How Good is Ancient Harbinger’s Ability?

by DannieRay23 - 4 years ago

A lot has been said about Ancient Harbinger, they say its too expensive, too easy to be killed, that 6-mana is a competitive mana slot. But lets look past that for a second, what if Triggers? How good is getting a 10-cost minion from your deck into your hand? Personally, I believe it to be a lot less impressive than it originally looks, and let me explain why.

A lot of these numbers will vary depending on how many 10-drops do you run, and how many Harbingers do you use in your deck. I’ve seen a lot of people mention that Harbinger’s stats make it so it would be a detriment to run 2, as you are unlikely to get value out of 2 of them. Also having too many 10-drops will just make your deck wonky, so lets for the sake of argument assume you are running just a single Harbinger and a single 10-drop. Also, All of the calculations are approximate and considering that there’s no mana ramp or additional card draw involved (unless otherwise specified). If you notice a problem with some of the calculations be sure to mention it using the comment section below.

The easiest way to evaluate this ability is by breaking down all the possible cases, and there is two main ones.

You already had your 10-drop in your hand, and you get nothing

Your 10-drop was in your deck, and you draw it.

Lets look it like this, if you have just a single Harbinger and a single 10-drop, then you are going to draw one of them first. That means that off the bat you have a 50% chance of your card being a Vanilla 4/6. But that’s actually doing the card a favor, because you can draw the Harbinger first, and still draw your 10-drop before you can get the ability to trigger. This means that at the very best you have a 50% chance of triggering the ability, and it only goes downhill from there.

There’s other thing that a lot of people might be overlooking. And that is that our second case actually splits into two very different scenarios.

Your 10-drop was near the bottom of your deck, so you get it early.

Your 10-drop was near the top of your deck, you would’ve drawn it anyway before turn 10.

It’s easy to see how you could overlook this fact, there’s no real way to know where your 10-drop was. But lets say that Tempo was on your side and you managed to drop the Harbinger turn 6 on an empty board. That means that you are getting at least 4 draws before you have the 10-mana, this means that there’s a 20% that you would’ve drawn this card anyway. If your are within that 20%, this means that the Harbingers ability was essentially just “Draw a card”. If you have any sort of card extra draw between turns 7 and 9, this percentage increases approximately 5% per card, at least for the first few draws.

The problem is that this is actually the best case scenario. Getting to draw Harbinger very early minimizes the chances of you drawing your 10-drop and completely negating the Ancient Harbinger’s ability. Your chance to draw Harbinger by turn 6 with no extra card draw is about 30%, with around a 70% of not to have drawn the 10-mana cost. That’s an easy 21% chance of this scenario panning out, but that also includes the aforementioned possibility of your ability being just a glorified card draw.

In this specific case, his ability is just a 50% chance to get a 10-drop, a 20% chance to draw card, and a 30% to do nothing.

In fact, Harbinger will always have at least a 30% to do nothing, because that’s the chance of drawing your 10-drop before you have enough mana to play the Harbinger; that means that there’s obviously only at most 70% chance of the Harbinger’s ability having value. Of that 70%, there’s a 30% chance that you already drew Harbinger before turn 6, that’s our 21% likely best-case scenario; then the remaining 49% are those cases where you have drawn neither. If that’s the case and you haven’t drawn either of them, you have a 50-50. That’s a 24.5% chance of the ability doing something, and 24,5% of it doing nothing, so by adding our numbers up there’s a 45.5% chance of the Harbinger’s ability actually doing something, with a small fraction of it being a normal card draw.

In fact, it might be even worse. Because in this particular scenario you only have one 10-drop, which means that even if you get it to trigger, then it won’t trigger again.

But I guess that if you don’t draw it, it doesn’t matter that your card has a bad or null ability. You could theoretically say that the point of the card is actually getting to draw it first, and maybe if its just going to be a vanilla card, you can afford to hold it in your hand and not play it unless there’s no other option. The actual evaluation of the card will depend a lot on your deck composition and how much you can afford to have a mostly dead card for the off-chance that it gets something good going. Perhaps you can fit more than a single 10-drop in your deck, perhaps you can use some forms of ramp or cost reduction, or maybe there are more cards in this expansion that will have synergies with this.

But remember this, having your Ancient Harbinger survive a turn is hard enough, drawing it on time is a challenge of its own, and getting it to draw you the card you want isn’t exactly guaranteed. Take all of those factors into consideration before you start singing the praises of this unique new card. Personally, I’m interested if you can make it work with 10-drops that have ways to get their cost reduced, that way you have multiple targets for the ability.