Every day as I come into the office I have a few extra minutes to mess around on the internet. Most days I just obliviate the time with Reddit or Twitter, but for the last couple of weeks, I've had something more exciting to check out; card reviews for the new Hearthstone expansion.

Yes, I'm one of those.

So I figured since the new cards are all out, I'd give my top five most interesting new cards. So here goes! No order!

5. Gonk the Raptor

So to make it very, very clear this is not about best cards, here's Gonk.The G man is pretty much garbage. His stats are actually pretty decent, but for a 7 cost minion you want more than pretty decent. His power is too low for him to really be a threat by himself after all.

His ability though does something no other card lets you do. If your hero kills a minion, like, personally, it...err...I mean they...they get to attack again!

Ok, where is the riotous applause!?

Sure, attacking with your hero is inconvenient even for a druid. You have to have a card or at least the mana to activate your hero power after all.

Sure it means you bash your face against whatever you wanna kill, doing damage to yourself. Clearing a board of 1/1’s is gonna cost you 7 health after all which seems a bit of a drawback and that is only in an ideal situation.

Sure, even if you use the new zero cost +2 attack to your hero card you’ve still done little more than what a swipe could do for nearly half the mana.

But I will say this. Everyone thinks this is crap, but I know the secret.

Step one: Do not play Druid, play rogue.

Step two: Have Runeforge Haunter, Shadowblade, and a bunch of steal cards in your deck.

Step three: Play against a Druid.

Step four: Steal Gonk from the Druid

Step Five: Cry when Gonk or the Haunter is naturalized or silenced, or if your weapon is destroyed. Or even more likely when you don’t get Gonk, or either of the other cards. Or even more likely than that, when you die due to having so many bad cards in your deck..

2: High Priest Thekal

Ok, so let’s get this straight; worst case there is absolutely no downside to this card, right?

You got good stats for the cost, and you immediate move all but one of your health to armor.

To be clear, armor is just strictly better than health! Sure this doesn’t actually help you right then, but if you have any healing at all that otherwise would have been useless, you suddenly can use them all to great effect.

4: Mass Hysteria

This is the confusing mess of a card that Brawl should be! I honestly am not 100% sure how this card is even going to work. Do they all pair off and attack at once? Do they take turns? Is it in random order? I have no idea!

Someday far from now when I randomly pull this from Lyra I guess I’ll find out.

3: Raiding Party

I just miss Kingsbane rogue, ok. I am under no illusions this is going to save the deck in standard, but I’m gonna throw a couple in my wild deck to be sure.

In case you don’t know, Kingsbane rogue (or Thor rogue as only I, for some reason, call it) is all about buffing up the indefatigable dagger and repeatedly pulling it out of your deck. Some of the best ways to buff it just happen to be the battlecries of pirates, so this card is crazy good. But...the best ones are no longer in the standard format (the sets that are legal in the standard format rotate out regularly...you know what, if you don’t know what standard is you probably didn’t read this far anyway).

Anyway, looking forward to getting my kingbane and two squidfaces all at once.

1: Spirit of the Dead

So I’m a Priest main in Hearthstone. I have a homebrew deck that I’ve run with various adjustments (and widely varying results) since before the first expansion. The core of it is divine spirit and inner fire, but it’s not the usual OTK (one turn kill) version. It’s more meant to be played as an aggro deck. I love it, as I don’t have a lot of time to play, and I like that I usually know if I’ve won or lost by turn 5 or so.

The Spirit is gonna slot beautifully into that deck, and it barely has anything to do with the power. It’s just an amazingly sticky minion with a great statline for inner fire shenanigans. The fact that I can also potentially Vivid Nightmares out a bunch of radiant elementals then get them back even if they’re killed. All the better for Lyra.

In short, I’m sure there are better cards in the set, but this is the one I’m super hype about.

So what do you all think? Anyone else play Hearthstone? Following the new set? What are your favorites? Let me know in the comments!