Hearthstone: Route to the Sunken City, new Dredging and Colossus abilities explained
Hearthstone
Blizzard involved us a few days ago in a quick test of the next set of cards for Hearthstone, Route to the Sunken City, which will be officially released within the client of the popular card game on April 12th.of a very important set because it will also mark the beginning of the year of the Hydra, thus allowing us to definitively say goodbye to the year of the Griffin which is now, in fact, running out. The change of holidays will bring with it a substantial rotation of the format as the Ashes of Outland decks, The Academy of Scholomance and Madness at the Darkmoon Faire will become Savages, while the Standard mode will only include Forged in the Savannahs, United at Stormwind, Divided into the Alterac Valley and clearly Route for the Submerged City and the Main set revisited just for the year of the Hydra.
Going into the details of the new Route for the Submerged City set, the short test gave us allowed to touch all 135 cards that will make up the add-on giving us the opportunity to better discover the functioning of the 2 new abilities, Dredging and Colossus, and to discover some extra details about the Naga, the new type of minion that become part of the Hearthstone meta, with all that that entails in terms of alchemy and combos with existing cards.
Dredging
Inspector of the Pit, a card with Dredging D ragaggio is the new mechanic of Route to the Underwater City that officially enters the Hearthstone abilities, around which to build and interact your own decks. Those of you who have a minimum of familiarity with Magic The Gathering, can find an immediate connection with the Prophesy skill which Dredging is clearly inspired by, but proposing an interesting reversal of dynamics.Where Scrying in Magic allows you to sort and discard a certain number of cards on the top of the library, putting the others at the bottom of it, Dredging works exactly the other way around, allowing the player to take three cards from the bottom of your deck and then put one on top. Both abilities therefore allow you to act on the next draw by directing the game strategy, but with one fundamental difference: Dredging allows for additional interaction since through other special abilities it becomes possible first to send certain cards to the bottom of the deck and then, with Dredging, place them on top.
Azshara's Deserter, a creature that places an enhanced copy of him at the bottom of the deck To give a concrete example, each class has a specific creature that, once killed, through the Death Rattle allows you to create and send directly to the bottom of the deck another attacker very similar in mana cost, attack and defense, but with a generally very powerful ability. There is also no shortage of spells capable of creating copies of themselves at the bottom of the deck immediately after summoning with everything that goes with it in terms of combo and acceleration of attacks.
Exactly as it happened with Scry, we are quite convinced that Dredging could greatly revolutionize the Hearthstone meta by significantly altering the speed of matches with some very fast and aggressive decks.
Colossus
Tartacqua, one of the giants of Route to the City Submerged The other mechanic introduced in Route to the Submerged City, Colossus, is apparently simpler and more linear in its consequences, but is equally capable of expressing an unthinkable potential as soon as players have studied some apparently unrelated interactions.The ability is, for the moment, connected only to some very powerful creatures, one per class, and is accompanied by a number that expresses the quantity of appendages that v they are summoned together with that beast. To be clear, Tartacqua, a 6/5 at a cost of 7 belonging to the druid deck, has Colossus +1 and this means that he enters the field with a single appendage: the Tartacqua shell; Xhilag of the Abyss, a 3/6 at cost 7 belonging to the Demon Hunter deck, has Colossus +4 instead and descends to the ground with 4 Bulbo of Xhilag in tow.
Xhilag of the Abyss, another colossus The peculiarity of this dynamic does not concern only the physical occupation of the battlefield which will obviously be affected by these colossal creatures that deposit more counters next to them, but the particular interactions between the main card and its appendages that , in many cases, they force the challenger to reflect adequately on what to attack and kill first in order to try to limit the damage. Taking back the 2 cards just mentioned, Tartacqua is immune as long as his Shell is in play, but the latter grants 8 armor to the hero when his Death Rattle is activated. Xhilag instead increases the damage dealt by its Bulbs by 1 each turn, but at the same time the Bulbs each deal 1 random damage to an enemy at the end of each turn.
The choice of how to act is therefore always very complex and requires clarity and great timing: it is better to take out the appendages first, with the risk of leaving room for the most powerful card, or it makes more sense to intervene immediately on the main evocation, however leaving the field open to extra elements that could , very quickly, destroy our defenses?
The Nagas
Priestess Valishj can be disruptive to speed up the very first turns Long distance from the last time something similar happened, Rotta for the Underwater City introduces a new type of servant: the Naga. This time, it is a type of tribe that substantially modifies the Hearthstone meta, bringing alchemy and interactions with the entire set and, indirectly, also with the other expansions and above all with the main deck. >Naga in fact do not represent a purely aesthetic addition, but offer new and interesting opportunities to the Standard mode also in function of a series of dynamics built around the summoning of creatures and the casting of magic. In fact, compared to other races, this tribe focuses on enhancing summons in synergy with the cards held in hand, improving both spells cast on the battlefield which, for example, can gain additional damage or resolve in multiple copies when in hand. have determined Naga, both by causing any creatures that have taken the field to be empowered if spells are cast that turn.
The Gifts of Azshara is a fundamental card for decks focused on multiple draws Again it seems therefore that Blizzard's goal is a general acceleration of summons with an exponential increase in the spells that can be achieved over the course of a single turn, and this sort of predisposition of naga towards summons, makes them particularly efficient in combination with the Dredging and with all those dynamics aimed at moving the cards inside the deck and at the mul draft tip it within the single round.
We therefore have a great curiosity in discovering which cards will be included in the most aggressive decks and, at the same time, in the most control ones. And we're sure it won't be long before we are amazed in this sense, as the Route to the Sunken City lands in the hands of all Hearthstone players.
