In before “just stun them lol” even though that won’t be a thing with pure faction, just a long battle of attrition where you are outstatted 2-3 times, and your only generation involves randomness board shifting and possibly giving up 4-5 matches. Might have been an opportunity for interesting counterplay focused team-building if not for this little detail, but most likely still super annoying to most people even with “normal” teams at the end of the day regardless (with brute force likely still being more effective than weaker counterplay options). Even just Harpy Mage looks extremely obnoxious, with a 4 mana initial cast (with two available colors to fill it) semi-choosable (ie., not single-color restricted) mass explode with storm baked in.
Don’t know how this somehow evolved from an interesting concept dealing with storms that might have been a bit weak because of needing to constantly clear the storms to… this.
Champion of Ga(a)rd is looking to be another one of those “pure tank” mythics that we already know really doesn’t work well in this game in addition to being a pure armor boost variety, which also has its own problems. His spell currently increases his armor (granted, its a lot of armor, but he doesn’t do anything with it except potentially take hits) and spawns 22 red/blue gems randomly (he uses red, but not blue, so he refills a bit on the red and generates blue). He’s not even a Stonehammer-class in this regard, since Stonehammer inflicts two status effects that can actually help set up damage.
The “1 stat to all red allies at the start of the turn” trait is unfortunately looking to be saddled with this troop who can be easily dispatched or countered by armor destroying weapons, true damage, stun (or any debilitating status really), enrage and/or true shot with skulls, control teams being faster than him because he blocks 24 mana if used in front (12 if accelerated, but very little synergy there), things that can kill the rest of the team while leaving him alone and easy pickings, or just bad luck on his cast. If none of those are present, then he can tank for days, I guess, and feed your blue troops eventually. Maybe he’ll end up setting something up where his first cast can lead into a a win condition and move up to situationally useful (doomed blade is a stretch, mass spawners like this generally erase too many skulls for the remaining colors to align; theres much easier ways to get strong blue-using things like Rope Dart up; and nothing currently exists where a red/blue combination board is strongly beneficial for quickly dealing a lot of damage).
I feel like if he is going to keep this spell design, I’d rather him have ~60% skull/spell block as his mythic trait, two actual traits that help his overall design (armor to skull damage for one, but unfortunately we already have a very weak 25% as a “legendary” trait there and 20% as a hero talent, possibly a resistance trait), and allow the red boosting trait to go to something I might actually want to use.