Like I don’t understand. I"ve bene playing around with the deck and even though I’m not really losing a whole lot I just get to the point where I don’t know how I’m supposed to win. Freeze is obviously a good stall tactic but without a board to push damage it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I feel like they should have made ice lance part of the core set because that type of burst finisher is exactly what I need.
Also why print a AOE destroy all frozen minions when we already had a legendary that dealt 4 damage which basically destroys all minions in the same frame. We even have snap freeze which mana cost was halved and is still just a fringe pick lol
You may as well just have certain frost effects baseline in the keyword like adding an addendum
“If this character is already frozen, deal 2 damage to it instead.”
Right now if you want to play freeze you have to mix archetypes. For instance, hero power and freeze or spell damage and freeze. Unfortunately it makes the dungeoneer less reliable. but it’s what we’ve got right now.
they just added literally an entire mini set worth of cards to support one archetype and it still doesn’t fit lol, what are you talking about? Are people supposed to wait 6 or more months just to play with their cards?
the miniset isnt intended to swing the entire meta and create a completely new archetype. thats the main sets role, the miniset just shakes up the meta a bit
A little intermixing is fine, but the archetypes should also stand on their own.
It didn’t create an entire new archetype, it focused 3 cards on an existing FAILED archetype. You shake up the meta by supporting existing archetypes which they tried with freeze mage and failed.
so you are saying that warrior didnt become much more viable, or that shaman saw plenty of play before the set aswell? not every deck must be broken at all time, have patience and there might be more freeze support in next set
Exactly this. Freeze isn’t a new archetype, it’s a part of Mage’s, or has been, class identity. There should be enough core set support to make it viable, if not competitive. Freeze Mage is currently in such a bad spot that expansion cards do not even help much.
I’m not talking about warrior or shaman, if you notice this thread was about mage. The intended playstyle of the freeze MAGE archetype. And despite contrary belief you can make an archetype viable without making it overpowered.
Just in case you are still confused, this is a thread about FREEZE MAGE. Please don’t speak nonsense already known.
There just seems to be too many elements missing to give us any idea what the Freeze stuff is supposed to be doing.
But from playing with various attempts at a Freeze-centric deck, there seem to be three major holes that prevent a deck built around what is currently available:
No early game.
The only card that seems even potentially useful to drop on turns 1 or 2 is Glacier Racer, but that conflicts with Floecaster on early turns if you have both in hand, since Racer will just destroy the frozen targets you’d need to discount Floecaster.
And there is almost no chance you will be able cheat out Floecaster early enough to make it a real threat.
Highly restricted draw if you want to run the Dungeoneer. And you need as many Freeze elementals as you can manage to gather if you want to make use of the other Freeze synergy cards without relying on luck to draw the combo pieces you otherwise need.
No method to close out games, as you have mentioned. It could be something like Ice Lance, as you’ve mentioned, or something else. But there needs to be something to give the deck the ability to close out games.
So, basically, the current options are too slow to get on the board, have almost no reload options, and no ability to close games.
Also, the few power turns that you might put together require a lot of luck to assemble the necessary combo pieces, and even when you do, they are pretty underwhelming.
Which useless to the discussion of what we’re trying to figure out. What is freeze mage supposed to do and how can that be supported. People said it would be supported with the miniset, it obviously failed, so we are here to discuss how it can be remedied and supported correctly.
Finally someone that understands the thread. I also ran into the glacier racer problem which is why I just got rid of it. You also sometimes need to cast a spell other than a frost one so you always have to save it for a combo it’s more like a piece than early game.
The freeze minions all have pretty bad stats so you can’t even really stall and floecaster is just lazy secret runner design. I feel like freeze mage needs more reach in general.
conclusion is mage really lacks lategame value/a finisher. so currently nothing can be made work, not control, not hero power, not freeze. It´s really just abbandon mage, or if you insist play lunacy on 4 and pray.
The following list of suggestions seem like they’d be a lot, but I also think that they might be required to make some sort of Freeze Mage deck work without additional support from the next couple sets.
So, here are some of the ideas I’ve been considering for what could be done now:
Core Set changes:
Replace Water Elemental with Snowchugger.
Clearly the Elemental is supposed to demonstrate to new players that Jaina is about Freeze effects and elementals. But in the current game, it is just too slow at 4 mana. Snowchugger does the same thing (except the elemental part), and at 2 mana is is both more playable and fills a big hole in the current options available for Mage.
Replace Snap Freeze with Ray of Frost.
Even with the buff to 1 mana, Snap Freeze is just a bad version of the already terrible Freezing Potion stapled to a bad version of Execute. Ray of Frost with Twinspell has much more flexibility and allows more Freezes—which anything built around this set of cards desperately needs—and more flexibility about when and how to use them. An alternate (and probably really crazy) option would be to keep Snap Freeze but give it Twinspell. (I doubt that would ever happen.) (Based on the next poster’s comment, I think that this is probably just a completely unrealistic distraction, so I’ve struck it out.)
Barrens and Wailing Caverns card buffs:
Buff Flurry to hit an additional target at each rank—i.e. Rank 1 would Freeze two random enemy minions and increase up to four random enemy minions at Rank 3.
Flurry seems like it was meant to be a Prep-like enabler for the other cards, but at its current strength, it really can’t be used before it hits Rank 2, and even then it is still pretty weak. Increasing its targets would make Glacier Racer a potentially more threatening early game minion and more importantly would potentially allow Mages to play Floecaster early enough to actually threaten their opponents.
Buff Rimetongue to a 2-mana 2/3.
As I mentioned above with the Water Elemental to Snowchugger suggestion, there is a huge hole in any potential Freeze Mage’s early game, especially if it is supposed to be fairly aggressive as the addition of Floecaster suggests that the direction is intended to be.
There are also a lot of 3-mana options currently available, both in the clearly Freeze-related cards and in the other aggressive cards that might be used such as Firebrand or Imprisoned Observer, so moving one of them to 2-mana would really help open up a real curve rather than the current situation where there’s almost nothing for turns 1 and 2 except for Neutrals but an overload of 3-mana options.
These suggestions wouldn’t fix all the problems, but they would allow Freeze Mage a stronger early game, so some or all of them might help make the 5+ Freeze cards from the mini-set and the main Barrens set more relevant now.
Would only ever be something to consider if it was nerfed back to 2 (which would defeat the purpose) or had something on it to prevent you from using it on the same minion twice. Otherwise you’d just get a 2 mana Assassinate which would be crazy (and literally no one would use it for the Freeze, again defeating the purpose).
And replacement with Ray of Frost is probably the better option either way.
Or rather than giving Snap Freeze Twinspell, instead make it add a Freezing Potion or something similar to your hand if it doesn’t destroy the target. Which would accomplish the same thing I was aiming at—more availability of Freezes and Frost spells—without enabling it to act as an Assassinate.
What a cup. We have been waiting for this to be true for seven years.
They have printed more archetypes than I can list here only to abandon them with no support.
Mage at tier 1 with Deck of lunacy at 2 mana for the first two weeks of this set was not fun for anyone. I don’t think mage will ever be tier 1, but it will be playable.
I’m sure the next set will give the last of what freeze mage needs. The mini set gave a few more pieces. But I believe the last time freeze mage was a thing, it was nerfed. Will maybe be different. Who knows.
The freeze cards they’ve added are more to support a variety of different mage archetypes (tempo, control) rather than create a “Freeze Mage” archetype.
The cards themselves are blatantly contradictory in some cases. A deck that wants a 0 mana 5/5 isn’t the same as a deck that wants a situational board clear like shattering blast or an execute style card like Snap Freeze.