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I was going to write this whole thing in pieces, since GU seemed to indicate they would be releasing the cards piecemeal, but that literally lasted a day and they just dumped the whole set out since then, so away we go.

I still do not think we know everything. Some of the tokens that are generated by the new cards are not clear, and the mechanism for release seem to have something to do with in game actions, though we know it will not be batched with Mortal Judgement packs like Light’s Verdict was. So some of my takes here may be early, and since GU can just wholesale change cards anyway I think better to get them all down now. I also included the few cards I reviewed from the day one spoilers at the bottom of the article to keep it all in one place. Enjoy!

Reinkeeper Selena

This seems about the right power level to me for 6 mana in nature. I am inclined to think this generally better than some of the other commonly used 6 drops because it sits in a bit of a sweet spot of removal, value, and one card army in a can. It is more versatile than The Hunt but can remove less, gives more value and instant use than Nightleaf Prowler but loses hidden, and is less of a value engine than Watchtower of Agrodor but turns on right away.

I suspect control decks will want this as they will look to trade all day and use enchanted vines and the like to keep the board clear, and then slamming this down you can try and ride it to the win, but it may also have a place in the top end of aggro wild decks since the badgers are wild for sure. Fun design, would love to see more like this. 6/10

Snowshaper Pallas

A reusable ratify attached to a moderate body. I have not seen Ratify in some time since most threats that would matter are either warded, spread out, or OTK, but I feel like being reusable makes this card something else.

This is very annoying if it stays on the table, but if it is on the table for more than a turn your deck is probably completely out of gas anyway. I am not going out of my way to try this out, I think if we have a large meta shift in the future this may be worthwhile. 4/10

Sleigh Master Valka

I love War and Vikings because they make my job of reviewing so much easier. This is a really, really good card in an aggressive Viking deck, and that’s really all there is to it. It comes down, kills something or somethings, maybe get’s some chip damage in, and then sits there telling your opponent to kill it or lose. 5 mana is a bargain all things considered, and it is not even a terrible play if you do not meet the requirements because early on this is a must deal with threat. It is also the perfect stats to deal with Guild Enforcer, which seems very important.

Compare this to Archangel Bruiser if you want something in the same vein, though I think all things considered this is easier to play. You will not play this in every deck, but I almost dare to say this is the best aggro warrior card printed in a long while, while still being just on this right side of balanced. This is our Leeroy Jenkins. Get your copies and expect to see it. 9/10

Merry Kadmos

Kadmos here would have been a very cool card a few sets ago, but now I don’t see it. 3/4 frontline for 5 is not great, and him losing armor and gaining a point in cost should give you a good baseline for stats.

His roar gives you 1 of 2 things, neither of which are overly powerful on their own. Stalling a creature can be great, and coupled with similar effects is almost like a free turn against some decks, but in Gods turn 5 is often too late a turn to really take advantage of it. If you can chain this into Wrong Paths there are scenarios where you basically just make your opponent sit there reliving the same turn over and over again while you make progress, but there are also a number of cards that take advantage of that fact to your detriment (beneficial roars and self buffers keep the buffs.) Overall I do not think the 3/4 frontline body and +1 cost is better than wrong paths draw a card, and that card currently sees little play.

Second ability is GU desperately trying to make Chosen One a thing, and maybe taking a hit now for gains later is good, but I have yet to see anyone really capitalize on it. The game is too punishing for you to take weaker cards or turns off to maybe have a build your own Polyhymnia later on in the game.

I just do not see a home for this without a chosen one or Wrong path deck being a thing. 3/10

Orfeo in Wanderlands

Deadly, Hidden, attacks a thing as it comes in sounds good, and I am sure it can be in the right lists, but I think this card is much worse in execution than most people will see it for.

You are trading this 1/1 with your opponents stuff, but it is telegraphed and they can play around it. Unlike something like Underbrush Boar, there are very few 0 power dudes this will trade into and survive to give you positive card value. More likely there are a bunch of armor one guys that will eat this, or things your opponent will get roar value off, or even things that are just cheaper than this they do not mind trading into.

The fact that he shuffles back in makes you want to think this is a control piece for the late game, but since this card is kinda bad it’s probably not the thing you want to draw most of the time. I think you can stay away from this one. 2/10

Frost Queen Neferu

Even though I am VERY disheartened by a card later in this review and what it means for Anubians, I really like this card. It is not as overtly powerful and straightforward as Valka, but I think it may be more important to the strategies that will use it.

So this can do up to 8 damage to your opponent on their turn if they are careless. Attacking with a relic is not something you can expect from some gods, but all the same she is guaranteed to do 2 a turn unless your opponent has decked. Some gods will also have an issue removing her without at least playing another spell or using a power, so there are 2 more damage.

Where I think this card shines is in Anubain lists that can protect it. Anubians reliance on the void is going to have to be downplayed in the future and this gives them an on-board threat that can close out a game pretty quickly on a cheap body. Combined with the chip damage you were already doing with your Priestesses and Necromancers, just shoving this out on turn 4, maybe on a mostly clear board with a warden out, may be all you need to clear out a substantial chunk of health from your opponents and set them up for the death blow. I have won with anubains before as early as turn 5 (4 with concededing) simply by getting a good early hand of 2 priestesses and some blitz guys, and this plays very well into that mode of the deck. At the least I think this is an above scale 4 drop for even a zoo style death deck, should that ever be a thing. 7/10

Guiding Light

I am only interested in this for it’s empower mode, and also it is nice to see that they are using that keyword outside of the set it came it. Maybe we see more armor or blessed stuff in the future.

For 1 mana, to draw the chosen one is maybe just fine if your deck has already give a ton of buffs to it and you are low to the ground. I have yet to see that play out but it could happen, and you should know what kind of buffs you have when you play this. It is at least the cheapest version of this effect I think we have seen thusfar.

For 4 mana you basically set up a canonize in your hand but it replaces itself. You lose the immediacy of canonize which is relevant, but gain a lot of value. Hitting a creature that naturally wants to have this bonus, like something with ward, blitz, or armor is going to be really good if you can afford to take a turn off or the game goes long.

Overall I think this may not be the best card, and it is clearly a signal that GU wants the chosen one to work really badly, but I think it is playable even outside of dedicated Chosen one lists and can be pretty good at key points in a match. 5/10

Woodcutter Imp

This card. I REALLY think that Godblitz is underutilized, and I understand why, though I do not agree with the thinking at all. There are plenty of direct damage spells out there that also ignore frontline, so it’s not like going face was ever an issue for most gods.

This card brings one of my favorite decks to bear, which is suicide aggro. Go face, make your opponent have to have answers, but I actually think this is much better than these types of creatures have been in other games. First of all, it is not damage dealt, it is only damage dealt on attack. That is a big deal since your opponent can in effect clone fireballs or whatever just by hitting this. Secondly, it has 3/3 stats for 2, which means it can also do an underbrush board impersonation if you need to play more control early in the game.

While this is not always going to be the card you want to draw against your aggro opponents, this is going to be a card you lead with in a lot of matches against control that will win you the game. Being on the play against something like magic, I generally want to use my pip to either play 2 guys with 2 toughness, or 1 guy with ward or protected to ensure I get damage though and they need to expend resources to start clearing the board. This gives you a faster clock than any other 2 drop you can follow up with and the self damage is basically irrelevant in that match up. Just like the war legend in this set, this is pretty much for aggro decks only, but it does a very good job in them and you can expect to see this pretty often. 7/10

Candy Chain

Deception gets all the (thematically )really stupid relics. This is up there with the D20 mace. This is another deception card that poisons your opponent deck so that on later turns, presumably when they do not expect it, they get some penalty. Candy link supposedly makes your opponent discard and draw, or draw and discard, so it is some form of disruption. I’m not sure how true that is as of writing this but let’s just assume it is.

So what does this card do? By itself nothing. After you have cast a spell, still likely nothing. After you have cast 5 spells? Well now we are probably at a place where maybe it has some sort of effect? It feels like a lot of effort at that point, and you cannot even combo it with another relic like Cobra Scepter. Probably not worth the card, and almost assuredly not worth the card plus 3 mana. 2/10

Take the Reins

Too many puns. Another dual mode empower card, both modes basically do the same thing in that they are broader Umber Arrows. You have much less control over which creature you get in the first mode, and the second mode is much more costly.

These cards are tough to use because there will be board states where this does nothing for you and is dead in hand. There are other matches where you will play this and the game will end on the spot. Generally I do not like cards like that with such high variance but low versatility. Not having full control over what it takes in the first mode is tough because you will often take something that is summoning sick and cannot attack, assuming this works like Umber Arrow. If the card gave it godblitz it may have been much better since you can use it as a 2 for one as is often the case with arrow.

For 7 mana, taking your opponents big thing and swinging with it shoudl win you the game. If it does not you should not have been using this card in the first place. I am generally against including this unless you have some other way to take advantage of the creature you stole, and currently war does not. 3/10

Frozen Rest

How much would you pay for versatility? These are 2 ok effects, I generally see the sleep as an after thought over the relic destruction since it is card disadvantage. If you wanted relic destruction there are a bunch of options that are either cheaper, attached to a body, or both.

If Death were much more aggressive I could see the sleep thing coming up more, but they are not and 3 mana is a lot when you consider this effect exists on a 1 mana spell that sees no play. So yes the versatility is there but the premium you pay for it is way to high. This card is a pass for me untill such time that a need relic destruction not on a creature in a deck that also has a way to really take advantage of sleep. 2/10

Unexpected Gift

I think this is hands down the best control card in the set. For 1 mana you get a body that can trade into stuff or be used as sacrifice fodder, you heal yourself for 3, and you dilute your opponent deck with a card that likely helps you when cast more than them? Sign me up.

I suspect BWD decks can find a place for this, and maybe there is some sort of deception Bombs/Candy links deck that just seeks to turn your opponents deck into total crap, but this is a versatile card that I do think has a lot of applications. It’s PROBABLY not going to do what it needs to do against combo magic, unless you can fire them both off after they cast lost in the depths, but maybe? Either way I suspect people will both play it and underestimate it. 7/10

Winter’s Bounty

This is going to bother a lot of people, me not so much. Gaining 20 is a lot. Going to 40 is a lot. 6 mana is a lot. Put them all together and what you have is a card that fully requires you to be in a dominant board state on turn 6–7 to be able to cast it because it does not affect the board at all.

Where is this good? It’s is pretty solid against any deck that looks to OTKO you but had a hard cap to the damage it can do. Some mage decks that are looking to dome you with a combination of Pyrrhic Knowledge and Arcane Burst for instance will have a hard time getting past this. Likewise any deck that looks to do damage over turns but not really deal with the board state like an all in war build would get sucker punched by this very hard. So in those matches these are going to be very good. In decks where you are your opponent are trading on-board to try and establish a foothold like Light or other nature decks, you may never get a chance to cast this.

As the game does not have sideboards, I see this as a meta choice to shore up a match you are weak against. There will be some matches where it is actively bad, and others where it’s a concede trigger for your oppoenent. In generally I don’t find these make the cut all that often, but I do see some spots where it can shine. 5/10

Thawed Heart

I hate this card and I really hope it get’s heavily nerfed if not outright changed, and based on the sentiment of the community I do not think I am alone here.

This card just invalidates entire archetypes and it does so in such and over the top way it is impressive. Anubians can literally play for 5/6 turns just to set up a maybe kill shot just to have your opponent play this and undo everything you just did, and light was not an easy match up for them to start with. They will basically not be able to beat this with the current cards they have. Likewise this hits a lot of incidental stuff like Pyrrhic Knowledge, An End to War, and Radiant Embalmer.

Against decks where graveyard shenanigans are not included, this is still a card that mid to late game can just grant you a very high amount of life for 2 mana, which in light means you can still build your board state with hero power.

If this card had a hard cap of 5 cards from a void/5 life gained it would still be the absolutle best grave hate in the game. Gleamweaver was kinda the gold standard because it was also at least a body, but even 2 cards removed from the void could be enough to completely stop an embalmer loop or an Anubians player. This is far to much and it really should be changed so that the entire tribe they just fleshed out in the last set is not removed from the meta entirely. 0/10 fro how much I like it, 8/10 for how good it is.

Avalanche Watcher

I like this one, but as a theme let me just note I do believe a lot of the cards spoiled so far are riffs on hearthstone cards, at least from when I played many years ago. This one is a slightly better and class shifted version of Forbidden Shaping which just gave you a guy, were as this one ads backline and +1 toughness.

If we want to use that as a heuristic the card was no where near dominant but had niche uses specifically because its stats started low and did not trigger specific things. This is slightly different than that yet again as this is a creature with a roar where as the other is a spell, but I think it is comparable and will see play should the same situations arise.

It’s kinda hard to break this since even if you could repeatedly trigger the roar you still have to have mana to pay for it, but in a fair deck the thing it may actually do is provide flexibility since it is also never a dead draw. It’s pretty on par for most of it’s curve, as a 2 mana 2/3, 3 mana 3/4, and 4 mana 4/5 are all fine, but backline is not ward or protected so if you need something more dedicated for thoes slots there are better options all around. Backline is not a common ability in magic so maybe it fines a niche or some other card gets printed that rewards you for having a deck full of creature with these types of numbers, but until then to me this is a card with potential that is unrealized. 5/10

Curious Wandercats

This is a neat riff on relic removal even though it is fragile. It relies on you not needing a relic of your own, needing to remove 3 as a floor as opposed to 1 with Nightleaf Trapper, and not needing to remove it instantly, as is the case with lightning talisman. If you hit that critera this card may very well have a prominent place in a list if the meta becomes very relic focused, or may be the reason it does not become so.

This is probably not something you rush out unless you really need to remove a necroscepter, but being a good body with more than 2 health means this will be a prime candidate to become hidden, either with your hero power or Assassin’s Aim. Playing this on turn 4 to remove your opponents relic and then hiding it with hero power, threating 7 damage with an Assassin’s aim the turn after and still preventing relics could place a very high bar on any deck that wants to play relics that last more than a turn.

Right now I cannot see Deception wanting this over counterfeit or Trapper, but as things shift that could change. Absolutely a card I want a play set up should the meta shift in the right way. 5/10

Fir Free’s Fury

This card make me sad, because I really want to like it. On the surface this is a slightly smaller The Hunt that comes out 2 turns earlier and can generate you creature value. But as it is written I have NO IDEA how it interacts with Armor or Ward, since the implementation of it is not all at once but repeat this effect, and we do not know what the fruit does, as traditionally the 1/1 summons in nature are not vanilla. I kinda presume they probably death rattle off a point of damage to the weakest creature to keep in line with what the card is trying to do, but who the hell knows. EDIT: They does in fact do this, it has not changed my opinion on the card.

Let’s just talk about this cards most needed and worst interaction, assuming it works the way I think it does. Armor lurker, maybe the most played card in all of deception, turns this card off almost completley. Maybe you can snipe something smaller with it, but chances are that was not the creature you needed to kill. You do the damage so you do not get the fruits, and then this is promptly ignored.

I am going to hold off on reviewing this truly untill I see a bit more. My guess is that in games where it is good it is a decent player but likely not better than something like wildfire, and it decks where it is bad it is a dead card. 3/10, maybe?

Spirit Storm

This is a riff on Feign Death from Hearthstone, though it is shifted from Hunter (who is closest to war in that game) to Death. I can say unequivocally that this is potentially the scariest card spoiled because of what it can lead to in the future.

I think that if this card is good, it is likely going to be too good for 2 mana and will likely be an on the spot game ender. Some combos with this just off the top of my head are you can have Burrowing Scarab and Rockdrake egg in play and trigger this and likely end the turn with a full grip and 2 drakes in play, maybe even milling your opponent out. It could lead to some very early shenanigan turns with Necronomics which is in retrospect probably why Over the Line caught the banhammer not long ago.

Slightly less innocuous things you can do with it include bombfly and Possessed Acolyte, multiple uses of Siren of the Grave, Hidden looter/lootable corpse value, and my personal favorite right now the pure value of triggering Soul Jar. It does not take too many new printings to catapult this into a very strong place. Expect it to do something 8/10.

Pallas’s Wanderwagon

This is an outright bad card. The first thing to note, and I think many may miss this, is that it’s not YOUR spells, it is any spells. So this dies to a lot more of your opponents removal than you may think with that 3 power.

The stats on this are not very impressive to want to include it in your deck, and even if every turn you were switching it to 6, attacking with it, and then putting it back all you really did was get an early 6/6 that needs a lot of extra work. I cannot think of a Magic deck that wants to bnother with this as it also lacks protection and frontline is fine but not what you need. Skip this one outside of like maybe playing it in sealed if that ever becomes a thing. 2/10.

The Reinnapper

Gruss von Krampus I guess. Let me tell you I want to like this. A decent sized creature that comes in and removes a threat, those are generally good. War has been using the 2/3 charge unit forever and part of the allure of that card is it often trades and leaves a body behind. This is not that however.

The 3 power and no tribal synergies to me are real killers on this card. You do not play this assuming it’ll stick around forever, I guess deception can probably go a longer way keeping it hidden than most other gods, and the fact that obliterate gets around quite a few cards protections is a big plus fort this, but overall this just feels like it will come down and maybe open up an attack when a Pyramid Warden was standing in the way, and then your opponent will deal with it. 3 mana or less is also a challenge, because it feel like much more of a limiting factor than power or toughness.

This is going to draw comparisons to Blade of Whiteplain. It is not that. It’s a decent card and there may be a role for it to play in limited decks, but I just think in the current game it is going to fail to do it’s job more often than not. 5/10