Sylvanas Windrunner

Sylvanas Windrunner is a legendary neutral minion card, inducted into the Legacy set, formerly from the Classic and Hall of Fame sets.

Strategy
Sylvanas Windrunner is a card that can easily change a game, quickly. With her Deathrattle it is very easy to make yourself very powerful and crush your opponent with their few remaining forces after Sylvanas Windrunner is dead. Furthermore, it may force your opponent to play around Sylvanas, in fear that one of their powerful minions may be taken from them. But beware, she can be useless if you are in a bad situation, as she will be targeted as soon as possible and you will probably get nothing of value for 6 mana. Without a minion to steal, she is a mere 5/5 for 6 mana.

Destroying a Sylvanas of your own is sometimes a strategy to consider. For example, if your opponent only has one powerful minion on the board and you play Sylvanas followed by Power Overwhelming on her, this is effectively a seven-mana, two-card Mind Control. This is of course usually most desirable when the opponent possesses a single highly powerful minion which the player is otherwise unable to counter. Shamans are also able to utilize her deathrattle effectively with use of cards like Ancestral Spirit and Reincarnate. Another strategy involves destroying her with Shadowflame to clear any weaker minions and take control of one larger than 5 Health (or with Divine Shield), although this minion will still suffer the damage from the Shadowflame. Another strategy is using Brawl while with a Sylvanas on the field, this way ensuring the surviving minion will be on your side.

A less extreme (and more card efficient) alternative is to run Sylvanas into a target with the express intention of destroying her. This play usually sacrifices Sylvanas' long-term trading efficiency in exchange for immediate control of a valuable minion. It may provide the additional benefit of dealing damage to an enemy minion, but in many cases that is also the minion that will be stolen, making this more of a drawback. The ideal implementation of this strategy is to use Sylvanas to trade with a valuable enemy minion, before allowing her Deathrattle to gain control of another, hopefully even more valuable minion. In some cases, such as if playing against a lone Ragnaros the Firelord, it is necessary to directly trade Sylvanas for control of the enemy minion, even if that means damaging it in the process. In this case, Sylvanas can be traded for an 8/3 damaged Ragnaros.

Sylvanas is a strong addition to decks that can create 1/1 copies of her such as Shadowcaster, Herald Volazj, and Barnes, as these 1/1 copies can be destroyed easily via trading, and for some classes the user can destroy Sylvanas themselves to control an enemy minion unharmed.

Counteracting Sylvanas's Deathrattle can be tricky, especially if your opponent plays her against you to catch you out with only one or a few good minions that her Deathrattle can hijack. Mages and Shamans can handle Sylvanas efficiently with Polymorph or Hex respectively, while Silencing Sylvanas with Ironbeak Owl or Spellbreaker makes the situation more manageable, but still leaves a substantial 5/5 on the board; in either case such cards may not always be at your disposal. In the event that Sylvanas is played and you have no ways of countering her Deathrattle, a risky but possible solution is to introduce several low-cost or low-value minions to the battlefield; since her Deathrattle targets a random minion, having more minions on your side of the board will lessen the chance that one of your stronger minions will be taken from you when Sylvanas dies.

Lore

 * , styled variously as "the Dark Lady" and "the Banshee Queen," is the former Warchief of the and the former supreme ruler of the, one of the most powerful factions of undead on . In life, Sylvanas was the ranger-general of , whose leadership acumen and martial prowess were without equal. During the , she bravely defended  from a  invasion led by the death knight Arthas Menethil. Ultimately, however, Sylvanas fell in battle. Rather than honor the ranger-general with a quick death, Arthas ripped out her soul and transformed it into a banshee: a cunning and vengeful agent of the Lich King empowered by hate.


 * ''When the Lich King's control over his minions weakened, Sylvanas broke away from her tyrannical master's control and reclaimed her body. Vowing to avenge her death, Sylvanas gathered other renegade undead and set out to wage war against the Scourge. Thus it was that the Forsaken came to be, with Sylvanas as their queen. Under Sylvanas' command, the Forsaken joined the Horde and later helped bring about the Lich King's fall in the frozen wastes of.


 * ''Yet many challenges still lay ahead for Sylvanas. After an uprising within her ranks that killed other members of the Horde, the banshee queen is now mistrusted by many of her allies. While Sylvanas maintains that her loyalty to the Horde is undiminished, some of the faction's members are uncertain about her true intentions.


 * ''After the fall of the Lich King, Sylvanas came to the shocking realization that she, like Arthas before her, was damned to an eternity of darkness and torture in the afterlife. After entering into a pact with the Val'kyr, Sylvanas was able to regain her place in the realm of the living for as long as her Val'kyr survive. Knowing the dark fate that will inevitably befall her, Sylvanas considers her people a bulwark against the horrifying darkness that awaits her in the end. Following this, Sylvanas has launched an aggressive attack into the regions of Lordaeron and the greater Eastern Kingdoms not directly under her control, in an attempt to conquer the continent and secure it for the Forsaken.


 * ''After being mortally wounded during the battle for the Broken Shore, Warchief Vol'jin declared Sylvanas as his successor with his dying breath, leaving her to lead the Horde against the invading forces of the . Following the Legion's defeat, Sylvanas now leads the Horde against the Alliance in a war that spans all of Azeroth.


 * ''After being challenged to mak'gora by defector Varok Saurfang, Sylvanas managed to overcome him in combat, but in the process revealed to the rest of her Horde loyalists that they truly meant nothing to her. Ultimately, Sylvanas fled from Orgrimmar and abandoned the Horde to pursue her own agenda alongside those still loyal to her cause.

Trivia

 * Sylvanas's sister is Alleria Windrunner, an alternate hero for the hunter class. Curiously, they have no custom interaction in Hearthstone.
 * Rise of Shadows adds Sylvanas’s other sister, Vereesa Windrunner, a legendary hunter minion.

Patch changes

 * Moved from Hall of Fame to Legacy set.
 * A Wild Event set version is added for Standard format during the event Doom in the Tomb.
 * Moved from Classic to Hall of Fame set.
 * ''Commentary: Similar to Azure Drake [which was moved at the same time], it’s hard to see a card at the six mana cost out-value Sylvanas. In addition, Sylvanas has the most powerful Deathrattle effect in the game—as a comparison, the Priest card Mind Control costs 10 mana. We have exciting Deathrattle build-arounds coming soon, and in combination with Sylvanas, they would be too powerful for Standard.


 * Bug fix: "will no longer steal a minion that is about to die, which is weird because that’s generally her thing".
 * Now costs 6 (up from 5).
 * Text changed from "Battlecry: Discard your hand. Draw five 3/3 Skeletons" to "Deathrattle: Take control of a random enemy minion"
 * Previously: Battlecry: Discard your hand. Draw five 3/3 skeletons. [5 mana, 5 attack, 5 health, legendary]