Hellfire

When I saw today's card, my first reaction was just wow. This may be as close to Wrath of God as this game ever gets. For anyone who hasn't seen it:

Hellfire
Warlock ability
Cost:6

Your hero deals 5 damage to all heroes and allies.

First of all, there are very few allies that are going to survive the Hellfire. In that sense it can certainly be good for a Warlock control deck looking for ways to clear the field of an early swarm. But then there's the drawback. It hits your own guys as well and more importantly, your hero takes 5 damage from this. This is a very significant drawback, especially considering the probability that you will have to face a Moko or Fury the turn after. Even facing those odds, this card is still very powerful.

If you put Hellfire into your deck, Nemesis Skullcap becomes an auto-include as you will definitely need to healing. Depending on how much damage you have taken Grayson Shadowbreaker could become a more popular pick for post Hellfire to pull you back from the brink. A quick side note regarding Grayson. I qualified for Nationals this past weekend with an aggro Shaman deck and I think of the Alliance Trinity the card I least like to see is Grayson. That may sound really weird, but for the most part, Jaina and Magni are far more beatable by the Shaman than Grayson. The reason is you have several turns where they don't really do anything but maintain the status quo while the Shaman player waits on a Karkas or Vanquish. Once they're bounced it's almost like they were never there. Grayson on the other hand, can actively pull the Warlock back from near death while the Shaman tries to draw into an answer. Carrying on....

From a design point of view I love this card. It has an incredibly powerful effect with a significant but playable drawback. Instead of taking a card, making it incredibly powerful, but then sticking a huge number in the top left corner to make it "balanced" the designers have given us a powerful effect with a manageable drawback. They have given us the opportunity to decide if the effect is worth the price you have to pay to get it as opposed to Legend of Mount Hyjal, where the resource cost basically dictates that the card never see play.

On the subject of the preview article though, there were a couple of mistakes in regards to cards mentioned in the article. The first was the author mentioning playing this card on turn 5 being too slow when the cost is clearly 6. The other was the author saying that Nemesis Skullcap can heal the damage that an Infernal deals to your hero, when Infernal only hits opposing heroes and allies. I realize that everyone makes mistakes, I did forget about Shield Bash being a "free" card after all, but this is the official preview from the makers of the game. If the author was unaware, at least an editor should have caught these errors. It was the second preview from UDE that had card errors in it as the preview for Spellsteal referenced stealing a From the Shadows. Someone in editing should really be catching these very basic miscues.

While I'm talking about editing I would like to apologize for any errors, spelling, grammatical, or game-related that appear in my blog posts. 99% of the posts here are written with only a little bit of forethought and I usually just type them up and hit publish. The only preparation is getting an idea of what I want to write about and gathering any required information (like with the metagame articles). My articles for TCGPlayer tend to be more thought-out and probably fit into a more cohesive overall idea as I generally work on those about a week or so before I send them in and go back and edit them in an attempt to make them work better as an article. I proofread all of those before I send them in and Chedy over at the site usually catches anything that I might have missed, so if it seems like my writing here is different than my writing there it's mostly because of preparation.

Tomorrow's preview unfortunately is Thunder Clap, which I have already talked about so tomorrow seems like a good day to cover this weekend's Regionals action. I'm still missing some results so anyone who attended an event this weekend please send those in so we can get a more detailed analysis.