So why didn't good get hero replacements to counter Gala

I lose just about every game when Gala hits the board with no equivalent… just like in icecrown days when your opponent got turn 9 Hero and yours was the last card in the deck.

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Hero cards don’t counter galakrond. Specific strategies counter galakrond. Galakrond warrior crumbles to taunt walls and healing. Galakrond shaman crumples to board wipes and counter pressure. Galakrond warlock is similar to shaman… clear his board and counter pressure. Galakrond rogue needs to be out tempoed from the early game. And Galakrond priest… well pretty much everything counters that.

There are winning strategies in the good hero side. The new Beast druid should do pretty well against several of the galakrond builds actually.

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Galakrond aside, there were some very curious design choices made by team 5 with this set.

The “Evil” Classes get Grand Lackey as another Evil specific Legendary, Shaman & Mage get class specific Legendary cards.

Hunter gets a Dragon that battlecries Deadly Shot, while Paladin gets a Dragon that casts Divine Shield on it’s Murlocs? To play devil’s advocate, maybe Scalelord turns out to be the underappreciated gem of the set - it is still a very specific card that calls for a pretty specific deck while the Rotnest Drake - all it needs is a hunter deck with enough dragons to fulfill the dragon in hand requirement.

3 of the good classes get Twinspells, but mage gets a Hero instead?

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This set proves to me beyond any shadow of any doubt that the devs only cared about a few classes and spent all their time and energy on those.

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Sure and where are my evil sidequests or my evil singleton OP cards?

I’d gladly trade you side quests for the galakrond package… Turns out you don’t have to be an explorer to use the most powerful Highlander cards

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Do you really want Finnley?
Cuz you can have him.

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Finnley is strong…

Balancing aside, and leaving aside comments like “devs like class X more than class Y” (which to me it sounds outoftheworld absurd)…

the Adventure decisions do confuse me.

When we saw Reno as the 1st legend, i was sure that the other 3 “good classes” would each get their hero.

Now, i can even get behind a theory of “2 legends for the good guys, 2 legends for the bad guys”. And then later, as expansions are releashed to have other hero cards joining in for the other classes, like a special little something each expansion.

Even that would have some semblance of reasoning.

but the Shaman legendary completly throws me off balance.

What was the thought process behind giving specifically Shaman that one extra legendary?

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The worst thing is how much sense this would’ve made. Galakrond classes got 1 extra Legendary (Galakrond), so the Hero classes also getting a Hero as 1 extra Legendary would’ve made so much sense. But alas…

So far the Heroes are just complete fails in design. Heroes can’t play Galakrond but Evil CAN play Highlander? Galakrond can’t be disrupted (well, if you jump through hoops I suppose there are ways to discard Galakrond, but good luck!) but Highlander is disrupted by just shuffling 2 same-named cards into it, 1 of each copy is way more limited than having to add some Invoke cards, the payoff of Galakrond is far higher than Highlander, etcetera.

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Compared to Reno or the value and clears Elise could give Paladin? Not really. He is not that good.
He is not as consistent or powerful.
Sadly.

Finley is a decent enough minion but for him to really be impactful he needs to start in the opening hand.

Other than that the primary issue is that you can’t build around what hero power he will offer.

He doesn’t provide enough of a reliable spike to win games.

As a 1/3 1 drop I think he could really propel the deck as you could play him turn 1 or draw with crystology and focus on more of a lategame plan with Highlander paladin

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Finley should do something different than RNG hero power - it should be a card that you can build around reliably, not what it is, look at the class, if it wasn’t for mechs, they wouldn’t have anything

also paladin, druid and hunter deserve a hero card, just because of balance; and about reno’s hero power, it also deserves being something not RNG based: they have taken this RNG fiesta joke for mage TOO far, the class has fallen too low because of it

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They tried to keep it in flavor with the old Finley.

Let’s all remember Mysterious Challenger and Avenge turned Highlander Paladin into a respectable deck during DitT.

Finley wants HL Paladin to be aggro, Paladin just doesn’t have enough quality aggro and that’s the failure on the devs’ part.

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As a Priest player, I’ll gladly give you my Galakrond for your sidequests.

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I was so certain that this would have been the case. When I saw people complaining about Galakrond, I restrained myself from replying “but we get extra cards in the adventure, I’m certain we’ll get hero cards for them as well” but somewhere a little voice in the back of my head said “don’t bring hype to the people, what if they don’t”. Too bad that little voice was right.

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I always thought Finley should have been “Upgrade your Starting Hero Power OR Discover a new Upgraded Hero Power.” Basically if you play it as a Paladin it gives four choices, one of them will always be Upgraded Dudes in this case.

I still don’t think it would help much. Buffing Hero Powers in a Highlander deck is a fundamentally flawed idea because you want a Highlander deck to play on curve as much as you possibly can.

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Yeah priest got the short end of it. We just had a whole meta with thaurissan so I dunno how they thought a 1 time 1 Mana discount was going to be a winner.

Also adding a random minion to hand is good but in this power play meta that sort of game plan just doesn’t cut it.

At least priest does have 2 workable archetypes (if played out) in combo and res

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Yeah but they’re old archtypes. Like… what Warrior and Shaman are doing in the meta right now is not the same thing they were doing 2 years ago. The same can not be said about Priest.

Evil classes received lackeys, hero’s, invoke synergy’s and 1 extra legendary in d of d. They get access to the playable highlander cards- those are neutral. They also got character cards and quests, just like the hero’s. The scales are weighed pretty heavily on one side there.

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