Hello, Yakri here, and today I’d like to talk about Wrath of Gold. I think this is the first single card that’s really been obviously worth talking about that we’ve seen revealed so far, at least outside the context of an established meta or specific combos.



Pretty much immediately I saw some comments on the reddit Discord from people who weren’t really getting the use case of this card. Now I’m not going to go so far as to say this is an amazing card, it’s just that it has some valid uses and a niche, so it’s conceivable it could end up seeing use.



So let’s talk about the sheer damage numbers on this bad boy first. 4 damage per gold may not sound like much, but if you kill one hero, that’s 5 gold that you’re converting into 20 damage. You could get as much as 6 gold fairly realistically by the end of round 1 with an aggressive start U/x strategy, where X is Black or Red.

Once you hit that 6g mark, you can potentially drop this baby in lane 3 and wipe out the lane, depending on hero HP.



Probably more relevantly, this can be really handy versus wide decks. Because the bounces are random, this is pretty terrible if you have an equal number of units to your opponent, however if they have say, 2x your units, they’re likely to take more damage than you over a decent number of damage instances.



So if you’re facing down an extremely unfavorable board state in a lane on round say, 2 or 3 (mana turn 4-5). Then if you have maybe 8 gold and a single hero in that lane, you can drop Wrath of gold and deal 32 damage spread across the lane, weighted towards your opponent. Heck if you have a single low HP hero like Luna or Prellex, and your opponent has like 5 units, the odds are massively in your favor of hurting your opponent more than they hurt you.



The crux of these examples is that this spell can have a high impact very early on, and it is actually possible to control for the RNG involved. Mainly because lanes that you are losing badly will naturally result in your opponent being more likely to take more damage than you, and because of how the spell resolves. Since the next instance triggers after the previous instance finishes, the spell won’t hit units that are already dead from damage dealt so far. Ergo, in a worst case for a <=8hp hero versus a big lane of units, 2 hits will be wasted on your hero and your opponent will eat the rest. If your hero is currently under or at 4hp of course, the odds improve. If you have 8+ gold you’re going to kill a lot of enemy units.The spell can potentially even be gold positive depending on the number of enemy heroes and their HPs.



Does this make Wrath of Gold better than Annihilation? Of course not, but it is much faster, and specifically is going to be good against decks with lots of weaker units, and you can control for the RNG involved.



Well that’s all for now folks, thank you for watching. Let me know in the comments if there are any other cards you think would be worth specifically discussing.

