Festival of Legends isHearthstone’s music-themed expansion, based around a battle of the bands hosted by E.T.C. And if you’re going to have a music competition, you’ll need some instruments. Fortunately, the expansion has you covered, with all 11 classes getting a unique, music-themed weapon.
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Most of them are quite powerful, with more unique effects than you’ll see on many weapons. But, like real-life instruments, there are noticeable differences in quality between the cards. To help you decide which instrument you want to specialize in, here’s all of them, ranked.
11Kodohide Drumkit
In theory, Kodohide Drumkit is a great card for a Control Warrior deck. You equip it, then steadily gain armor until you need a board clear. Unfortunately, if you’ve played Hearthstone ladder recently, you know Control Warrior isn’t in a great spot.
Even with cards like Kodohide Drumkit, you don’t have the tools to keep up with the aggro decks, and lack the value to compete with the dominant control decks in the meta. Strong as it might be, Kodohide Drumkit probably needs both significant nerfs to other classes and some better cards around it before it will see consistent play.
10Timber Tambourine
Timber Tambourine is a rather awkward weapon. It has low attack for the cost, but three durability is high enough to make it difficult to triggerthe weapon’s Deathrattleexactly when you want to. Additionally, by the time you can start playing five-cost cards, your deck should be doing more powerful things than summoning a few 5/5s.
Druid is fully capable of game-winning plays once they reach the higher mana totals, and Timber Tambourine seems underwhelming in comparison. There will be games when those Ancients you summon beat your opponent down, but Druid players simply have more consistently impactful cards to include in their decks.
9Record Scratcher
Rogue has several different decks to choose from in this meta, but one of the heavily-pushed archetypes from Festival of Legends, Combo Rogue, isn’t one of them. That’s in part because, if your goal is to play a bunch of cards in a turn for a powerful tempo play, Miracle Rogue is still a better option, even though it got almost nothing from Festival of Legends.
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A patch change buffed Record Scratcher form two attack to three, which is nice, but seems unlikely to push the archetype into relevance. Still, refreshing your mana is a strong ability, so we may see Record Scratcher rise to meta relevance with more Combo support cards.
8Jazz Bass
The Jazz Bass feels like it should be powerful. Cheating mana will basically always be strong in Hearthstone, and this weapon can get you a significant discount on high-cost spells if you play enough Overload cards alongside it.
The problem is, Overload Shaman was performing extremely poorly to start the expansion, so Jazz Bass was largely missing in action. However, Jazz Bass gaining an extra attack shortly after Festival of Legends launched, along with several other buffs to the archetype, might mean it becomes at least a fringe-relevant deck.
7Cosmic Keyboard
Cosmic Keyboard’s effect is probably best viewed as a bonus, rather than something you build your deck around. That’s not to say that summoning free Elementals isn’t nice, but the card’s effect is far from capable of winning games by itself unless you play it with some truly massive spells.
However, the tempo it provides when played alongside cheaper spells can be quite useful, which is why Cosmic Keyboard has seen the most success in aggressive archetypes like Secret Mage. In such decks, the weapon allows you to build up your board presence while using your spells for damage and board control.
6Felstring Harp
As any Warlock main will tell you, the ability to convert self-damage into healing frequently comes in handy. The most obvious use is Life Tap, which changes the Hero Power’s drawback into a benefit, but there are many other cards that either have a damage effect that hurts both you and the opponent, or that have a powerful effect at the cost of damaging your own Hero.
With three charges, Felstring Harp can actually end up saving you a massive amount of health for a two-mana card. In certain matchups, that can be enough to push you over the edge into winning a game.
5Idol’s Adoration
The value of Idol’s Adoration comes down to simple mathematics. You invest one mana to save you four in the long term, putting you at plus three. That may not sound like much, but the ability to bank Hero Powers for future use has been deemed valuable enough to see play in multiple archetypes.
Control decks often find themselves wasting their mana in the early game anyway, so the investment costs them basically nothing. And in Undead Priest, which uses Archbishop Benedictus to turn their Hero Power into Shadowform, Idol’s Adoration allows them to more efficiently weave in instances of two damage.
4Jungle Jammer
Jungle Jammer has mostly been seeing play in extremely aggressive variants of Hunter. These decks view spending four mana to deal eight damage as a great deal, even if the second half of the damage is delayed.
And in a best-case scenario, Jungle Jammer comes with what can be a pretty significant upside as well. Thanks to some Hunter spells from the same expansion in Bunch of Bananas and Barrel of Monkeys, which are cheap and can be cast multiple times, it’s pretty easy to summon decently sized beasts with this weapon, giving you significant tempo to go along with its raw damage.
3Arcanite Ripper
Arcanite Ripper is basically a perfect defensive tool. It has enough attack to clear small minions, and once it runs out of charges, it summons a minion to help you recover the health you lost.
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And that minion can get surprisingly large. Hitting minions with the Ripper will naturally lower your health, and Blood Death Knight has many other methods for increasing their life total. Arcanite Ripper isn’t the main reason Blood Death Knight is in a good spot at the moment, but it plays a significant role in allowing the deck to reach the late game.
2Glaivetar
Glaivetar is tailor-made for an aggressive Outcast Demon Hunter deck. And while that deck was hit with a nerf shortly after Festival of Legends launched, it is still quite powerful, and Glaivetar is one of the main reasons why.
It has enough attack to put pressure on your opponents, and aggro decks love drawing cards (most decks do, but aggro decks especially). Combined with the many cheap Outcast cards Demon Hunter has access to, Glaivetar is a one-card draw engine. The only real downside to the weapon is that it can be surprisingly easy to overdraw yourself, especially since so many Outcast cards either draw or generate cards by themselves.
