The Comprehensive The Great Dark Beyond Preview

Voronei Recruiter

Crewmates:

The Demon Hunter set has a big focus on the generation of Crewmates, which are 4/4 Draenei minions with a bonus effect, one of the eight available to One Amalgam Band and other cards such as Elemental Inspiration. Whenever you play a Crewmate, it also summons Crewmates that are adjoined to it in hand. This means you can summon a row of Crewmates for 4 mana, should they be lined up together in hand. The tricky part, of course, is to free up your hand to enable that swing turn.

We can treat the value of a Crewmate as a generation of a card. Voronei Recruiter is a 1/3 that generates a Crewmate at the end of every turn. We can compare it to Gold Panner, which has a stronger effect by drawing, but has 1 less health, making it easier to remove. Recruiter is also a Draenei, which means it can be targeted with buffs that are exclusive to the tribe.

This is a reasonable value generator that presents a threat that needs to be removed, but the entire package is tied to each other in their chances of seeing competitive play.

Score: 2

Infiltrate

A 3-damage AOE effect for 3 mana is a decent deal, though it’s important to note that the effect is symmetrical. The caveat is that we need to choose a minion in play that doesn’t take the damage. This makes the card difficult to activate on curve if we want to target our own minion, which is where it would be the strongest in stopping early aggression. Alternatively, we must choose an enemy minion that won’t take the damage, which means the AOE effect isn’t as strong.

Another issue is that Demon Hunter’s late game still looks non-existent, while this is a card that fits into a more passive playstyle that is supposed to lean into the late game. Pirate DH, or a Crewmate deck, won’t want to play this card.

If Demon Hunter is successful at establishing a late game strategy, Infiltrate will be a good candidate for inclusion. Until then, we’ll be amusing ourselves with the thought of playing it on curve with a Snowflipper Penguin.

Score: 2

Shattershard Turret

The first Demon Hunter starship piece, Turret looks like one of the stronger standalone pieces in the set. A 3 mana 2/4 with Rush and Windfury is a decent minion for early game board control, able to potentially kill two small minions in one turn. Its context in a starship is important, as we can turn our starship into a big rush minion capable of clearing enemy minions while buffing our board, thanks to Felfused Battery.

Unlike most starships, which tend to lean towards a late game win condition, Turret’s power is early game focused and can help boost the power of an aggressive deck, such as Pirate Demon Hunter. We believe there’s a strong chance of Turret becoming a staple card in decks like Pirate or Crewmate DH.

Score: 3

Headhunt

An Arcane Shot that adds a Crewmate to our hand. This card is as simple and basic as they come, which makes it easy to evaluate. If Headhunt drew a card, it would be insanely strong, so generating a card makes it look good. Again, we don’t think there’s any point in running Crewmate generation if we don’t run all of it, as the whole point is to stack them up in our hand and summon them all together for a big swing.

For that purpose, a cheap generator will do well for the archetype. We can even play Headhunt and Recruiter on the same turn to have a guaranteed Crewmate pair in hand.

Score: 2

Felfused Battery

The second DH starship is weaker standalone, as it doesn’t have an immediate impact on the board. It’s still a threatening card that the opponent needs to remove, especially in a token style deck such as Pirate DH. When joined with Shattershard Turret in a starship, Battery’s ability starts to really shine, as we can buff our board by +2 attack instantly, once the starship launches and gains Rush and Windfury. Two Batteries inside our starship can give a board-wide buff of +4 attack. That’s very strong with Sigil of Skydiving, for example, albeit a bit telegraphed.

The cheap cost, decent stats for a 2-drop, as well as a snowballing ability, makes it an easy inclusion for aggressive decks. We do believe that Demon Hunter’s starship will be the smallest, but also the fastest one in space.

Score: 3

Warp Drive

This is the biggest reason to run a starship in a Demon Hunter deck. Warp Drive draws 2 cards and discounts each by 2 mana if we’re building a starship, a condition we consider easy to meet. An activated Warp Drive is a mini-Skull of Gul’dan, a draw effect that costs a net negative mana. We can argue that Warp Drive is easier to activate compared to Skull, with the option to play it earlier.

This card is incredible for every Demon Hunter deck that runs a starship, but we think it makes the prospect of an aggressive starship deck more enticing. With a low curve, Warp Drive is likely to draw us cards we can instantly play, so we don’t lose any initiative while reloading. We expect Pirate DH to be all over this, as the deck doesn’t have much draw available to it, even if there’s a bit of anti-synergy with Patches.

Score: 4

Eldritch Being

A weird 1-drop that has potential to impact our hand by reorganizing it. It triggers both on outcast and spellburst, so its effect shouldn’t be difficult to activate.

Clearly, the purpose of this 1-drop seems to be shuffling our hand in the hopes some of our generated Crewmates end up next to each other. With Crewmate generation, it’s quite difficult to stick them next to each other because we tend to generate one Crewmate at a time, which means they’re being separated by our drawn cards. To place them next to each other, we will usually need to play the card that ends up stuck between them.

Eldritch Being can give us a couple of shuffles that can do the job. However, we don’t believe this card can be justified in the deck. In terms of impact on the board, it’s a Dire Mole. Its outcast trigger is unreliable, especially when we tend to generate Crewmates that can trap it in the middle of our hand.

In any other deck, its effect is meaningless. We believe that to best leverage Crewmates, we need to emphasize adjacency in the deck building process rather than use a random shuffler and hope to get lucky. Emphasizing adjacency means running a cheap curve, with cards we can easily get out of our hand. This would make Eldritch Being unnecessary.

Score: 1

Emergency Meeting

The only card that generates two Crewmates, but with a caveat, placing a demon between them. The demon is cheap and is theoretically easy to get out of our hand, but it still requires a mana investment to get done. If we play Emergency Meeting on turn 2, we’re guaranteed to be able to play the demon on turn 3, setting up adjacent Crewmates on turn 4.

We think a very good comparison for this card is Patchwerk Pals. Both spells generate three minions. We can play all generated minions by turn 4 if we play the spell on turn 2. The quality of minions generated by Patchwerk Pals is higher and more reliable. The synergy between the minions is higher in Patchwerk Pals, as the demon is an interference to the Crewmates.

It’s clear to us that Patchwerk Pals is the stronger card. That doesn’t make Emergency Meeting unplayable, but its power is tied to the archetype it’s meant to be included in, while Patchwerk Pals is far more versatile and useful in a variety of decks.

Score: 2

Dirdra, Rebel Captain

Dirdra is the cornerstone legendary of the Crewmate archetype. A 4 mana 5/4 rushing Draenei, it shuffles all 8 types of Crewmates into our deck, while drawing one when it dies.

For a cornerstone legendary, this is a remarkably bad effect. It’s true that a 5/4 rush that “generates” a card shouldn’t be bad on paper, but Dirdra’s battlecry is a massive drawback. While we don’t mind generating Crewmates, we have no interest in shuffling them into our deck, which denies us from drawing the good cards in our deck. A single Crewmate is significantly worse than a constructed-level card.

You could say that we can draw all the Crewmates and summon them together in one big play, but this is fantasy. In practice, we’ll draw a mix of Crewmates and other cards, which will diminish our draw on average. Dirdra is not worth making our deck worse.

We can see this card being buffed in the future, but we wish it was reworked instead. The battlecry is simply horrendous.

Score: 1

Xor’toth, Breaker of Stars

The effect of Xor’toth is the source of its power, so we must be able to evaluate it independently first. A 5-damage AOE effect that is asymmetrical and hits the enemy hero is stronger than Flamestrike. If this was a newly printed constructed card, it could easily cost 7-8 mana.

A legendary minion that costs 6 mana and brings a 5/5 body alongside the effect sounds incredible, but the big caveat is that the AOE can never happen on the turn we play Xor’toth on curve, unless the last card in our hand costs 0 mana. Since we draw a card every turn, there’s never a point at the start of our turn that our hand is empty.

This hints where Xor’toth should be strong. Rather than a resource-focused deck, we want a fast-paced deck with a low curve that will not have many cards in hand by the time we get to turn 6. This increases the likelihood that by turn 7, we can blow up the opponent’s board and face.

But there’s a small contradiction here. We want to play an aggressive deck, yet we can’t activate the effect before turn 7. Aggressive decks usually don’t want to prolong the game later than turn 8, as that’s when most slower decks are able to stabilize. In aggressive mirrors, Xor’toth might be too slow to be relevant in some games, but potentially end the game if its effect does materialize.

We believe there is some justification to running this card in Pirate or Crewmate DH, or other decks with a low curve that can easily get cards out of their hand. Xor’toth would be the curve topper that provides a game ending win condition in faster matchups, while providing the final push in slower matchups that turns L’s into W’s. It should be better than a card like Kayn.

Score: 2

Final Thoughts

The Great Dark Beyond Set Rank: 9^th

Overall Power Ranking:  10^th

Demon Hunter… looks a bit sus. There are some good additions to the class’ toolkit. Specifically, the starship package looks like a great fit for Pirate Demon Hunter, especially in combination with Sigil of Skydiving. And yet, we’re almost disappointed by Demon Hunter’s starship because it’s so aggressive leaning. It also requires us to have a wide board to take advantage of.

Demon Hunter doesn’t have early game issues. Its most prominent archetype is one of the fastest decks in the format. It is only rivaled by Pain Warlock in its ability to get ahead and stay ahead. What Demon Hunter is sorely lacking is a functional late game. It’s been over two years since Demon Hunter received a set that provided it with a functional late game.

We’re talking about the Relic package in Castle Nathria being the last time that Demon Hunter received a set that told it to focus on resource-accumulation or late game power spikes, rather than flood the board, or scam opponents early with a polarizing card that got nerfed for play pattern issues (i.e., Sharpshooter and Grasp). That is an astounding fact.

Crewmate Demon Hunter does seem like a flavorful archetype. It will likely be Draenei-focused, to take advantage of Crewmates being Draenei, but we have power concerns. It’s aggressive leaning, yet its early game doesn’t seem explosive. We’re not convinced it can find its own niche, especially one that is separate from the faster Pirate Demon Hunter.

And then, when it comes to the late game, we’re truly drawing a blank. This is the class we’ve struggled to theorycraft the most, because it didn’t inspire enough ideas in us. Pirate Demon Hunter could well return to being a strong deck once Renathal is gone, but it feels like there are no real alternatives, which puts the class in a danger zone of stagnation and irrelevance.