Flare Up temporarily enhances your resources, but only after you’ve made some commitments to the game. You may be burning out allies, or interrupting your opponent’s plays, but you need those abilities in the yard to fuel the ramp from Flare Up. It’s no coincidence that effective but conditional ramp shows up in multiple classes with Legion Lost; it’s one way we are trying to push the potential of bigger cost controlling or comboing decks in the Core format.

Flare Up also represents a ludicrous number of angles with which other cards may interact, now and in future design space. We started playing a little more with the removed from game zone in this set, and that’s something we anticipate exploring more in the future.

Happily the card also does not play particularly nice with most strong Mage archetypes available in Classic, which don’t really need much help. It is an interesting option for Deathwing Jihan though.

Druids have been hanging back in the cut for the bulk of these previews, but I’d like to say that’s only because what they represent was worth saving.

With the advent of Warlords of Draenor, Feral Druids were split out into two new specs, Guardian for bear tanks, and another that retained the name Feral, but was all killer kitty kat. Now clearly, it was impractical to start introducing a whole new talent tree into such an established class, but the flavor of this split was worth capturing. Thus we conceived of a subset for feral talents, where either can be played with any previous feral talent (and any future card that just says feral talent), but not with each other. They also get to stay Feral abilities this way, and avoid blowing up your forms.

First up is the intimidating ursine, Frenzied Defender.