I feel like Sliver of the Immortal Spear got a huge nerf with today's update (the removal of the Pass Priority window in "prep" phase.) Before, you could tap your spear before you drew in order to increase your chances of drawing one. Now you'll need even more luck to get the five you need, and spear decks were already low-tier as it was.

Sad time for Johnnies...

Edit: Nope! See post #5.

Hadn't thought about the ramifications of the change for that. I'd say it's a shame, but I'm not really a fan of "insta-win" cards. (Although I much prefer ones like Immortal Spear to things like that one card that goes into your opponent's deck and makes you win if they draw it.)

Well, thing is, spear was really hard to win with already. You kind-of need to take your opponent by surprise with it due to all the answers for it, and it's a "do nothing" card until you can actually draw five so if you're "all-in" on spear you're going to be on your back foot all game.

Might have been, before, that it would have been nice to put four slivers in your sideboard for a tempo deck to pull out round 2 against a slow control deck. Now, I think the card was hurt bad enough that it's almost never worth playing.

Yeah, that's true. I guess that type of card is even weaker than the Yugioh equivalents (Exodia, etc) due in large part to HEX having dedicated resources, making it much harder to actually assemble the stupid thing...

Update: Apparently this isn't true. I'd been testing it and I was still able to get my own priority phase, so I spoke with John Tatta about it. Apparently they took away your priority window before your *opponents's* draw phase but you still can have your own if you have the checkbox marked.

Spear is safe!

Oh, really? That's good.

I guess reading between the lines, they did only specify the opponent being unable to:

There appears to be plenty of inconsistencies between what they say about triggered and activated abilities, targeted and non targeted and also the prep phase window and what is currently implemented in alpha. It would be good to get official word on direction these changes and also implementation of hot keys for multiple priority phase passes.

Yeah, the whole thing seems kind of convoluted. Maybe they should have just left things alone.

Well it is alpha, and this is the perfect, maybe only time to tinker with the core underlying mechanics. They need to make exports a success and they need to be mindful of hearthstones fluidity.