Frost Trap

Thankfully, UDE gave us a good card today. I take that back, UDE gave us a great card today. I said when I saw Chops, that I thought a Hunter control deck that uses pets exclusively (or almost exclusively) could be a viable strategy when Dark Portal releases. Today's card makes it seem even more likely.

Frost Trap
Cost:4
Hunter ability

Trap (you may exhaust your defending hero rather than pay this card's cost).

Remove all attackers from combat, and opposing heroes and allies can't attack this turn.

First let's just talk about the card itself. This card is really good. It's WoW's first "free" card. Free cards are usually either really good or really bad. Despite seeming like a purely defensive card, this card actually is very versatile. Assuming there is a Blood Elf Hunter, he will be able to recycle traps with Solanian's Belongings which seems good.

First, let's look at how this card could help current Hunter decks. In the mirror, this is like a Time Walk. When both players are just swinging away, stopping one turn's worth of attacks without using any resources can be a pretty big deal. The other place this can come in handy is against Gorebelly. In the Gorebelly vs. Hunter matchup Gorebelly is occasionally forced to attack on the kill turn. Setting the Frost Trap when they think they're going to Rak you can mean the difference between winning and losing. So Frost Trap can help rush decks in a few ways, but let's look at what I think will be an emerging archetype based on the 20 cards we've seen so far (yes, I realize it's kind of dumb to predict an emerging archetype from the set when we haven't even seen 10% of the set yet, but humor me).

I think Hunter control will be a deck that makes some noise around Darkmoon Faire time. Using traps to stall to Old Bones and Multi-Shot and Ancient Bone Bow to take over in the mid-game. We may even see Elendril get flipped. The pets are all incredibly efficient and Bestial Wrath is well, beastly.

One thing that is a little worrisome is all the "free" cards. Traps, the Paladin healing ability, Aspect of the Viper. Free cards are historically overpowered, and while these three seem to be tame enough (actually the two that aren't traps are not that good) the fact that they have introduced the mechanic means to watch out for broken cards in the near future.

I'm still compiling results from this weekend, but I'm going to try to get the metagame update out tomorrow, so anyone who has tournaments this weekend has the information with some time to make use of it.