Abhorath: I was actually doing a write up on this when @Drathas posted and it ended up being pretty much what I was going to say, so I’ll throw my weight behind that. Only I’d be careful about giving him a storm on kill. Aborath backed by an appropriately colored storm can very easily cast several times in a row, getting skull cascades and occasionally sweeping the team. This is muted for now since basically every appropriately colored storm user is either blocked by him or marginalized by being extremely out of place (snow hunter’s icy death vs infernus’ fiery death is not even comparable given the troops they are on), but this could be fixed as more relevant troops are added. I’m not sure he should be able to luck into this setup solo with skull cascades/extra turn with his spell which would allow him to streak into killing several of the team and (with redesign life gain +huge) gaining 100+ life and 150+ attack in the process. I’m fine if he can do this with a bit of support, as an RNG troop that risks a lot every time he casts (and he already can, it just takes a bit more than it should to make sure he doesn’t collapse right away and to get the storm up).
Prince Azquila:
Another storm user that always gives first crack to the enemy. I never really liked the design of any of these, and I think storms were always massively overcosted for this reason, but thats another matter. Like most Epics, he does large base damage with zero boosts that scales extremely poorly into even midgame and has no boost condition for his spell, but only gets his secondary effect of attack raise (also a fixed value, terrible scaling) if his spell kills. Not only that, it suffers from a very high cost, making it very hard for him to trigger the storm in the first place to gain the advantage that he needs. He turns gorgotha into a chaining machine, but as you’ve wasted two slots and you want your other damage dealer to also be yellow, and you need a huge amount of setup, it is usually not worth it. The majority of my uses I’ve used him is when he gets summoned by Elspeth AND cascades to full mana, but otherwise, this is a mulligan summon for Elspeth.
I do not consider him remotely an endgame troop and he should not be balanced as such or to try and counter the current meta. However, he should get a slight buff. In keeping with his design and just to make him a bit more situationally useful, I’d give his spell triple damage versus Naga and drop the cost to 10 or 11. If he needs to lose his kill condition for this to happen, do that, as he does not fill the role of attack buffer appropriately anyway since it is way too hard to set up once you are out of extremely early game. Other conditional triple damage users that can specifically target range from 10 to 12 for 21 to 33 base spell damage (at endgame, before traits and team bonuses) without getting a storm or death condition out of it, but on a lot more relevant troop types, a whole color, or any troops with triple damage under easy to attain circumstances that they can set up alone occasionally (Lady Ironbeard, Minogor). Replace his Stryx Shield trait with Air Spirit. The only thing he has over Peryton is still his dual colors while sacrificing quite a bit, as Peryton would consistently deal more damage to everyone and be easier to set up, but covering an additional color that is unblocked is a pretty big blessing when you run exploders as generators. I still don’t think he would see much use at endgame, but makes him a bit easier to run existing setups that need him for the storm (which may become increasingly irrelevant when the appropriate on-death storm trait hits on an appropriate troop) and would extend his naga slaying purpose if we started seeing more relevant naga.