Stealspell

Today's preview card is up. It's a new Mage ability

Stealspell
Cost:3

Gain control of target ability. If it's attached to a hero or ally, you may attach it to a different hero or ally.

This card doesn't excite in the way some of the other previewed cards have. There just don't seem to be that many abilities where stealing them could be considered game breaking. Stealing a Searing Totem is nice and getting a Curse of Agony would be great. If this card were an instant we'd have ourselves a winner for sure. As it stands, I'm not going to say it's bad. It could have uses, but at best, I think it's probably a sideboard card. It just seems like it will be dead too often vs. aggressive decks to warrant inclusion in the main. The other problem is the fact that it's a Mage ability which leads me to the next topic I want to talk about today, why Mage control doesn't work.

Mage decks have an inherent and significant drawback that no other class faces (actually Rogues have this problem too). They have a low health total, no good armor or damage prevention effects, and no healing. The other caster classes have good healing ability while the combat classes tend to have higher health and good armor. Take Grennan for example. He starts at 29. Has a built in 3 point heal with his flip ability and a lot use Draconian Deflector. If a Deflector gets used say 3 times in a game, you actually have to deal 44 damage to Grennan to finish him.

The Priest, which is the other class with a really low health total, can heal obscene amounts of damage and is getting the ability to heal 14 damage for 4 resources in Dark Portal. Healing Priests don't work for other reasons, but they can definitely heal some damage.

The Mage though had no inherent healing ability and no armor or prevention spells. This means to kill Litori (Ta'Zo and Varanis tend to be more aggressive decks so this isn't as important to them) you only need to do 25 damage. Compare this to the Warlock, which is the other main Alliance control deck. She starts at 28 so that's already 3 extra damage. Factor in Steal Essence which heals 2 and Nemesis Skullcap which can heal a lot, and suddenly you might have to deal 35 or more damage. That 10 extra damage is significant.

A lot of people have been predicting big things for Mages after Dark Portal, Blood Elf Mages in particular. Aside from the fact that's it's still way too early to try to predict how DP will affect the metagame, until Mages get something to help that low health total, I think they will only find success by killing their opponents before their opponents kill them.