Jan'alai, the Dragonhawk

Jan'alai, the Dragonhawk is a legendary mage minion card, from the Rastakhan's Rumble set.

Fixed bugs

 * Playing Jan'alai with Brann Bronzebeard used to cause a crash, summoning only a single Ragnaros and causing the game to soft-lock when the turn ended. This bug was corrected in a later patch.

Strategy
Jan'alai's Battlecry is extremely impactful, summoning Ragnaros the Firelord, an extremely powerful minion on its own. Having Ragnaros is already a good reward, but it also effectively costs 1 less mana and adds a 4/4 body. However, you will need put your Fireblast to work for this effect.

To meet the damage threshold as quickly as possible, include as much Hero Power synergy cards as you can. Daring Fire-Eater gives your Hero Power a burst of damage for just 1 mana, while Spirit of the Dragonhawk triples your Hero Power damage output. In Wild, another option is to run an odd deck with Baku the Mooneater for an upgraded Fireblast, which halves the number of times you need to use your Hero Power at most. Wild also has additional options like Fallen Hero, Garrison Commander, Coldarra Drake, and Justicar Trueheart.

Ragnaros himself can do a lot of work without depending on Jan'alai, so consider adding ways to reuse it like Zola the Gorgon or Youthful Brewmaster. Since Ragnaros himself is an Elemental, Frost Lich Jaina will let you heal off of his fireballs.

Jan'alai combos extremely effectively with Khadgar, summoning two copies of Ragnaros for 9 mana, for a whopping 16 damage. Combine with Khadgar and a 1 mana Faceless Manipulator for 4 Ragnarosses and 32 OTK kill.

Lore

 * '' is the dragonhawk of the  trolls.


 * ''In, Hex Lord Malacrass stole her essence, imbuing it into . Jan'alai's spirit is chained by Zul'jin. She is freed when the chieftain troll is killed.


 * ''Jan'alai appears with the other Amani gods in, directing the player to the leopard goddess, . The Amani gods are also summoned and tell the player to defeat the guardians at the and kill the.


 * ''Jan'alai appears in Zul'Aman where her spirit is chained by . He is freed when Daakara is killed.


 * ''A is present in, the Amani tribe's enclave in.

In Hearthstone lore, Jan'alai serves as the patron loa of Jan'alai's Dragonhawks, the mage team in Rastakhan's Rumble. Her connection to Ragnaros is unique to Hearthstone.

Trivia

 * Jan'alai went through a number of iterations during the development of Rastakhan's Rumble. The developers always wanted to include the effect "Your Hero Power also targets adjacent minions" on one of the set's mage cards to play into the fiery Hero Power theme of Jan'alai's Dragonhawks, but the effect shifted around between Spirit of the Dragonhawk, Pyromaniac, and Jan'alai herself throughout development. Another similar idea was a card reading "Spell Damage affects your Hero Power", and at one point Jan'alai was a 6-mana 4/4 minion with this effect as well as Spell Damage +3. This effect was later moved to Spirit of the Dragonhawk, but according to Peter Whalen, the deck didn't quite work due to the difficulty of trying to include both Hero Power and Spell Damage cards. Thus, Jan'alai was changed to have a more direct pay-off as a 6-mana 4/4 with "Battlecry: Summon every minion you've killed with your Hero Power", but this had two major issues, the first of which was that players "really, really, really hate" being beaten by their own minions. The second issue was that this design forced both players to keep track of every minion that died even if the mage player hadn't drawn Jan'alai yet. As a result, the designers wanted to find another version of Jan'alai in the same space, with a similar mana cost and an effect that gave players some mid- to late-game value as well as tempo. They started discussing "awesome fire creatures" from Warcraft and Hearthstone's past and eventually settled on simply bringing back Ragnaros, who felt perfect for the role.
 * Jan'alai's flavor text is a reference to the internet meme "You mess with crabo, you get a stabo", which is associated with pictures of mostly non-harmful animals holding knives or firearms one way or another.

Patch changes

 * Added.