Two new heroes were added to Hearthstone Battlegrounds yesterday: Tirion Fordring looks pretty good and Millhouse Manastorm looks kinda bad. This assessment may change as smarter players discover tricks I missed, but for now, I recommend avoiding Millhouse (unless you want to prove me wrong) and giving Tirion a try.

At first glance, Tirion's ability didn't seem very good to me: honorable army [1 mana] +1/+1 to minions with no minion type.

For comparison, Queen Wagtoggle can give +2 attack to Mech, Demon, Murloc, and Beast, and Pyramad can give +3 strength to a random minion. The +1/+1 granted to a few Battleground minions is not attractive.

However, Tyrion is interesting because typeless minions are usually not easy to buff. I have not played against him yet, but I have played against him. Using his ability to buff Guardians of Justice, Spawn of Nzos, and Weavers of Wrath early on, and then buff Soul Acrobats later on. Mix in the usual daemon companions like "Floating Watcher" and you have a potential winner.

I had a chance to test Millhouse Manastorm myself, and his ability is hard to make work: the Manastorm [Passive] minion costs 2 gold, the Refresh costs 2 gold, he starts at 2 gold, and the Refresh costs 2 gold.

The 1 gold reduction on buying minions is good for cycling Battlecry minions, but the extra gold for Refresh makes tiering up and completing synergies a struggle.

You could do it this way: if possible, acquire another minion (a "token" in local parlance) on turn 1, sell the token on turn 2 to tear up, buy 2 minions on turn 3, and buy 2 more on turn 4. If you don't get useful draws and can't build a strong minion, you could be in for a terrible time.

I finished 4th in the mill house, but it was hard to call Mechs and Beasts, and ultimately the Mech lineup was the only part of the "strategy" that I wasn't desperate enough to just keep up. However, if I can adapt to what I get on each draw, I may be able to use Milhouse successfully. Watch him in action in the video below:

Hearthstone's 16.2 patch also brought other changes to the battlegrounds: two new Demon cards (see below) were added, the Voidwalker card and hero Sir Finley Mrrgglton have been removed (they will eventually return with a new power, but it's probably not a bad power), a minion lineup has been added to the bonus stats, and several bugs have been fixed. Read the full patch notes here.

As for Tirion Fordring and Millhouse Manastorm, we will add them to the Hearthstone Battlegrounds hero tier list once they are used more and we can say for sure how strong or not strong they are! Hearthstone Battlegrounds Hero Tier List There is always the possibility that the brainiacs of the Hearthstone meta will come up with something that I would eat crow about.