The Rise of Shadows Announcement Trailer keyed us in on some new Hearthstone mechanics. The first set of the Year of the Dragon will add Twinspell, Lackeys, and Schemes. All of these card types are additions that seem to increase the overall power level of cards in Hearthstone.
Twinspell
Of the few revealed cards, one of the new Keywords is Twinspell. What Twinspell means is that after casting a spell, another copy of the card will be placed in the hand for immediate or later use.
This is very interesting because essentially what it means is that you can have more than two copies of a card in your deck. Often times, there are meta cards that would be good enough that players would desire to have more than two of them in your deck.
This is why cards like Shadow Visions are popular. Priests use them to discover additional copies of spells over the deck limit. However, this occurs at the sacrifice of a card slot, since 30 cards is not a lot to fit into a deck. Twinspell means that you have to sacrifice nothing for the additional copy of the spell.
The one Twinspell card that was revealed was The Forest’s Aid. It’s an eight mana spell that summons five 2/2 treants, then adds another copy of itself to the hand after being played. This is a mediocre card, but the implications of Twinspell leaves us wondering if anything super powerful will be printed.
Lackeys
Lackeys are new token minions that will generated off of other cards in the set. They provide value not within the cards themselves but usually by aiding the board state in some way. One of the Lackeys discovers a spell, which is very versatile within itself.
Depending on the situation, some Lackeys will be much better than others. The only way we’ve seen Lackeys being produced is by random, so the RNG element is high.
Getting a Goblin Lackey or Witchy Lackey could be bad in instances where you don’t have anything on board since they only interact with friendly minions.
The one card that we’ve seen so far that generates Lackeys is EVIL miscreant. It is a three mana Rogue card that when combo’d adds two Lackeys to your hand. At a 1/5 stat line, this card is really bad in terms of tempo. The Lackeys themselves seem like pretty good cards, so hopefully some better stated Lackey producing cards are released.
Schemes
Schemes are the names of the new upgrading spells. Each turn the card is in the hand, their effect gets more powerful.
We have seen two Schemes revealed to us at this point. Hagatha’s Scheme is a Shaman Spell that does 
one damage to all minions. It gains an additional damage each turn the card is in the hand. After a couple turns in the hand it becomes a very formidable AOE removal spell. The only problem is that when in a desperate situation, this card coming off the top would be quite bad. It encourages keeping the card in the opening hand, but at five mana, it’s a little expensive to be doing that.
The second Scheme is Togwaggle’s Scheme. It’s a one mana Rogue Spell that shuffles one copy of a minion into your deck, gaining one additional copy each turn in the hand. This card seems way too powerful. Gang Up was considered very strong when it was in the meta, and this card can do triple what Gang Up can do at a third the cost. Especially since Rogue has access to Myra’s Unstable Element, this could wreak some havoc on the meta game when released.
Scheme’s bring forth a sort of risk-reward game when it comes to keeping cards in the hand. You could keep Schemes in your opener to try to get later value of them, or mulligan them away and risk drawing them at a time where their use is of little value. Either way, Schemes look to be potentially very powerful cards on release.
Images courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment via their official website.
You can like The Game Haus on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for more sports and esports articles from other TGH writers along with Gino!