I mean, the good priest deck right now is miracle. It’s not amazing and has missed some of its curve in the meta, but it is undoubtedly the best the class has to offer before the buffs drop.
Would it play extra arms? A 2 mana mecho spell with potential acolyte/pyro synergy doesn’t seem awful.
But we already know that the devs have no idea what cards Priest has. Reckless Experimenter is literally the only huge “design-around” card that the class has, the only card that dramatically shifts the potential values around, and Blizzard just flat out admits that they forgot it exists when they designed SN1P.
So the best Priest card, lacking only the proper synergy and support to be a meta terror, gets nerfed. If that just ain’t Priest design in a nutshell, I don’t know what is. “Sorry, we have to nerf this bad card with the potential to be good so we can print a powerful Neutral card instead. We forgot it existed.”
Ive already watched Kibler slaying it up with a mech priest. Well, a deathrattle mech priest.
Im sure that a power crept blessing of kings isnt hurting that. Also, theres room for testing more aggressive builds when you have access to tier 1 buffs. Combined woth priests natural ability to sustain its board health, it’s not unlikely.
When was Priest even in this Meta? Can’t say goodbye to someone that never showed up to the party.
Wall priest and nomi priest both showed promise before the meta devolved into rogue warrior
There is a deck I think Arms could work in.
Had an old Dragon Priest whose ideal turn was Cleric/Twilight Hatchling into turn 2 Shadow Ascendant. I tried Keleseth, but even when Keleseth landed on 2, it was missing that early tempo from the Ascendant to secure an early board.
More Arms would probably work quite well in that deck. Cleric into Arms might be a little like Aggro Druid’s Dire Mole into Mark of Yshaarj. Might give the deck a little bit of oomph when it comes to needing a slight burst from hand.
couldnt it possible make new variation that doesnt use kangors and is more aggresive or use a other finisher?
but paladin doesnt have AoE board buffs to take advantage of 1/1 robots (if they survive), the only way i see this works is that you have buffed robots in hand to take advantage of those bodies to magnetize them into face but in the agro meta we are there are always tools to kill an army of 1/1
That definitely could work…utilizing arms in the early game to stabilize the board and hero power for draw via cleric…
That actually sounds like fun! Let me know if you come up with anything, please!
Board style Priest might work when arms is 2 mana. Turn 1 Cleric into turn 2 arms can be nuts. People fail to see that it doesn’t take much to get there for a board style zoo build a 3/5 eats most 2 drops in standard and next turn it will be 5/x that will be able to eat most 3 drops and live and if it survives to your turn 4 you can Blademaster Circle for 2 cards and a 5/x and 4/7 and be in good position to dominate the opponents turn 4/5. 2 mana arms could be what gets Priest into the meta. If anything Mech Event is Hello Priest.
Honestly I think folks are delusional (or perhaps just haven’t played much Priest lately) if they think zoo/board Priest can be made relevant by dropping the cost of a single buff by 1 mana!
Yes getting Extra Arms t2 on a t1 girl is a powerful play, but that’s it! we haven’t got any other tempo plays, if the deck doesn’t have a 1 drop and an Extra Arms in your opening hand you’ve lost, we don’t have a flame imp!
Plus Priests have a very hard time drawing cards unless they devote their whole deck to it, you can’t be droppoing acolyte of pain on 3 in a tempo deck.
Look at Priest’s Lackey generator, EVERY other class gets their Lackeys upfront and guaranteed, even flipping Warrior!, all except priest, let’s face it the class is not designed for tempo, our minions are weak and our hero power is bad(for tempo, probably just straight up bad, but definitely bad for tempo), I don’t think one half decent buff is enough to make this deck viable.
The only time a board control priest was viable was dragon priest with “secret agent, coming through” and a assymetrical boardwipe in Dragonfire potion, as well as a bunch of overstatted dragons/minions (Twilight guardian, Wyrmrest agent) and we had a good buff in Velen’s chosen too, I don’t think we’ve got anywhere near that card quality available to Priest in this rotation.
I don’t even think Miracle Priest will want Extra Arms, 2 mana is too much , they need their spells to cost zero, 1 at the most, it’s too slow for that deck, and even if it was used I find it hard to believe it will raise it above tier 3, particularly as every other class gets a buff.
I’m predicting it now, priest bottom of the meta , at less than 5% representation.
There’s also potential with Test Subject to keep the buffs coming and still establish an early threat. My main concern with a Zoo Priest, though, is just the draw. You do have to choose between drawing with a Northshire and continuing to develop the board as a Priest. Assuming you even get Northshire and Arms.
I think the real problem is when you DON’T get Arms. It’s not about the godhand, it’s about all the times you don’t start with the godhand. Zoo decks aren’t about always having the godhand, they’re about always having a powerful start. Beyond Northshire & Arms, what do you have that gets you out ahead? What do you have that lets you reset after board wipe, how do you close out?
I mean, that’s a pretty safe bet. If we do get a good priest deck, it’s going to be a good legend priest deck, not a good rank 15 priest deck. That’s kind of the nature of the class though.
Well I don’t think that’s acceptable. If you are going through the exercise of buffing cards , why not do it to equalise the power levels , and bring lesser played classes into the meta?
Priest doesn’t have a deck that’s good at any level right now, this would have been the perfect time to give the class a meaningful buff, like Paladin is getting, but no.
Not only that, it’s obvious from the Reckless experimenter nerf that the devs don’t even know what cards priests have right now! I am just frustrated because the design work on Priest cards seems disjointed/haphazard and just plain sloppy, minimal effort is being expended while they attend to their favourites, there’s no excuse for cards as egregiously bad as Cloning Device or Surrender to madness, none!
I don’t know, I’ve been enjoying Miracle Priest still. If I had the legendary res minion I would also be toying with wall and inner fire. I don’t hate the idea of a johnny class and, if you like meta breakers, priest tends to be the place to be.
Fair enough, and to be fair I like the fact they’ve moved priest away from dragonpriest “bodies on the board” style and have given us a bunch of wonky cards to play with.
I LOVE the idea of making a Surrender to madness/Extra Arms zoo priest work! I’ve been thinking about all sorts of possibilities! BUT at the moment I think the power level we have to work with is way below the level required, Miracle priest is fun, but it certainly isn’t a good deck and getting constantly wrekt by every other class gets long very quickly.
Maybe I just have to accept this is Priests time to be bad, but I don’t think it needs to be THIS bad!
This may earn me hate, but I feel like surrender to madness doesn’t even need to destroy mana crystals to be fair. 3 mana on a zoo deck and you still need to draw the cards? It’s barely even a zoo card.
Edit: a thought…
0 mana
Spend your remaining mana. Destroy mana crystals spent and give minions in your deck and hand +1/+1 for each.
I wouldn’t disagree, the destruction of mana just seems way ott, look at cards like Mist caller which buffed your whole deck and gave you a 4/4 on t6 and that still wasn’t playable, and then you look at Keleseth as an example of a card that works doing this and then compare it with StM and you just wonder what they were thinking!
I would love to ask the devs just why they made that card soooo bad, what were they worried about? I mean Luna’s pocket galaxy only costs 5!
Sometimes it feels like the devs are absolutely terrified of giving Priest decent cards, they don’t have the same problem with Hunter or Rogue or Warrior, all classes that have dominated the meta at one point or another, but priests aren’t allowed to have anything nice!
Edit: something like that would be pretty cool, add a bit of skill and player agency into the spell, and give it a monstrous upside for the daring!
I’ve played Zoo Priest most of last expansion and experimented with various tempo builds this expansion.
Zoo actually worked quite well last expansion, I was 50/50 against Zoolock and pushed rank 5 multiple times. Circle was so good for tempo. However, the deck was never anything beyond a tier 3 at best.
This expansion Silence is your best tempo deck but it suffers multiple faults.
The biggest flaw is it doesn’t have value plays outside of cleric and acolyte gimmicks. It’s very strong on minion board control, you can make huge beefy minions early on and heal them easily, but if your opponent pulls ahead on board with a good combo you struggle so much. If you don’t draw Cleric or it dies, you run out of steam so easily. We can’t generate a ton of lackeys or make big one card swings.
Extra Arm’s is a good card. It fits great in Silence and the buff is definitely positive. It means Silence Priest can fight a turn 3 Giant which is major. It won’t fix the deck though.
What Priest really needs is heal/silence draw and value synergy and some all round good cards. Kabal Talonpriest and Potion of Madness good. Or Purify. It’s been gimmick after gimmick every set. Look at Druid for example with some great Heal synergy and a crazy boss in Lucentbark and even that hasn’t pulled it to the meta. Priest doesn’t even get that much. They badly need it.
I just want to necro this post to remind all it’s participants the OP was Nostradamus here.
Priest 0% win rate on the Hearthstone Championship Tour
Less than 5% played rate since the last expansion. Only 2 “semi-decent” decks for the last 5 months.
All the OPs predictions came true, and he’s a regular guy… There are people who GET PAID to know this stuff, who couldn’t figure this out.