If you have 10 cards before playing this spell, it deals 10 damage in total.
If you also have Thalnos in play, it deals 2 damage for the first missile and successive missiles as long as Thalnos survives for up to 20 damage in total.
On a typical control warlock turn 3, he will have 7 cards if starting first and 8 if starting second. That should be enough to clear a turn 3 board on average.
If Dark Skies deals 8 damage on average for 3 mana, it is 25% more effective (damage/cost ratio) than volcano’s 15 damage for 7 mana.
More Handlock support, sounds like a pretty decent, flexible removal spell. Also encourages thinking ahead - do you tempo out stuff, or can you hold back and clear with this anyway? Handlock looks a bit better.
It’s basically like a cheaper, weaker, hand-dependant Volcano without the Overload.
This is nowhere near the level of Defile’s board-clearing power, but it is more flexible if dealing with, say, a single medium/large enemy minion on the board while you have nothing.
Defile’s repeat condition had it check every cycle to see if something had died and recast itself if something did die (even if that death wasn’t due to the target hitting 0 health). Every cycle of Defile was essentially a new version of the spell which meant it had to check for spell damage every time.
Dark Skies doesn’t recast itself, so there’s no reason to expect it to update what it does between each “missile” being launched.
The fact that it ends the sentance after the first missile, then says repeat for each card in your hand makes it look like it checks your hand size in between each cycle, counting a card each time.
This would cause the death of a spell damage minion to impact all casts afterward.
If not, it would’ve just said “deal 1 damage to a random minion for each card in your hand” rather than specifically repeating the casting of the core spell, which is simply “deal 1 damage to a random minion”
I’m comparing it to
Which as far as I’ve seen resolves the entire repeat cycle before any minions die.
Also, both Cannon Barrage and Dark Skies will fire at least once if you have no Pirates/cards left in your hand. So Dark Skies would not work the same if it said “ deal 1 damage to a random minion for each card in your hand ” like you propose. And for Dark Skies to split its damage across minions in one chunk it would have to be worded like Volcano, your wording would deal all the damage to a single random minion.
You just need a setup where killing/damaging various opposing minions will kill one or more of your minions. Something like Abomination would do it against a large portion of the Pirates in the game.
I just went and tested it against the Expert Practice Priest (it has Abom in the deck) and Cannon Barrage completes casting before the deathrattle triggers.
