I shuffled 5 Reliquary Primes into my deck one game. That gave me a giggle. Grave Runes / Psyche Split on Vargoth is hilarious. I miss Replicate, man that was good with Vargoth.
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Priest from around the globe UNITE!
Now we go back to the most boring meta :
- Rez priest (boring from T1 to end, even if you manage to win after 25 turns)
- Spell druid (don’t have more than 2 aoe ? you lost, don’t have them on turn 5 ? you lost)
- Big druid (most broken control deck so far)
The whole next week is going to be so boring, i’m done testing decks.
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I don’t think Priest is that far away from a tempo build, but we just aren’t there yet, we have lots of “pretty decent” plays, but that just doesn’t cut it when you’re playing vs DH (or Rogue or Druid or Mage!).
We can gradually build a board, but when we’re bullied off (or don’t get a good mulligan and can’t play a good T1+2) by one of the other classe powerplays ten it’s gg, we don’t have proactive minions to fight back and we don’t have the draw to run powerful combos.
Yes we can try and lucksack into the right cards with Thoughtsteal etc., but it’s just not a consistent strategy, Rogue needed cards like Vendetta and the rush Totem Golem to make burgling cards worth it, and Priest get’s nothing like that (Talanji was our Tess, but we never got any other support).
If they want Tempo Priest to be a thing they’re going to have to give us cards like Eye Beam, Blackjack Stunner,Phase Stalker etc. minions with decent stats and a strong upside or “free” spells , stuff like the new Iron Sensei(Dragonmaw Overseer) just don’t cut it and they require you to be ahead on board, which Priest never is.
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1 attack minions provide other benefits. Like… didn’t priest just lose one of their favorite 1 attack 1 drops (cleric) to HoF?
It’s not like other classes haven’t run 1 attack 1 drops in their tempo decks that do just that (anything from shimmerfly to balloon to mech-a-roo to even a simple dire mole).
If you insist on being able to trade up, well like you said there’s a 2/2 neutral. Welcome to what every other class when they want tempo but their class cards are found wanting.
If pallies had that mentality (and some of them do when they complained before this expansion on how pure pally wasn’t good), mech pally wouldn’t have ever been a thing.
I think more experienced pallies would argue to you to death on how their recruits and buffs aren’t all that. But I’ll just say that different classes are different.
Ah, but didn’t you just say in a previous post that some of priest’s most powerful stuff (minions) are expensive?
And didn’t you also say priest has to often just play a minion to fend for itself when fighting tempo?
So wouldn’t that mean if priest removal spells are cheaper, it’s now easier for you to play both a minion and a spell on the same turn, such that the minion isn’t entering the board completely unsupported?
I think you’re just seeing animal companion as glass half full while dark prophecy as glass half empty here (and I think that’s the overall theme of our discussion: glass half full vs glass half empty)
Both produce something better than a 3 drop but less than a 4 drop. Misha is probably closest to a 4 drop (4/4 taunt as opposed to senjin 3/5 taunt), but even then you could argue the value of breaking the 5 health mark (e.g breaking flamestrike, breaking any 4/3 3 drop)
That is mitigated by the spell being discover instead of completely random, and the flip side that there are a few highrolls (millhouse and injured tol’vir top the list). Too lazy to do the math but I’m pretty sure the chance of all 3 choices being bad is extremely low. Nobody is forcing you to pick the bad choice out of 3.
I would also contest how many bad outcomes there are. Just looking at my own collection which I think is complete, in standard, I counted this list of bad neutrals.
Bug collector
EVIL Cabal Rat
Murloc Tidehunter
Novice Engineer
Ancient Watcher
Doomsayer
Frostwolf Grunt
Parachute Brigand
That’s out of like 80 neutral 2 drops before going into class drops.
Well, somebody (you) were talking about how the priest kit doesn’t have enough tools to help them get ahead in board and tempo, so wouldn’t they take this 2/2 rush as it would better than quote unquote nothing?
But say you still aren’t convinced. Ok. Don’t run it. You can still run the 4/5 taunt, which is only a little worse for tempo. With class cards that’s still 6 invokes.
By that logic, nobody but warlocks could do tempo, but we know that’s not true. Hunters have done it time and again after buzzard nerf. Pallies still persisted after divine favor left. Any hard face deck just relies on solid top decking with maybe one or two card draws (face hunter, pirate warrior)
Not saying they have zero draw, but they don’t need to be pre-nerf DH levels of draw, and that different classes can do other things in lieu of draw. Hunters had some random beast thing before and shimmerfly to give them a spell. Pallies now have libram of wisdom and liadrin and pure pally has lightforged crusader to refuel.
I like to see priest develop their own way, and I can see the logic behind galakrond towards that. If priest just tries to copy another class, well… you’ll just always look for ways where other classes can do XYZ better (and what strengths priests do have is underplayed), like some high expectations Asian father 
They cannot.
They used all their dusts.
Yes, Priest is now able to play SW Death and a Minion… on Turn 7 or 8. Turn 5? Just going to have to decide whether you want to play Convincing Infiltrator into something with 5 attack, or remove and waste the rest of your mana. And none of this is helping you have an early game.
Well, no, because the Tempo cards available to the class are Psychopomp & Mass Res. Unfortunately, you have to remove most minions from your deck for those cards to be good. I suppose a 2/2 Rush Reborn isn’t too terrible.
I guess I have to explain how decks work. You have 30 slots. The reason Priest runs “nothing” is because it doesn’t have the cards to support an early game, and the late-game cards like Mass Res & Catrina punish you for running smaller minions. Like old Gul’dan Death Knight decks didn’t run Flame Imp, for example, because the DK pulled from friendly demons that have died. It’s like that, except it’s not a narrow tribal tag, it’s all minions.
Priest isn’t rewarded for running small minions either. If it wants to win in the late game, it has always had to run big cards (often Neutral Legendaries) and just rely on removal & aoe to get there. Right now, even trying to make a curve deck, Priests still mostly have to rely on getting aoe at the right time to make up the difference in the weakness of the available minions. So, like… why even bother with the minions? This is what I mean when I say it’s not supported.
My issue isn’t even with the ability to generate cards rather than drawing. The reason Invoke doesn’t work is because the random cards don’t do enough for the sacrifice, and the sacrifice comes from the Neutral cards being balanced around more immediate, board-impacting powers. Priest has the slowest one, so the Neutrals are miserably slow for it. A 1 mana 1/2 is also a pretty poor fit; I have no reason not to just put in the minion I’m hoping to get from it. Time Rip is okay-ish.
The problem is the lack of support. Beginning with having to spend 2 mana to get a random minion, where when Priest had a similar reward from a quest except a random spell, the spell was discounted by 2 for the cost of the hero power.
Basically, Priest is a class with no mana-cheats competing with a lot of Tempo decks that do have them. It’s a class that doesn’t generate a lot of stats for the mana it pays (other than Mass Res & Psychopomp, and somewhat Khaarj). Most Tempo decks rely on a turn like this at some point. Demon Hunter does it with Skull, still. Nerfs don’t really apply.
You either need to put a lot of stats on the board with one card, or put a lot of stats on the board with multiple cards at once. This can be done by discounting cards, or having a deck composed of the best stats available at regular cost and plenty of card draw (Zoo type decks). Priest’s cheats are particularly limiting for deck design.
So the card generation is stacked onto one 7 mana card, which you can at least tutor up with a 6 mana card. So that’s pretty late for a Tempo game, and it doesn’t refill your hand immediately but works turn after turn and limits the number of cards you can play in a turn by costing 2 mana. I’m not saying they can’t make it work, but they aren’t printing cards to make it work. I’m not confident that anything in this expansion would go in such a list.
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I disagree about rush, Priest should have been the Reborn class, it just FITS. You put down a minion that even if it’s taken out once, it needs to be taken out again, and if the enemy doesn’t then you can heal it so that it can potentially survive two more attacks. Reborn is perfect for Priest.
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Turn 5 and before is where all those other earlier minions we talked about in like the beginning.
Maybe they won’t win tempo, but they’ll hold off until those bigger spells and minions come into play. (if it’s a against a non-tempo deck like res priest, hey they might win… see, you seem to focus on of how to win tempo against other tempo decks and that in a straight up fight priest kit looks like they’ll lose, but there are other deck types out there)
You remember DK Rexxar? One way hunters played is that they’ll try for tempo early. If they win then and there, great, but if not or if the matchup looks like it won’t end early, they just play to not lose tempo so much, until DK rexxar comes in, and then they rely on the zombeasts to grind out the enemy eventually, since they can keep producing them each turn with RNG chance to get some nasty poisonous/lifesteal/etc.
When DK Rexxar first came out (before the rush and lifesteal beasts), hunters had very similar complaints as you are now, though somewhat mirrored - control (or at least control like) hunter wasn’t a thing, just like tempo priest isn’t a thing.
Hunters didn’t have good draw. Hunters didn’t have strong late game or big cards as opposed to small cards for priest). Zombeast button costs 2 to make one.
There are more than that. Our conversation has been that priest have gotten them.
…why do you think you need to explain that? We’re talking about galakrond priest, not res priest. Obviously galak and res don’t work together.
We went over this. The spells exist.
Again, we talking about galakrond priest, not res priest. The late game for galakrond priest is galakrond.
Once more: we’re talking about galakrond priest, and my point since the beginning is about a more tempo oriented priest. A potential deck type to develop in the coming future, not what priest “always had” in past.
It feels like you’re stuck in the res priest (and control priest) mindset. Again, kinda like a high expectation Asian father who can’t see any good future for your child other than a lawyer or a doctor or engineer
I have little spells that do that more reliably, though. That’s why there’s no point in running the minions.
Res Priest ran Galakrond as a finisher, and depending on the meta will continue to do so. Why would I make a weaker deck than Res Priest with the same big card at the end?