Servants of the Betrayer may just see the rise of the solo paladin deck build, based around the new powerhouse Traitor rare that the paladin class has access to, and with Omedus rush on its way out of the metascape there may just be a home in the new competitive environment for a Priest-based deck of discard.
With the new set only days old, the structure of whatever the new meta may be is near impossible to define. The best way, however, to get a feel for it, is to jump into deck-building yourself and find the most powerful manifestations of the deck types that we've seen before and that you envision being seen in the future... and then pitting them against one another in a looping cycle of build-test-modify. There's no better place to start than with the cards that you're most excited about, and for me it's priest and paladin, both classes of the Traitor variety from SotB.
Without a doubt the defining card for a new solo Paladin is Seal of Betrayal. It's Traitor, so we're from the onset limited to a selection of only two heroes, but because the solo Paladin deck will be made up of predominantly abilities, weapons and armor, faction choice is a less important decision here than in other deck types.
The Seal is a phenomenally powerful card and a step above anything else we've seen before in the paladin class. It takes the act of clearing your opponent's side of the board with the broad sweeps of a two-handed sword into positive card advantage on the paladin's side. In anything but an ally-starved meta if you're opponent doesn't have an answer for it, any lethal swing from your hero results in a net gain of two in terms of board position for your side of the table. To get everyone on the same page here, this is what the card will do:
Traitor Hero Required
Ongoing: When an ally is destroyed by combat damage dealt by your hero with a weapon, put that ally from its owner's graveyard into play under your control.
2, Destroy Seal of Betrayal 
Gain control of target ally that your hero dealt combat damage to this turn.
The key phrase in the top half of the card is combat damage with a weapon. The destruction trigger on the lower half doesn't stipulate weapon based damage, so if you're powered up by Aura of Fanaticism or other cards that pour attack directly into your hero you can still use the Seal as an kind of pseudo-Twist of Faith (though more than likely, the pay 2 and destroy power will come in handy stealing a high health ally that your weapon isn't big enough yet to destroy). Including weapons in this kind of deck is, regardless, a necessity without question, and we'll want to start the weapon damage going as soon as we possibly can.
Re-enter Mass of McGowan. It's the cheapest decently-powered weapon a paladin has access to and, if you already have an Andis Butchersson or other strike cost reducing card in play, you can actually start stealing allies with it on turn four when you drop the Seal. Where it'll only hit heroes for two, the Mass smashes allies for four, which is just the right amount of attack to take down a Kulvo Jadefist or the vast majority of any of the other three and four drops in the game. There's the Hellreaver as the other possibility, of course, but that requires the opposing allies coming to you.
After Mass, we need to keep curving our weaponry up so as to keep up with the rising health of opposing allies and provide bigger and bigger packets of damage that we can put onto the opposing hero when the board is clear to swing through. That calls for the Obsidian Edged Blade - a four cost, swing for four with a strike cost of one two-handed sword that can be discarded from your hand to boost existing two-handed swords that you already have on the table - followed by the MotL epic, the Demonslayer, which swings for five. Follow those up with the end game closers of the Glaive of the Pit or the Felsteel Reaper, and you have a decent weapon curve that can support ally thievery through Seal of Betrayal up through the health values of the majority of the most commonly played allies in the game.
A turn three Mass leaves us with a vacant first two turns of the game. Against the rush, these two turns can mean damage in the double digits. The early game portion of the plate armor suite was a little later in coming, but Servants rounded it off nicely with the addition of a particular pair of 'sharp' looking shoulders. Armor in a soladin deck I recommend taking mostly in twos. If you mind the uniqueness violations via armor slots carefully enough, more often than not armor draws that would normally have been dead draws because they are duplicates will become viable plays to lay down a more ominous looking wall of gray steel.
1-drop: Doomplate Chestguard, Girdle of the Endless Pit (Chest, Waist)
2-drop: Fanblade Pauldrons (Shoulder)
3-drop: Gauntlets of Vindication, Herod's Shoulder (Hands, Shoulder)
4-drop: Doomplate Legguards, Doomplate Helm (Legs, Head)
5-drop: *empty*
6-drop: Vambraces of the Sadist (Wrist)
The Doomplate Helm might be the first to go if you need to trim the fat a bit, but once you have five or more pieces of equipment out on the field, your armor becomes unbelievable powerful until your opponent draws a decent answer. The Fanblade Pauldrons are a Servants addition that provides a stellar four defense when you exhaust your hero. In the early game, this is more than enough to thwart most any damage that might be sent your way (though it will fall to a Voss Treebender or other hero exhausting tech). Vambraces of the Sadist has some sick synergy with Seal of Betrayal, because not only are you taking allies away from the opposing player and using them as your own, you're dealing damage to that hero every time you rip an ally of his away.
The Seal of Betrayal is our all-star ability. But there's one other card in Servants that gives solo paladin another push towards viability. That card is Avenging Wrath. It's a four cost instant-speed play that quite simply doubles you heroes attack that turn. Play it while your weapon swing is still on the chain in the last stage of combat and outside of an interrupt the soladin has a brutal, explosive closer of its own (even more so if you can ready your hero).
Solo paladin could round itself out with other of its more staple abilities like Hammer of Justice, Consecration (which can do a board wipe for three with Gauntlets of Vindication in play) and even Divine Riposte, though having not pulled one, I have yet to actually test that particular card yet. There's Hammer of the Righteous if you want to stem the flow of early ally rush, Lay on Hands for late-game staying power and the Blessing of Freedom to interrupt targeted damage spells and even some of the equipment hate out there that targets your hero specifically.
If you decide to go pseudo-solo and include a minor ally suite of your own, there's the cantrip Redemption and the Servants card Seal of Redemption, which while not compatible with the Seal of the Betrayal can create respectable card advantage of its own, retrieving allies from you graveyard with every swing.
A soladin could go Horde, for the variety of increasing potent equipment and ability hate cards that the class has access to along with the staple Horde solo quest Counterattack! The deck could also go Alliance for the virtual insanity of blue card draw through cards like Weeble, Bizzaz, Corki's Ransom and Totem of Coo. Horde paladin can also field the Blood Elf cards Solanian's Belongings and Arcane Torent, which might be reason enough to stay red.
This kind of solo paladin deck I see first off as having a bit of trouble against other solo decks, if unprepared. In these match-ups, the Seal of Betrayal becomes more lackluster and the relatively slower nature of the paladin deck puts the soladin player in the losing position in a damage race. Hammer of Justice is a powerful card in this match-up, however, as is Seal of Redemption if a more pseudo-solo deck with a modest ally suite is designed.
But now, what about the other side of the coin? The softer half of the martial clergy of the church of the WoW TCG. Omedus rush is on its way out and while discard never was able to keep up that well in competitive play, a few additions from Servants of the Betrayer may be enough to push the class over the edge into competitive playability.
First and foremost among these is, again, the Traitor rare ability. In this case, it's Spiritual Domination. Spiritual Domination runs a similar course as Seal of Betrayal, in that it steals ally cards from opposing player's zones, but whereas the Seal took allies from play, Spiritual Domination goes digging in the opposing player's graveyard. And if you're playing discard, there might just be a fair number of choices in there.
Let's start with the tradition suite of discard abilities first. For the Priest class, early game discard follows the 1-2-3 curve of Touch of Darkness, Mind Spike, and Mental Anguish. For putting cards in the graveyard, those traditional abilities have been supplemented by Melt Face, non-targeting ally destruction courtesty of SotB. There's also the incredibly strong ally Shadow Silhouettes, which under controlled circumstances has the potential for some fast damage or positive card trades. It's risky, because damage on your hero might mean the card turns into simply an overly expensive heal, but in the right deck it may just have a place in a build that all but lost Shadowfiend and Morlug as its all-star allies.
Servants, however, had more in store for the Priest class than shadows and face melting. A certain pair of cloth shoulders can turn every discard the opponent makes into a 1 damage AoE. These shoulders are the Mana-Sphere Shoulderguards. Every Mental Anguish suddenly becomes a Consecrate. With the Essence Focuser in play, these discards turned AoEs become positive card advantage when they turn into card draw. The Focuser, not to be confused with the Essence Gatherer, is an uncommon wand that reads the following:
"When an opposing ally is destroyed, you may pay 1. If you do, draw a card."
With Servants of the Betrayer, discard wasn't given more powerful discard cards it was simply made a more powerful game mechanic for the priest class. Whereas before a Mental Anguish would be a 2-1, it can become a 4-1 if you have the Mana-Sphere Shoulders in play and two opposing two-health allies to destroy. It can become an incredible 6-1 if you then possess the Essence Focuser.
Priestly discard is no longer simply just the act of depleting your opponent's hand with abilities. R&D rightly saw that this was simply not a strong enough mechanic in the WoW TCG environment to exist on its own as simply and purely 'discard.' Instead, with SotB it's become a multi-faceted play strategy and can generate monumental card advantage in the right situations. Play a Horde hero, for example, and complete a pair of Swift Disciplines before you Touch of Darkness the opposing hero, and the Mana-Sphere + Essence Focuser combo lets you draw 4 cards for 4 resources and generate card advantage of 5 for 1.
What about Eclipse? If we're going Traitor for Spiritual Domination, the possibility of the inclusion of this card is going to invariably come up. Could it be the Priest deck finisher? Greater Heals are suddenly both a way to keep you alive and a finishing move if the opposing hero has more than 14 damage counters. Keep in mind, though, healing abilties only count as having healed the number of damage counters that they actually removed, so a Greater Heal on a 2-damage hero will net you a damage total of... 4.
Having not tested the card yet, I can only speculate really. I have to think that, given R&D's rather solid track-record of keeping card power levels relatively even through the sets, that the Eclipse + Greater Heal combo isn't the incredible closer that it might seem to be.
Constructed play with Servants is, relatively speaking, still a little ways away, but construction for it starts now and the new meta will begin to take form in theory on the Internet and within your individual play groups until the ideas and predictions of players across the country collide at the Realm Championships to flesh out what the first incarnation of the SotB meta will be.
Tags: Warcraft
Related to:
World of Warcraft TCG
