate. The thing is, this card is a lot less flexible that Innervate as there’s only a few targets that you can actually ramp up. To compensate for it, you get to skip the minion’s battlecry effect. This would be pretty strong on Resurrect-friendly cards like Mukla and Injured Blademaster. The catch is that Random factor on the card could also betray you, and instead of dropping an insane 5/6 Battlecryless Hungry Dragon for 2 mana you could end up with just a 3/4 Dark Cultist which would reduce the value on Borrowed Time to that of a coin.

Still, dropping bigger creatures early will add a lot of value to the Resurrects you will be casting later on the game. While this might look like a quite an underwhelming card for your average Priest, the potential it has for decks which build around it could be so high that the card ends up being way too OP, but you’d have to calculate the odds on that one.

 Wait for it, It’s Going to be Legen-

 

wait for it…

 

wait for it…

 

SallyWhitemaneNefLab

Last but certainly not least we have Sally Whitemane, a High Inquisitor of the Scarlet Crusade.  Sally comes with a Resurrect of her own as a Deathrattle, we have put a measure on place to prevent her from resurrecting herself which could end up being an infinite loop. There’s not much to say about this beauty, other than she has great synergy with most of the cards that we’ve discussed. A small negative is that Sally could end up bringing the Risen Summoner back to life, here’s where our suggestion of tuning our Skeletal Construction so he reads “Cannot be summoned by other cards” would start shining.

CairneBloodhoofpiloted-skygolem

At 5/5 she’s a decent body, and to evaluate her power you would have to compare her with cards such as Cairne and the Piloted Sky Golem. But the Tauren Chieftain and the Mech give you 4 drops when they die, while Sally is giving you the effect of a 2-mana cost spell.  Her power level is all about you having minions that have a decent synergy with Resurrect Mechanics, which in a themed deck with the cards we have created would be quite substantial.

Oh and before I forget..

Dary! Legendary!


Have we broke the game yet? Let me know what you think about Resurrect and how do you think it will interact with future cards. Will Resurrect become stronger and stronger as Hearthstone continues to release expansions or will the devs play around it and avoid creating too many cards that have positive interactions with this very interesting Priest Spell?

Until the next time, experiment on!

 

 


JR Cook

JR has been writing for fan sites since 2000 and has been involved with Blizzard Exclusive fansites since 2003. JR was also a co-host for 6 years on the Hearthstone podcast Well Met! He helped co-found BlizzPro in 2013.


0 responses to “Nefarian’s Laboratory #1: Get Resurrekt”

  1. Palaryel says:

    Ok, after reading this through and taking some time to analyze your card proposals a second time after I’ve read the text, I’d like to say that Blizz should hire you and pay you to make some cards. The ideas are good (all of them) while at the same time they are not broken, which by itself is something that is hard to achieve in a game like this. Keep going bro, I wanna see more. Cheers 😉

    • Dannie Ray says:

      Thanks for the high praise, but I wouldn’t put my money on those not being Broken. You definitely need to go through playtesting first, and personally I’d love to run some math on it too but that would be time prohibitive.

      • Palaryel says:

        Well, “broken” is relative here. Are the cards powerful enough to boost the priest class? Yes! Are they powerful in a way that would turn priest into a new cancer? Hell no! Considering the current meta, priest and shaman could use a couple of more powerful cards to keep them more competitive on the ranked ladder.

  2. Nuclein says:

    AAAWWWW. How nice. AAAAAWWWW. So many beautiful cards <3. Well done, keep it up!
    #neversurrender

    oh oh, seems like i got to much exited.

  3. akaimba says:

    you might want to read through the article for a few spelling mistakes – but putting them aside i would love to see these cards/ some similiar cards in the game – would be so much fun 🙂

    • Dannie Ray says:

      Oops, seems like turning into a Dragonman makes it really hard to type! Thanks for the heads up.