Hearthstone’s Journey to Un’Goro expansion card reveal season is underway, and one of the revealed cards is the new Hunter legendary quest, The Marsh Queen. It is a card that can single-handedly create a new archetype, so it’s pretty exciting!

Let’s take a closer look!

The Marsh Queen

The new Hunter quest, The Marsh Queen, is a quest to play seven 1-cost minions. When you complete the quest, you get Queen Carnassa, a 5-mana 8/8 Beast with a battlecry to shuffle 15 raptors into your deck.

What are the raptors you ask? They are the swarm! The raptors, Carnassa’s Brood, are 1-mana 3/2 Beasts that have a battlecry to draw a card. Therefore, once you play the quest, you will find plenty of low-cost beasts, each of which draws you another card so they do not really count against your odds of finding other cards in your deck. You may even be able to flood the whole board in a single turn if you hit a swarm of raptors! Combine the swarm with a Tundra Rhino, and you have a charging army!

Can you make it happen?

Playing seven 1-mana minions is a tall order. Note the difference between play and summon: you will not get quest credit from Unleash the Hounds or from the second 1/1 Cat summoned by Alleycat.

You could fill your entire deck with 1-mana minions and complete the quest rapidly, but then you will have a large number of weak draws between the raptors in your deck for the late game, so your ability to flood the board would still remain limited.

Furthermore, you need to stay alive until you can start getting value from the quest. This also limits your ability to use minions purely for the purpose of completing the quest.

If we take a look at what kind of 1-mana minions you could fit into your deck, there is a number of potential options: Alleycat, Fiery Bat, and Argent Squire are classic one-drop options. When adopting this Zooish playstyle, Abusive Sergeant could also find a place in the deck. More niche potential cards include Elven Archer, Mistress of Mixtures, Secretkeeper (if you go for secrets in the deck), Worgen Infiltrator, and Young Priestess.

Of the new Un’Goro cards, Fire Fly looks extremely useful, as it allows you to play two 1-mana cards while only taking up one spot from the deck, improving both consistency and overall deck quality.

To add to these, you have various draw engine options, even though drawing cards is generally a weakness for Hunter. The new Tol’Vir Warden is a perfect match for a quest-based Hunter deck, a 5-drop that draws two of the quest-enabling 1-drops from your deck.

Of the good old draw engines, Tracking and Cult Master seem to be the most promising options. Starving Buzzard, after being nerfed to the ground, really cannot compete anymore, and not all of your minions are beasts anyway.

Math time, part 1

Let’s say you run two copies of Alleycat, Fiery Bat, Argent Squire, Abusive Sergeant, and Fire Fly for a total of 10 1-drops, two of which count as two when drawn. Furthermore, you run two copies of Tol’Vir Warden, both of which also count as two copies when drawn. Overall, we thus have 12 desirable cards, one third of which count as double success. Therefore, in order to play those 7 one-drops, we generally need to draw 6 of our desirable cards. (I’m making this assumption because the math to track both cases separately proved to be a lot of work)

In order to calculate how likely you are to find your answers, we need to turn to some hypergeometric probabilities.

From this sample of 8 one-time successes and 4 double successes, we are looking at having the following opening hand before mulligan when going first (3 cards, one of them is the quest):

• 50% to have one of the 12 cards, 16% to have two.

You keep all the successes and mulligan the rest. In the 34% of cases where you mulligan both cards:

• 51% to have one of the 12 cards, 19% to have two.

In the 50% of cases where you mulligan one card:

• 44% to find another one.

Therefore, after mulligan, we have:

• 45% to have two of the cards.
• 45% to have one of the cards.
• 10% to have none of the cards.

We still need to find the rest of the cards, how often can we do that in our next 7 draws to get the quest out on turn 7?

• 20% if we had two after mulligan.
• 7% if we had one after mulligan.
• 2% if we had none after mulligan.
• For an overall chance of 12% to get the quest done by turn 7.

That actually looks really bad. It does not account for Tracking and Cult Master though, but still.

What about turn 10? That’s already a bit late, but can we do it by then?

• 56% if we had two after mulligan.
• 36% if we had one after mulligan.
• 20% if we had none after mulligan.
• For an overall chance of 43% to get the quest done by turn 10.

Math time, part 2

Running 12 eligible cards seems really weak unless there is some way to reliably draw a few extra cards in the early game. What if we up the number to 16? With four of the cards counting as two, I continue to assume we need to draw 6 of them overall.

• 51% to have one card before the mulligan, 30% to have two.

You keep all the successes and mulligan the rest. In the 19% of cases where you mulligan both cards:

• 50% to have one of the 16 cards, 34% to have two.

In the 49% of cases where you mulligan one card:

• 59% to find another one.

Therefore, after the mulligan we have:

• 67% to have two of the cards.
• 30% to have one of the cards.
• 3% to have none of the cards.

We still need to find the rest of the cards, how often can we do that in our next 7 draws to get the quest out on turn 7?

• 55% if we had two after mulligan.
• 30% if we had one after mulligan.
• 11% if we had none after mulligan.
• For an overall chance of 46% to get the quest done by turn 7.

What about turn 10? That’s already a bit late, but can we do it by then?

• 91% if we had two after mulligan.
• 80% if we had one after mulligan.
• 64% if we had none after mulligan.
• For an overall chance of 87% to get the quest done by turn 10.

16 eligible cards: 14 1-drops and two copies of Tol’Vir Warden are in a much better position to get the job done and complete the quest.

Conclusions

The viability of the Hunter quest depends on how good of a deck you can build around it. The exact percentages that would fully take into account card draw and double effects are a ton of work to calculate, but even the summarily worked out math above shows that you need a lot of 1-drops in the deck to make the quest work.

We are talking in the neighborhood of having half of your deck as 1-drops in order to make the quest work.

Perhaps it is possible to work out a more control-oriented list that runs the bare minimum of 1-drops, especially if there are any more playable-token-generating cards available. However, with the Hunter hero power being what it is and Hunter’s card draw capability being what it is, Control Hunter seems a remote, fleeting dream.

It will be interesting to see the full set of tools we get to try and build a Swarm Hunter deck in Journey to Un’Goro!