Hearthstone’s The Witchwood expansion reveals continue and we got to see Tess Greymane, a new Rogue Legendary minion.
In this post, I take an in-depth look at the card and what kind of decks it could fit into.
Tess Greymane
Tess Greymane is an eight-mana 6/6 Rogue Legendary minion with a Battlecry: Replay every card from another class you’ve played this game (targets chosen randomly).
Blizzard has also confirmed that Tess will play the cards in a random order, unlike Lynessa Sunsorrow, who casts the spells in the order they were played during the game.
Tess is an interesting take on randomness. You get cards from another class mostly randomly, but with Tess in mind, you can choose whether to play them before or after playing Tess. It’s still a huge RNG fest where your opponent’s ability to play around things will be limited, but likewise you are not guaranteed anything playable.
Can Tess be competitive? Hopefully not, but who knows yet. There are many paths Burgle Rogue can take:
- Full Burgle Rogue with Tess and all the burgle cards
- Smaller splash with Tess and some key burgle cards, perhaps Hallucination, Blink Fox, and Face Collector, for example, to get more controlled and reliable results
- Burgle Rogue without Tess, she is big and slow
Pushing the Burgle Rogue
The original Burgle could not get the archetype off the ground. Neither could any of the subsequent cards, even though many of them saw some play as additional resource generators in a non-burgling-focused decks.
Burgle is long gone from Standard, and now also Swashburglar (which saw a lot of play partially because it is a Pirate), Undercity Huckster (which saw limited play at best), Shaku the Collector (which saw a lot of play as a recurring effect and due to it having Stealth), and Ethereal Peddler (which saw no play, because it would go into a full burgle deck) are leaving Standard format.
The only cards that remain are Hallucination, which is low tempo, but most value as it is a Discover effect and thus much more likely to find useful cards – rolling three times gives you a pretty good chance to land on something useful at least – and Lilian Voss, which would need some heavy burgle support.
However, The Witchwood pushes the archetype again with renewed vigor. In addition to Tess, the other Rogue Legendary minion, Face Collector, can also fit in a burgle deck, even though it may end up getting neutral cards in addition to class cards.
Blink Fox and Pick Pocket provide more resources from the opponent’s class whereas Spectral Cutlass provides a weapon – with Lifesteal for increased longevity – that benefits from playing such cards.
At best, Tess Greymane could be a N’Zoth-style board filler. What’s more, it is enough to have played the cards, it does not matter if they get transformed or stolen! Grab a non-targeted board clear and minions and you can play Tess to get a board of your own while clearing that of the opponent!
What if there is a tempo-oriented Burgle Rogue deck that runs Hallucination, Blink Fox, Face Collector, and Tess Greymane? There is a good chance to pick up a bunch of minions from those and then resummon all of them with Tess.
Pick Pocket could add a lot of value, but it is also very, very slow, and it is hard to see how Rogue can survive long enough, even with Spectral Cutlass. Maybe with Kingsbane, which is also looking for a new identity with Coldlight Oracle on its way out of Standard.
There’s also a chance for Blink Fox to see play in Rogue decks even without a heavy Burgle focus, much like Swashburglar did.
Rogue’s new – or at least renewed – identity as a class that copies resources from other classes is very unlike Miracle Rogue or Tempo Rogue, and if I was to make a bet, I’d bet on Rogue once again coming up with an archetype other than what it is being pushed into, perhaps alongside the pushed one. Time will tell.