Hey all! Welcome back to another edition of Best Wildcard! Where I go through all the choices for wildcard slots. Before I get to the individual rankings, let's talk about the reason you're all here this month: Ysera.

Ysera

First of all, shoutout to u/pdrayton, who informed me that the bottom 3 slots were datamined as: Unbound Tank Fast Flying Spell Ranged Squad. So we can really get into this.

This means that Ysera can buff any unit, without wildcard. It also means you can put basically any card you want in the Boost Slot.

That leaves the question of how useful is that cycle slot. For that, we'll want to think about we will use Ysera for.

My guild and I were talking about it, and from what we can see, in addition to heroics Ysera has at least four use cases (which is quite good by the way):

1. Baron Geddon, 2) Golemagg, 3) Ragnaros, and 4) PvP

Baron Geddon's fight is all about economy, flyers, and crowd control. Though poison can help a little as well, but it's less a priority here. Ysera is all about that so she's quite a good fit, though time will tell whether she can compete with Rend. Still, I'm going to try this out myself once I get her deck upgraded through dungeon runs.

For Baron Geddon though you will want to use Dark Iron Miner, so wildcard doesn't do much for you there. If you want two spells then you need wildcard for that, though, so that's something to consider.

While I'm at it, I suspect either double chance of Ysera cards, or map-wide hibernate will be the preferred talent for Baron. Think about it: How many of your baron matches are losses due to getting overwhelmed by fire elementals? I think Ysera will help a lot with that.

Golemagg is where it gets interesting, in my opinion. Again you want flyers, but here it's more about poison, as it's chimera's poison stacks doing a lot of the work here. We don't really want any ground unit, just spells and flyers. So, for cycle flyers we're down to Gryphon, Batrider, and Vultures. Grphon and Batrider aren't bad, but I think there's a strong argument to be made here for the wildcard, especially as you very likely may want multiple spells (I use three fliers 3 spells in my Charlga deck and that works extremely well, though 4 and 2 might be good too). Additionally, you likely will want the double poison talent here. So if you're strongly considering using Ysera against Golemagg, then I'd say this should be a fairly high priority, though you can use gryphon or batrider in the meantime if you've used your wildcard slot for the month already.

Ragnaros these days seems to end up with one player on offense and one on defense most of the time. I think Ysera is a strong choice for defense. Here it would make sense to slot in bandits or dark iron miner, though you may want those in one of the cenarion slots instead. Interestingly, Old Guardian recently showed off a strategy using Arcane Blast, which is a cycle spell, so that's a consideration for the cycle slot as well. The two reasons I'm curious about Ysera here are innervate and hibernate, though the whelps and drake might be quite useful against molten giants and core hounds. But, I might even use map wide sleep talent here, as slowing down the guys on the left hand side by 6 to 9 seconds, while providing opportunity for my ally to gain an advantage on his push, sounds really enticing. Overall, I don't think wildcard is as important here, but I'd need to see it in practice first.

For PVP, it's harder to say, but you may want to put miner or bandits in the cenarion slots, so I think Wildcard is a bit more enticing here.

Overall, I think Ysera is above Cenarius for best Cenarion leader for Wildcard, especially if you're going to use her against Golemagg, though she doesn't have any particularly glaring gaps that Wildcard will be filling.

Alliance

Horde

Blackrock

Beast

Undead

Cenarion

Final (subjective) Ranking of Wildcard Priority:

Final Thoughts: Overall the rankings are starting to stabilize is what we're seeing here. I read the brilliant and insightful post by u/Conquistador6951 and have started to take his expert PvP insights into account. I hope to collaborate with him to overhaul the priority list for November, stay tuned for that!

What do you think of my analysis this time around? Let me know in the comments below!

Acknowledgements:
Thanks u/Old_Guardian for your videos which helped inform the original version of this guide, and u/ComboPriest for your spreadsheet which made my life so much easier this time around! (I copied it and plugged in the datamined for Ysera to check that it was all). Also, thanks to people like u/licheeman who leave comments on these threads after they've got old and stale, encouragement from you and pdrayton etc. is what keeps me doing this. (Plus Ysera is an enjoyable leader and it's fun to play with the the ideas like this). Massive thank you to u/Conquistador6951 for setting me straight about PvP!