Hearthstone’s Knights of the Frozen Throne expansion card reveal season has started! We can expect to see multiple cards revealed on daily basis for the next couple of weeks leading up to the expansion itself.

In this post, I take an in-depth look at Sindragosa.

Sindragosa

Sindragosa is a legendary Mage class card from Knights of the Frozen Throne expansion. It is an eight-mana 8/8 Dragon minion with a Battlecry to summon two Frozen Champions. Frozen Champions are 0/1 minions with a Deathrattle that adds a random Legendary minion to your hand.

We got ourselves a new Dragon! Alas, only for Mage, so no other class will be able to benefit from it. It might have some interesting implications for Mage though: if there are no other new Dragons in the set, Netherspite Historian has a 58% chance to Discover Sindragosa for Mage (37% in Wild). That could be a building block for a slow, grinder-type Dragon Mage.

I’m loving Dragon Mage already. I don’t think it will be a top-tier deck, but I would be happy to be surprised.

Can Sindragosa itself be part of a competitive deck, even if that deck is not a full Dragon deck? Sindragosa is a slow value card, in many ways similar to Elise the Trailblazer. The Frozen Champions are easy for Mage to pop, even Hero Power will do, so at most you pay two mana for a random Legendary minion. They are also destroyed by any area-of-effect damage, either something from your opponent or a Volcanic Potion or Primordial Drake from you. They can be silenced to prevent the card, but it is unlikely for them to be worth using a Silence effect on.

Once Knights of the Frozen Throne is released, we will have around 105 legendary minions in Standard format (assuming 5 neutral legendary minions again, same as Un’Goro). Currently, one third of the legendary minions cost eight mana or more, and around one half of them cost seven mana or more. Getting two random legendary minions will, on average, give you one fairly big threat.

Sindragosa is Control Mage material. The deck can be built around Dragons, or it can include Sindragosa as part of its value package in one of multiple possible combinations of Netherspite Historian, Sindragosa, Primordial Drake, and The Curator.

Some of the more recent Control/Dragon Priest hybrids have included but a few Dragons that are mostly designed to milk value from Netherspite Historian and Drakonid Operative. With Sindragosa, Control Mage can go for a similar package. Perhaps Netherspite Historian is part of it, perhaps not. Same for The Curator, it is a potential choice, but can also be left out. It is also possible that Sindragosa will be used without any of these support cards as simply one big value card among many others.

It might even be possible to combine Sindragosa with N’Zoth, which would bring back the Frozen Champions. I’m not sure if such an extreme value package will be needed though.

It all depends on whether a slow Control Mage or Dragon Mage is viable. Sindragosa has nothing to offer to more aggressive builds, such as Secret Mage or Tempo Mage, and Freeze Mage has its own gameplan as well. Value-wise, it has a lot to offer, so any grinder type deck will be interested in it.