Toysnatching Geist
Geist is a horrible minion at its baseline. The comparison with Nerubian Vizier reflects poorly on it. A 3-mana 2/1 that discovers and discounts a lower quality card on average is not something you want to put in your Hearthstone deck. We don’t consider the gigantic version of the card good enough to make up for it, as it’s a slow turn 8 play that’s not guaranteed to have an immediate impact either.
Clearly, the idea is to buff Geist and take advantage of its scaling discount. The minion is undead, so all the unique buff cards available to Death Knight can target it. A buffed Geist becomes a much more enticing card to play, though it’s very unlikely that it’ll be ready to play on curve.
Does Geist lift Handbuff Death Knight into a competitive win rate? It’s a good card for the deck, but we’re skeptical it’s enough.
Score: 2
Helm of Humiliation
We don’t understand why this card requires two Blood runes, as it’s outclassed by other class cards with similar effects. Righteous Defense and Twisted Tether are both better cards, neither of which made significant impact in their time in Standard. The only thing Helm is better at is having a higher floor, being a guaranteed 5/5 buff.
Yet we’re supposed to give up Reska to play this card in Handbuff Death Knight? No chance we’re doing that. This is a waste of space.
Score: 1
Foamrender
This weapon can potentially provide a lot of damage for a deck that’s capable of generating enough corpses to support it. Foamrender can act as the main corpse spender in a Rainbow Death Knight deck looking to juice up Climactic Necrotic Explosion and put the opponent within reach of the deck’s primary nuke.
The main issue is that Foamrender is very resource hungry and would need to push out Corpse Bride in the proactive variant of Rainbow, or Quartzite Crusher in the defensive build. We think it is more suitable for the defensive variant, as the deck is less reliant on board to win games and can afford to take a turn off thanks to its AOE effects.
But we do wonder whether Foamrender is a weapon you run in the primary list, or one you simply discover off Runes of Darkness when you need to. You don’t need the card in every matchup, so it might just end up being a discovered weapon in slow matchups.
Regardless of the outcome, we suspect that Foamrender will have some positive impact on Rainbow Death Knight’s ability to close out games.
Score: 2
Final Thoughts: We’re not sure that this is enough to lift Death Knight back into contention at higher rank brackets. Handbuff Death Knight is not trustworthy. Foamrender will have to do a lot of heavy lifting in Rainbow Death Knight.
