hearthstone Silver Vanguard Reveal: Kobolds & Catacombs

[Zadina 923]

Silver Vanguard is a new neutral Common minion that will be introduced in Kobolds & Catacombs.

PC Gamer has unveiled this brand new card: 

The stats of Silver Vanguard are terrible for a 7-mana card. One could argue that the Deathrattle could trigger more easily with the card having such low health, but the 7 mana slot mostly contains minions with usually beefy stats. Blizzard seems to want to continue the trend they started in Year of the Mammoth, just like with the newly revealed Spiteful Summoner, of minions with interesting effects, but weak stats and slightly elevated Mana costs.

As the PC Gamer article points out, Silver Vanguard could pull out some nice minions for Paladin and Warrior. Examples are Tirion Fordring, Ragnaros, Lightlord and Grommash Hellscream.

What do you, guys and gals, think? As always, all the revealed cards can be found in our Kobolds & Catacombs expansion hub.

[Yridaa 490]

Unless you can trigger it with cards like play dead (And even then...), this card is one of the worst printed cards I've seen in hearthstone.

[leapingshadow 50]

6 minutes ago, Yridaa said:

Unless you can trigger it with cards like play dead (And even then...), this card is one of the worst printed cards I've seen in hearthstone.

I disagree, obviously on its own this card won't be very strong, but it comes with the ability to get an 8 cost card for 7 mana. It's not too hard to assume pulling a Lich King or a Tirion Fordring with this card's deathrattle and realistically that means you're getting 8 mana for 7 mana, and a 3/3 on top of that. You obviously need to include this in a deck where it's good but say your Tirion or Lich King is at the bottom of your deck, this is sort of a guaranteed way of drawing one of those, don't pull a Keening Banshee for this one methinks.

[Caldyrvan 377]

I don't know if this will change but not many decks are running a ton of high cost minions and then exactly 8 ... oO

Lets say you have Tirion and The Lich King in your deck. It's not unlikely to get one of those in your starting/early hand. If you happen to draw the other then you have two useless highcost cards in your deck just for the small chance to play this card on turn 7 and hopefully not get transformed, sapped or silenced during your opponents turn to pull your Tirion.

Since they revealed the "Recruit" ability I thought it's questionable. I don't like it ;)

[FanOfValeera 253]

15 minutes ago, leapingshadow said:

I disagree, obviously on its own this card won't be very strong, but it comes with the ability to get an 8 cost card for 7 mana. It's not too hard to assume pulling a Lich King or a Tirion Fordring with this card's deathrattle and realistically that means you're getting 8 mana for 7 mana, and a 3/3 on top of that. You obviously need to include this in a deck where it's good but say your Tirion or Lich King is at the bottom of your deck, this is sort of a guaranteed way of drawing one of those, don't pull a Keening Banshee for this one methinks.

Well, being a deathrattle kinda affects the card badly, as your opponent just draws an answer and then kills this guy and what comes after. Like they already drew a a SW:D or Spellbreaker, before they kill this so they can use it to kill what comes after.

I can think of a use maybe, as you kill it yourself with a board clear, so that while you are clearing a board, you also slam your Lich King on an empty board.

Maybe this expansion has more synergy with this, but so far, this is what I could think of.

Caldyrvan wrote something while I was writing my own post, so I had to edit mine to say that he is totally right about something. 

If you already drew you 8-drop, this card is a 7 mana 3/3 which is terrible. This is too much of a downside. For some classes, you can just draw Medivh from this and lose all that sweet value.

Edited November 22, 2017 by FanOfValeera

[leapingshadow 50]

1 minute ago, Caldyrvan said:

I don't know if this will change but not many decks are running a ton of high cost minions and then exactly 8 ... oO

Lets say you have Tirion and The Lich King in your deck. It's not unlikely to get one of those in your starting/early hand. If you happen to draw the other then you have two useless highcost cards in your deck just for the small chance to play this card on turn 7 and hopefully not get transformed, sapped or silenced during your opponents turn to pull your Tirion.

Since they revealed the "Recruit" ability I thought it's questionable. I don't like it ;)

It's not like Tirion and the Lich King are poor cards on their own anyway, you say that they're useless high-cost cards but Tirion's been in almost every Paladin deck since the start of Hearthstone, drawing them is good on its own. This card in a one of just reduces the chances and lets you have multiple chances to draw Tirion. This card obviously if you drew both would lose most of its value but chances are you'd just run one of these anyway so losing only 1 card in this rare circumstance isn't that bad looking at how much value you'd get for it on it's own. Imagine playing this on turn 7, you gain control of it next turn and get to run it into an enemy minion, it summons a Tirion and you have 8 mana to play with now to drop something big or control the board with. I'm just saying this card isn't as poor as everyone thinks, I believe it has potential, especially in my Silver Hand Recruit deck as a nice late game save if I've lost the early game.

[Synesthesy 114]

It's slow, a big tempo loss, can be silenced/transformed, mess with n'zoth (ressing a now useless 3/3 isn't good), useless late game (when you have drawn your 8 drop)... for me, it's bad.

[Caldyrvan 377]

9 minutes ago, leapingshadow said:

It's not like Tirion and the Lich King are poor cards on their own anyway, you say that they're useless high-cost cards but Tirion's been in almost every Paladin deck since the start of Hearthstone, drawing them is good on its own.

When I said "... two useless high cost cards... " I was referring to 2x Silver Vanguard not Tirion and Lich King. I love my Tirion :). Playing one Vanguard might be worth a try it's just a common.

Edited November 22, 2017 by Caldyrvan

[leapingshadow 50]

Don't get me wrong I don't think this is going to see play in any tournament at all and I don't even think it's a strong card, I just don't think it's as bad as people are saying it is. This card, as far as Paladin is concerned, is pretty good against Doomsayer. Playing this and it activating and triggering it's Deathrattle is a high tempo swing. Paladin's at least in my experience have a hard time dealing with Doomsayer without expending a ton of resources if they don't have a sizable board.

[leapingshadow 50]

1 minute ago, Caldyrvan said:

When I said "... two useless high cost cards... " I was referring to 2x Silver Vanguard not Tirion and Lich King. I love my Tirion :)

Ah, just a misunderstanding then. Brings me onto the point that you'd basically never run 2x of this card. That'd be too far, it's similar in design and I believe it's future play rate to Doomcaller from WotOG.

[SMOrcMan 76]

I feel like it would be decent with battlecry, but as a death rattle it is pretty slow and makes silence amazing. When you start getting up that high in cost, there is things with just as good value for more tempo.

[VaraTreledees 138]

Slow, gives your opponent a lot of agency over it's trigger, vulnerable to shamans, mages, priests, rogues (bounce effects), and the deck slots for high cost minions are inherently limited, meaning there will be quite a few situations in which you will have nothing to pull.  It is garbage tier.

[Yridaa 490]

6 hours ago, leapingshadow said:

I disagree, obviously on its own this card won't be very strong, but it comes with the ability to get an 8 cost card for 7 mana. It's not too hard to assume pulling a Lich King or a Tirion Fordring with this card's deathrattle

So instead of drawing a card like Tirion or Lich King, you draw a 7 mana 3/3 that's very prone to things like silences, saps, being ignored.

 

I can turn your logic around and say that the 7 mana 3/3 is on the bottom of the deck, and then you'd be very sad you didn't simply include an 8 mana card that has an immediate effect. I'd rather have a 7 mana draw 4 cards (Sprint) than a card like this, and even that one isn't good enough to be included nowadays unless you talk T4 decks.

 

You only have 30 slots to fill in with cards, so unless there's some deathrattle modifiers coming up, I really, really disagree with you as well.