As I said, it’s a great time of year, and today IGN can add to the excitement by unveiling a legendary new legendary Forged in the Barrens wizard, Varden Dawngrasp:
Frost Nova finds the old school Flamestrike at a lackey!
The Varden Dawngrasp not only have an attractive ability, but they are also important in some other ways. Dawngrasp is Hearthstone’s first openly non-binary character, and secondly, this character is one of ten mercenaries who will anchor Hearthstone’s new one-year narrative and connect to the game’s next Mercenaries mode.
But the most crucial question for when the Year of the Griffin begins is – how powerful is Varden Dawngrasp likely to be? Well, at the very least it’s like playing a Frost Nova with a 3/3 minion attached for four manas, which seems reasonable, as long as delaying for once fits your game plan. If you are playing with a controller Mage, for example – perhaps working for a new victory condition like Mordresh Fire Eye and using cards like Reckless Apprentice, Fallen Hero and Coldarra Drake – then the cards that help you reach the end of the game as Dawngrasp Varden are probably very valuable.
Mordresh is extremely slow, but also extremely cool.
It also has a great advantage of – potentially – functioning as a clean board if you can freeze your opponent’s minions first. Of course, this will not be as simple as it would have been before the main set. Cards like Frost Nova, Frostbolt and Blizzard, for example, will all be out of the Standard format. The same will happen with Ray of Frost, from Rise of Shadows.
In terms of Frost cards that will being in the main set, Snap Freeze and Cone of Cold will pair extremely well with Varden Dawngrasp and, in fact, will be cards that you probably want to play in general – both have been enhanced as part of the radical changes in The Hearthstone team is doing a lot of existing cards to align them with the power level of modern Hearthstone. (Cone of Cold went from four to three, while Snap Freeze changed from two mana to one.)
In addition to these two, we don’t know how much freeze support will be printed on Forged in the Barrens, but we to have I saw a letter that was very synergistic with Varden Dawngrasp – Flurry. This zero-cost spell can freeze a random enemy minion at the start of the game, but increases as the game progresses, freezing two when the player reaches five mana and three when ten mana is available. Obviously, the random nature of Flurry’s freeze means that you won’t necessarily be able to specifically target the exact minions you want to remove using Varden Dawngrasp, but even so, anything Flurry freezes will suffer four damage and anything else will be frozen. Tidy.
Zero mana spells are always worth paying attention to.
The Year of the Griffin begins on March 30 (March 31 in ANZ), but it is worth noting quickly that some very cool changes will be available before then. Hearthstone will be fixed with all the new content and changes before the 30/31 March date, and while things like the move to the main set and the release of Forged in the Barrens will obviously wait, Classic mode – which is a snapshot of Hearthstone exactly as it was in June 2014 – will air, as well as a wide variety of reversals for cards that have been nerfed over the years, such as Call to Arms, The Caverns Below, Starving Buzzard, Conjurer’s Calling, Flametongue Totem, Undertaker and knife juggler. So there are Many. The wild format is going to be crazy.All in all, this year at Hearthstone is proving to be very special. If you are interested in starting your Forged in the Barrens collection, pre-purchase packages are available now. See you at the tavern!
Cam Shea is based in Sydney, Australia and recently put together a video featuring 150 little things that make Breath of the Wild a game for all ages. He’s not really connected Twitter.