With the arrival ofHearthstone BattlegroundsSeason 4,Beasts lost some extremely powerful minions: Alleycat, Bird Buddy, and Goldrinn, the Great Wolf are all gone. Each of those minions were mainstays of Beast builds for a long time. But the new Season came with some interesting additions as well.
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Most of them are focused around summoning and buffing Beasts, which is consistent with the theme the minion type had before Season 4’s introduction. However, that theme got much weaker with the departure of the aforementioned minions. Let’s see if these newcomers to the Beast minion pool are enough to make up for the loss of several of their most powerful strategies.
5Humming Bird
Humming Bird is an above-average minion in some situations but struggles to stay relevant as the game progresses. The two-attack buff to all your Beasts it gives you is decent and can make a massive difference in the early game, buffing cards like Manasaber, Sewer Rat, and Rat Pack. However, even the four attack you get from the Golden version of Humming Bird will be almost completely irrelevant once you reach the late game. As a result, it’s not a card you’re going to keep around for long.
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Ultimately, its lack of long-term viability means Humming Bird is a placeholder minion at best and probably isn’t going to be worth picking up unless you already have a board that would be immediately made stronger by its presence. That said, in those situations, you will almost certainly win your next few fights, giving you a health edge and letting you power level for better minions.
4Rylak Metalhead
Rylak Metalhead is a Beast, but it clearly isn’t meant for Beast builds. While there are a couple of Beast-focused Battlecries that will benefit you mid-combat, your options are limited to things like minor stat buffs or giving a Beast Reborn. Unfortunately, those sorts of boosts disappear once the round of combat is over.
However, Rylak Metalhead has a surprising amount of synergy with other minion types. Because while stats don’t stick around after combat, generated minions do, which can potentially turn Rylak Metalhead into a value-generating machine. And since any Battlecries triggered by its Deathrattle are duplicated by Brann Bronzebeard, you’re able to potentially increase the value even further. This sort of effect is especially useful forbuilds like ElementalsorMurlocs, which benefit heavily from playing more minionsand have Battlecry-based minion-generators like Tavern Tempest and Primalfin Lookout.
3Manasaber
Manasaber is replacing Alleycat as a Tavern Tier 1 minion for Beasts. For as long as it was in the game, Alleycat was one of the best minions at the Tavern Tier for any minion type. The fact that it sold for two gold was invaluable in the early game. While Manasaber has slightly better synergy with Scavenging Hyena, the other Tavern Tier 1 minion for Beasts, which gains stats whenever a minion dies, that hardly makes up for its worse economic value.
Worse still, despite having far more stats overall, Manasaber doesn’t trade much better against other Tavern Tier 1 minions. It would even lose to Alleycat head-to-head if it were still in the game. However, in the mid and late game, Manasaber is far more powerful than the minion it is replacing. Thanks to the many ways to buff summoned Beasts— like Banana Slamma and Leapfrogger—it doesn’t take much effort to transform seemingly harmless 0/1 Taunts into dangerous threats.
2Banana Slamma
Banana Slamma is clearly intended to be a replacement for Bird Buddy, which left the minion pool in Battlegrounds Season 4. They are the same Tavern Tier, and function similarly: Bird Buddy buffed all your Beasts when a minion died, while Banana Slamma buffs any single Beast you summon. And unlike Bird Buddy, since Banana Slamma is itself a Beast, it can benefit from Beast synergies along with buffing them.
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It’s worth noting that if you have two Banana Slammas, their buffs will stack with each other, giving more stats than a Golden version of the minion (which triples the stats of summoned Beasts) at the cost of an extra board space. Of course, you could always get two Golden Banana Slammas. That won’t happen every game, but when it does, you can combine them with other Beasts like Octosari, Wrap God, and Mama Bear, to summon some truly massive minions.
1Octosari, Wrap God
There are some Tavern Tier 6 minions that are powerful in a vacuum. Octosari, Wrap God, is not one of those minions. Without support, Octosari is among the worst minions at its Tavern Tier. In the right scenario, though, Octosari will scale extremely quickly. When played alongside the Deathrattle minions present with Beasts or Undead, in even one round of combat, the Tentacle Octosari summons can grow to a competitive size.
Additionally, when combined with cards like Banana Slamma and Titus Rivendare, Octosari will easily summon multiple Tentacles with stats in the triple digits. It slots easily into Leapfrogger builds and can be the backbone of a powerful win condition on its own.
