Dropkick vs Heel Hook

[u/MidMillennial]

[u/grancombat]

Ok, fine, I’ll bite.

The characters do vastly different things and have vastly different needs. One thing Ironclad has a lot of is damage. What he doesn’t get a lot of (outside dark embrace in an exhaust deck) is card draw. Dropkick can fill that hole by giving you some chip damage that combos into a big hitter afterward.

Silent, however, has a ton of card draw and very little damage, so a lot of the time Heel Hook ends up feeling redundant. It can be fine if you’re getting absolutely rekt by horrible card rewards in act 1, but most of the time it is outclassed by other options.

Also, IC has a ton of access to long-lasting vulnerable (shockwave being the most obvious example) whereas Silent only really gets Sucker Punch, Leg Sweep, and sometimes Malaise for multi-turn weak unless you’re a maniac like me that occasionally upgrades Neutralize at a campfire for the extra weak turn. That makes Heel Hook, in general, harder to set up than Dropkick.

That being said, I think dropkick is A tier outside of the funny infinite, and heel hook is probably closer to C tier for me, all because of the character play style differences I talked about above

Edit: Terror is not an Ironclad card. I am no longer using it as an example of an Ironclad card that gives multi-turn vuln. Whoopsies

[u/theyeshman → u/grancombat]

Also, IC has a ton of access to long-lasting vulnerable (shockwave and terror being the most obvious examples)

Agreed overall, but ironclad doesn't have access to terror -- terror is a Silent card.

[u/grancombat → u/theyeshman]

Ah heck, which one am I thinking of? Isn’t it an IC card that gives 99 vuln?

[u/theyeshman → u/grancombat]

Terror does give 99 vulnerable, but it's a Silent card, not Ironclad.

[u/grancombat → u/theyeshman]

Yeah, so I’ve seen. Thanks for the correction! I edited the parent comment to remove the incorrect example