This is not the time to experiment with janky control decks: the Questlines are still busted and will only get stronger with some of these cards, meaning it’s a miracle if you make it past turn ten. That said, with a relatively short time until the launch of the next expansion, this might be the first time that targeted card crafting might be a viable alternative considering the profile of the new cards and the texture of the current Questline-dominated metagame. It’s impossible to tell in advance whether the themes and tools on offer here will receive further support down the line: also, something like Need for Greed, for instance, is clearly here as an eventual replacement for Skull of Gul'dan after the rotation, but this won’t come into play for a little while yet.Įven if you’re not that keen on most of the cards in the mini-set, buying it with gold will marginally improve your future pack openings as well, which is also a worthwhile consideration. Ultimately, if you’re a dedicated Constructed player, mini-sets are still the best way to spend 2000 gold in the game, guaranteeing you 35 different cards for the next two years.

So should you walk the plank? There are decent arguments both for and against it… Treasure, Plunder and 2000 Gold Pieces Overall, the mini-set has been touted as a historically low-power level affair by many content creators. The former offers interesting niche benefits in draw-heavy decks, while the latter could easily become a build-around element later down the line. Mechanic-wise, we now have a couple of Tradable cards that directly provide you with a benefit when they’re shuffled back in the deck, plus the whole parrot thing of repeating a previous effect. Theming-wise, you’ve got, well, pirates and parrots, Defias cards everywhere.

Let’s get the flavor out of the way first because that’s the easiest aspect to evaluate without trying to read the tea leaves of the still-developing metagame. In case you weren’t following reveals, you can find a full list of Deadmines mini-set cards here! Pirates and Parrots, Oh My! So is it worth picking up now that we’ve had a chance to test it in a live environment? Here’s what we’ve found. It’s also the first mini-set where most content creators went with a resounding ‘meh’ in their pre-release previews.

Hearthstone’s latest mini-set comes at an odd time, its release pushed back because of Mercenaries, coming off the back of a contentious, questline-focused metagame in United in Stormwind.

An impossible foe ele shaman