Brood Missionary

Quick Blog Post for those of you that missed it: one of the forum members over on Hex TCG recently passed five thousand posts.  In honor of this momentous achievement, he got to challenge any one member of the Hex team to a match.  If he won, he got to spoil a cards from the new set.  Well, Gwaer challenged Ben Stoll to a match and after successfully getting out the Triumvirate only to have is exhausted turn after turn, Gwaer emerged victorious and got to spoil a card from Shattered Destiny.  Here's Brood Missionary:

First thing to note is that Missionary is part of a cycle of cards.  This might not necessarily mean there will be one in every shard, but that it might be a cycle of Ardent-Underworld hate.  For those unfamiliar with Hex's lore, the Vennen are a race of anthropomorphic spider-beasts (similar to driders) that are allied with the Underworld Races.  Vennen are actually the offspring of orcs, with captured orcs enslaved and entombed in the Vennen's silken strands and used as incubation pods for the new brood, which will burst forth mercilessly from their victim's bodies.  The card Incubation Slave illustrates what happens to captured orcs pretty well.  

Brood Missionary is one of the first examples of a dedicated hate-card that we have in Hex, a card that isn't spectacular on its own, but is very strong against a particular deck.  If Orc decks become particularly popular, this might be a good reserves option for Blood Control decks., especially considering Fury of the Mountain God is a highly anticipated card from this set as well.

As far as cycle speculation, we might already have hints about it considering the current racial dichotomy.  If you picked up an Orc Starter and ran through the starter trials, you may have noticed that the opposing champion in all three games was Zared Venomscorn.  Being the only Vennen Champion, Zared demonstrated a bit of soft storytelling for the Starter Trials, as did the other decks: Humans faced off against the Necrotic champions, Dwarves against the Elves, and the Shin'hare took on the Coyotle.  If these races have such derision for each other, perhaps the cycle alluded to will see a Necrotic card that converts Humans into Necrotic (which is also in keeping the the Necrotic thematically).  I'm unsure what the Elves & Dwarves or Shin'hare & Coyotle hate cards could be, but this card has me really eager to see what else gets revealed of the Hex lore in Shattered Destiny.

This card really needs an ability like Lifedrain to justify running him in the main.  A 2/4 for 4 without evasion is generally very subpar, but if you get to use its ability, you stand to gain massive card advantage since Incubation Slave itself is a ticking time-bomb of skittering potential.

That's all for today.  As we wrap up the week, I have my fingers crossed that we get some patch, or an update with what we can expect as far as updates go into August.  As of now, all we know that they have coming up is a Tutorial, which will be needed for the transition into Open Beta.

Until next time...