Icecrown Previews - With the Wind at Your Back

September 4, 2010

Icecrown previews! Now, I believe this card has been seen already through gunslinging or somewhere else. Nevertheless, I am happy to talk about this and really want to build a deck using it.

Now this cards application should be immediately apparent. Balance Druid aka “Boomkin” is a deck that revolves around recurring Moonfire over and over to wear down and kill the opposing hero. The decks strengths lie in the difficulty of destroying Moonfires, having a focused ability strategy, and the fact that Druid has a bevy of solid support and removal to interact with the opponent. It’s a solid deck, but one of the issues is that it’s a little too slow and your opponent can potentially race you.

With the addition of Gale Winds, the deck becomes obnoxiously faster. As soon as this card hits, a lot of your abilities are technically free and give resources on following turns. It’s the type of card that has diminishing returns where if you draw too many; additional copies have no use if it resolves, but you will want it every game. Therefore, it will probably be a three-of.

There are very few cards in World of Warcraft Trading Card Game that allow you to have additional resources and ramp yourself into bigger things. And there is a reason for that. Resource acceleration allows end-game cards to be played earlier than intended. Sometimes it’s cool; sometimes it’s broken. Therefore, resource acceleration cards typically have costly restrictions on them. Gale Winds is perfect because the typical restrictions of this type of card are absent. The restriction is that you can only have it in Balance Druid decks.

This also opens up opportunities to play high cost cards reliably much earlier than has ever been possible before. Imagine casting Barkskin and Insect Swarms early game then playing a Gale Winds and following it on the next turn with Highlord Tirion Fordring. That’s going to be tough to beat. Or even just ramping into an Exarch Onaala on turn six with multiple resources available to you.

The power to use your abilities as resources at breakneck speed will reduce the need to interact with your opponent; you can now dedicate more cards to killing the opponent. Cards like Quagmirran’s Eye let you play cards like Gale Winds earlier to speed things up and allows you to spam Moonfire. And when Moonfire only costs one resource to play and return to your hand the game can end very fast. Especially when charging Eye of the Storm counters, they won’t see another attack for the game.

Let’s take a look at different abilities Boomkin has available to help make Gale Winds even better. Barkskin, Cyclone, and Insect Swarm can all be played for free and be played before Gale Winds to ramp even further. Moonfire, Moonkin Form, and Dreamstate are all part of the plan that kill the opponent. Use Regrowth and Nourish to make sure you don’t die.

I am very excited about playing with this card. I think Boomkin can be a top deck again and will personally be playing with it for a few tournaments. I can’t wait to see the rest of Icecrown and what it has to offer.

-Dan Clark