Speaking of Mecha’thun, we originally thought that this big dumpy guy was just a meme. Dead Ringer sees play both in the Test Subject deck, the Mecha’thun deck, and the Mind Blast deck since it’s such good deck thinning and it’s practically a tutor for your combo pieces. Little did we know that Priest was going to become the all-time king of combo this expansion. We examined this card as an inclusion in Deathrattle Priest, which ended up not being too good. Once again we totally slept on the deathrattle mechanic this time around. However, it turns out that the small synergy hit is worth it to guarantee fully upgraded spellstones, which tend to win the game. After all, Spell Hunter was already a winning archetype without Subject 9’s help, and you couldn’t put it into a Spell Hunter deck anyway without ruining your Rhok’Delar and To My Side synergy. When it was first revealed, we simply didn’t believe that drawing secrets would be too powerful. Subject 9 has only seen some play in recent days, getting splashed into Secret Hunter and Spell Hunter decks. It’s just used to get a decent tempo swing. It’s not used for mech synnergy, which is what everyone thought it was going to be used for. Yes, the damage is random, but your Supercollider hit just needs to reduce the total health on the field to less than five, and then Dyn-o-matic ends up being a board wipe. However, we didn’t consider that Supercollider was good when examining Dyn-o-matic. Large amounts of random damage have never been good in the past. Speaking of Odd Control Warrior, Dyn-o-matic is another unsung star. This is one of the major reasons that Odd Control Warrior can be a deck in this meta. Even if it doesn’t manage to clear both minions, whirlwind effects and other board clears do a fine job cleaning up. Turns out, it can do something Gorehowl can’t after-all: clear two minions for one. It seemed like it was a weapon that did exactly what Gorehowl did except Gorehowl did it better because it didn’t need the opponent to have a board to be effective. When we first saw this card, we wondered why anyone would play it. It’s not the best mech in set, but it’s way better than we thought it was, considering we thought this was pack filler. It’s even seen some experimentation in Mech Warrior decks, since it gets rush with Dr. Who would have thought that Deathrattle decks would be so popular these days? Mechanical Whelp sees play in both Deathrattle Rogue and Deathrattle Hunter. Six mana for a 2/2 body just looked so bad. Warlock, on the other hand, has card draw built right into their hero power, so they aren’t giving up too much card advantage by buffing their minions in hand. Another big difference, the Grimy Goons hand-buffs were put in classes that traditionally have no card draw. You have a degree of control on which minion Soul Infusion buffs, and making sure that it hits a Saronite Chain Gang or Doubling Imp could win you the game. However, Gadgetzan handbuffs were random. Hand-buff mechanics didn’t work at all in The Mean Streets of Gadgetzan so we had no reason to believe they would work here.
Arguably, it’s because of Cosmic Anomaly that Face Mage/Tempo Mage exists in the meta right now.
Players played Evolved Kobold back when Whispers of the Old Gods was standard legal, and Cosmic Anomaly is just that very card with a +2/+1 stat boost. However, Cosmic Anomaly has proven that Spell Damage +2 is significantly better than Spell Damage +1. When The Boomsday Project was first revealed, we were skeptical about Blizzard’s choice to push Spell Damage in Mage. It’s by far one of the best cards in The Boomsday Project. This makes Giggling Inventor a must run in every deck of every archetype, from aggro to control to combo. It also puts three bodies on the field two of which can be augmented by magnetic minions. However, the fact that Giggling Inventor summons two Annoy-o-Trons, which have to be hit twice at minimum to get through, means that it’s essentially a four attack stall. On the surface, five mana for 4/5 of stats isn’t that good. This is the biggest one that we and almost everyone else got wrong. So these are 10 Boomsday Project cards that we missed that ended up having an impact on the meta. That’s not to say there aren’t some great cards that we missed when originally reviewing this expansion. Most meta defining decks use very few cards from The Boomsday Project and the most meta defining deck, Odd Paladin, uses none. In short, there aren’t too many good ones. Hearthstone’s newest expansion, The Boomsday Project, has been out for some time now, and we finally have an idea of which cards are good and bad.