Here be ALL the dragons.
Brian Kibler just revealed the latest Whispers legendary on his stream, and it's a good one: just like the original Deathwing, the new version (dubbed "Dragonlord"), is a 12/12 for ten mana and certainly packs a punch. It comes with an extremely strong Deathrattle, too: once it dies, all of the dragons in the player's hand will enter the battlefield. That means minions such as [card]Ysera[/card], [card]Chromaggus[/card], [card]Chillmaw[/card] and others will join the fray for free and while some of them lose valuable Battlecries by being summoned, most Dragons either don't suffer (much) from being summoned instead of played or even even stand to benefit from it, such as (regular) [card]Deathwing[/card].
Deathwing, Dragonlord synergizes extremely well with [card]Dragon Consort[/card] and as such it might be enough to bring Dragon Paladin decks back into the meta. Playing Dragonlord on turn eight could make for an insanely strong play as it would leave your opponent with very few options to gain board control again. Even silenced, it's still a 12/12 body without any drawback, which means the only way to cleanly get rid of it (assuming the player actually has some dragons in his hands to trigger the Deathrattle) would either be hard removal such as [card]Hex[/card] or [card]Polymorph[/card], or a combination of Silence and soft removal such as [card]Big Game Hunter[/card], if the latter will even continue to exist in its current form. Either way, Deathwing, Dragonlord certainly gives deckbuilders a lot to think about.
The second new card revealed today is Embrace the Shadow, a two mana Priest spell which makes all healing effects deal damage for that turn only. The card is basically [card]Auchenai Soulpriest[/card]'s aura turned into an epic spell and allows for combos with spells such as [card]Circle of Healing[/card] and [card]Flash Heal[/card]. Blizzard's intention here seems to be to allow for some more flexibility in Priests' toolkit, as their healing spells as well as their Hero Power could double as removal. Unlike [card]Auchenai Soulpriest[/card] however, Embrace the Shadow does not add a body to the board and since the effect is not permanent, its usability might be restricted to miracle-esque OTK combos. Whether or not such a deck could see play in Standard remains to be seen.
What do you think about the new Deathwing? Let us know in the poll!
You can follow the reveal of the new expansion with our Whispers of the Old Gods full card list here.
