Hearthstone with Charmed Forged in the Barrens Ranked part 08
0Forged in the Barrens is Hearthstone's seventeenth expansion, featuring 135 new collectible cards. The expansion was released on March 30th, 2021.
Set in the dusty savannah territory of the Barrens, a literal crossroads where tauren, troll, and orc adventurers gather to prove their worth. Mercenaries of old and newcomers alike train for an upcoming conflict with the Alliance. This set introduced the new keyword, Frenzy, which causes a minion to do something the first time it takes damage as long as it survived the attack. Additionally, it added seven Spell schools to the game; Arcane, Fel, Fire, Frost, Holy, Nature, and Shadow. This applies to new spells but also old ones, opening up many new synergies. It also added Ranked Spells that become more powerful as you gain mana, and Mercenaries that will have their stories told throughout the year.
As the first expansion of 2021, the release of Forged in the Barrens ends the previous Standard year, the Year of the Phoenix, and begins the Year of the Gryphon.
Welcome to the Forged in the Barrens issue of Archivist’s Lore, the series of guides where we look at legendary minions from a Hearthstone set and tell the story of those cards based on characters in World of Warcraft, comparing how well the effects of the card match the character in lore. For Forged in the Barrens, a little over half of the legendary cards have roots in WoW, with the other half mainly being the ten new Hearthstone-original characters called mercenaries whose stories are told over the course of the Year of the Gryphon. While there are many WoW characters in the set, several of them are minor and don’t have much story, but it still gives us something to go on.
Mankrik is both an unimportant quest-giving character in WoW and a legendary character in the history of the game and community. Story-wise, he’s a simple orc who lives in the Barrens and gives adventures (players) the quest of finding his lost wife, Olgra, only for her to be found dead, much to Mankrik’s sorrow. The two had been separated while battling a pack of quilboars in a small tauren camp. While Olgra was overcome by the attackers, Mankrik was revived by a tauren druid who found him and tended his wounds. Not knowing whether Olgra was alive or not, Mankrik watched the Crossroads every day looking for quilboars to take his vengeance on. After learning of his wife’s fate, he erected a small monument to her and traveled the Barrens seeking to kill more quilboar and destroy their homes in retribution. It has been hinted that he may have found some sense of healing, and even romance, with an orc shaman named Mahka.
What made this quest and character famous is the fact that this quest was in the earliest days of WoW when the game was a lot harder without many of the features it has today, including quest markers. Players had to search the entire zone of the Barrens—which was huge back then and was split in two later in the game—for Mankrik’s wife without any guidance on where to look. This resulted in lots of people asking for help finding her in the zone’s game chat, cementing the character and quest as something of a meme or running joke throughout Warcraft history. Nowadays, people may refer to a quest object that’s hard to find as “Mankrik’s wife”.
The flavor of this card’s abilities are a beautifully perfect match, referencing both the quest and the story. First you have to “go on a quest” to find Olgra after getting it from Mankrik, a quest where she could be anywhere in your deck and hard to find. Then, when you draw her body, you get a buffed-up Mankrik who flies into a rage by attacking the enemy hero, just like how he sought vengeance against the quilboar.
Final Verdict: A card based off an enduring meme from WoW’s history as both a game and story that captures it all perfectly in the card’s effects.
Barak Kodobane is a centaur, the highly-aggressive bastard descendants of a strange union between Zaetar, son of Cenarius, and the earth elemental princess Theradras. They have a history of enmity with the tauren people who live in the same lands. Barak himself is a new leader who has risen among a centaur tribe called the Kolkar. His rallying leadership turned the Kolkar from a disorganized problem for the tauren to a real threat. He resided in an area of the Barrens known as the Forgotten Pools and was slain by adventures/players to prevent more aggression against the tauren.
From a flavor perspective, there is little to match here. Barak only has two abilities in WoW: shooting and throwing nets. He has no known connection with magic, but perhaps drawing the spells represents filling a quiver of arrows or some such?
Final Verdict: There could be other ways to immortalize this orc of legend, but this is a good a way as any and the Frenzy flavor contributes a lot. Overall, very good.
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