New mage card revealed

It breaks down when you get into the nitty-gritty of it, because everything is situation-dependent, mana or cards do not have a consistent value. In broad strokes, in Hearthstone the more it costs (in mana, in minions, in cards, in life) for the opponent to handle your play, the higher tempo your play is. We don't often consider card and life costs tempo in HS because in practice they have a delayed impact that varies a lot depending on the situation, while mana and minion costs have an instantaneous impact.

Having the board has the advantage of choosing trades and attacking face and of using your already played minions for trades (and whatever else bonus your minions give you). Because of that, having minions on the board is basically always tempo, because it does something for you. A 1 mana 3/2 would be a high tempo card because it does quite a bit for you (trades with minions and spells that cost 2 mana to play, for example). It can also go to face for 3 which you can call pressure, but that really just means your opponent has to spend resources (mana and cards usually) healing or quickly dealing with your threats (even by killing you), or he will die.

About the new card, a 1 mana 1/1 that also gives you a useful card is going to help your early tempo compared to using the same deck without any one drops at all. You can justify including it because the card will have more value than a mana wyrm that just dies early, so there's less risk of it being basically useless in a slower deck (where a mana wyrm would usually be a wasted card draw, achieving nothing). You can also run it in a fast deck because it is both an early game minion and gives you something to spend mana on later, in that sense there is quite a bit of tempo mileage in it.

I think it was recommended for a tempo deck because it's not an all-out damage minion but it gives you a card that gives you a wildcard option or makes your curve better, and for those purposes it should be quite consistent. I don't think I would run it as my only one drop in a tempo deck because one drops are pretty important, and we do seem to be getting quite a few good ones this expansion.

/r/hearthstone Thread Parent