“We heard you liked 4 mana 7/7’s so we doubled it.”
Shaman in Mean Streets of Gadgetzan has been pushed heavily towards the control route. With [card]jinyu waterspeaker[/card], [card]jade chieftain[/card] and [card]jade lightning[/card], there are some good arguments to go out of the aggro/midrange style. [card]White Eyes[/card], the new Shaman legendary, is another one.
White eyes is a 5 mana 5/5 taunt minion with a cool deathrattle that shuffles “The Storm Guardian” into the deck. The Storm Guardian itself is a 5 mana 10/10 taunt minion, providing unmatched value for its cost. While deathrattles can be silenced, very few classes in the game run cards that can do it and short of Shamans’ own [card]hex[/card] and the Mage [card]polymorph[/card] there are limited ways to effectively deal with White Eyes, especially in a meta where [card]spellbreaker[/card] is not a common card and [card]ironbeak owl[/card] is unplayable post-nerf.
What remains to be seen isn’t whether or not White Eyes will be playable in control Shamans, rather if such decks will be viable in the first place. The archetype – often called Concede or Crusher Shaman – has seen use in certain metas in the past with [card]hallazeal the ascended[/card] and [card]elemental destruction[/card] being key cards and it’s very possible the new Gadgetzan cards power the archetype even further.
