Blackrock Mountain Retrospective

With the entirety of the Blackrock Mountain expansion having been released and available for players to experiment with, we’ve seen quite a few different decks emerge successfully from the newest card set. The most successful deck, by far, that Blackrock helped craft together is the infamous Grim Patron warrior deck which is a surprisingly complex and rewarding deck to play with in constructed.

However, with the release of decks that succeed, many deck archetypes still lack a solid foundation to work with. With this adventure being set mostly on the introduction of new dragon cards and cards that synergize well with dragons, everyone expected a few classes in particular to take full advantage of some of these powerful synergies, namely priests and paladins. These two classes were the frontrunners for viable dragon decks to be created from because they introduced cards that further provided strong synergies with dragons in general. Priests would have the ability to hold or play a Twilight Whelp, and have arguably the strongest one mana card in the game whose only downside is that it’s only playable if you have other dragons in your hand. Likewise with paladins they were introduced to the most powerful synergy card imaginable with dragons. Dragon Consort is a 5 mana cost, 5 attack & health creature which reduces the cost of your next dragon played by 2 mana. This means that you could play a Dragon Consort on turn 5, and follow that up with Chromaggus. It’s a card that provides a ton of tempo swing in the paladin’s favour but regardless the dragon decks lack true power in the higher levels of constructed.

The biggest issue with dragon decks is that there’s too many cards you’re forced to play that offer great synergy or are the ‘required’ dragons to place in the deck. That means you usually end up cutting cards that are required for some matchups. This means that you’ll be cutting 5 mana cards like Sludge Belcher which can help slow down rush decks a lot for cards like Dragon Consort and Blackwing Corrupter. Ultimately because decks are limited to 30 cards, it’s incredibly difficult to pull off a well-rounded dragon deck. It’s likely that we won’t see a fully functional dragon-themed deck until another expansion hits where a few more dragons are included in the more early game to mid-range focus area. An expansion entirely focused on dragons is not likely to happen again, but it’s entirely possible we see Blizzard dedicate a few cards in their next one to the dragon archetype as they did with murlocs and pirates in Goblins vs. Gnomes.

Nonetheless the expansion did release a bunch of cards that don’t rely on building entire decks around them to be good, standalone additions to some of the other decks already in existence. The larger dragons Nefarian and Chromaggus frequently see play in control warriors and other end-game focused decks to take advantage of their power levels. In my own opinion, I feel as though Nefarian is a lot stronger than people give him credit for. Similarly with Neptulon who gives you free cards, Nefarian is essentially giving you 2 cards at the cost of 1 extra mana. Other cards of notable power that you see quite commonly in a lot of other decks include Flamewalker for mages, Hungry Dragon for midrange decks, and Fireguard Destroyer for Shaman.

When you compare the release of Naxxramas and the release of Blackrock Mountain, they’re both incredibly similar in how the cards ended up being used individually, rather than trying to tie them all together. In this aspect both adventures had an overarching theme that doesn’t have enough traction in order to create viable deck types. Naxxramas introduced a ton of powerful deathrattle cards and legendaries, but no one after the first month of play continued to try and make a deck that revolved around Baron Rivendare and other heavy deathrattle synergy cards at the legend rank. I feel the same is going to happen with Blackrock Mountain and Blizzard’s attempt at forcing a specific thematic deck to work has failed yet again.

Overall the cards released were mostly strong cards when not relying on synergies between other cards in the set list, or of the small pool of readily available cards that have been released so far. I feel as more adventures get released, Blizzard will have a better feel for designing cards with strong synergies and making sure that some of the important features of the deck don’t simply revolve around tempo swings and gimmicks. It’s incredibly hard to make a consistent murloc, pirate, and dragon deck because there just isn’t enough cards that are strong enough to utilize them in a consistent fashion which is why they’re so volatile. Though Blizzard is definitely on the right track with their dragon themed deck, as it’s easily the most reliable of the few tribal themes that has been released.

Brandon Rendina