So while I am away from my game, I felt compelled to talk about what may be my favorite new hero, the Scholar.
I feel the need to begin with weaknesses (not gripes, like my feelings about the RC heroes, just understanding the Scholar in general)
1. reliance upon card draws-Elemental Cards can eat through your hand.
2. No ongoing/environment destruction-sucks not to have it, but then again, other heroes face the same problem
3. difficulty with draw once things are in the trash-He can search for elemental cards, and has limited ways of getting things back from the trash, but once they're there, they're often gone until you recycle your deck
With that out of the way, I find Scholar fantastic. I haven't gotten a truly bad draw with him. In general he can nearly always make the best out of a draw. Some games you get some elemental cards right away, and can begin healing and slinging damage. Other times you get cards to let allies heal, or play the top card of the deck. It takes some knowledge to know when to switch "roles," but the complex flexibilty of Scholar I find fantastic. He had a finisher, a little bit of AoE, some mass "enablers," and Grace Under Fire allows for some single target elimination, albeit with a restriction. Not all the cards are going to be usesful all the time, but thats ok-they can be inevitable discard bait. Scholar strikes me as a flexible, powerful hero that goes beyond "Stacking all three damage reduction 2 cards to be invincible." I haven't seen many rumblings on him and merely wanted to express my thoughts and get other opinions.
tl;dr-Flexible, stellar, and powerful hero!
We just did this in our game against Miss Information. Scholar was the last surviving hero and the other 3 heroes all allows him to use a power which he used on Truth Seeker. Truly stellar.
The scholar and AA could give you at least one turn of guaranteed no damage to hero targets, which I love. I don't have the cards in front of my or I'd name drop.
I have this set up in my head of the scholar and AA doing that and then nightmist casts oblivion and I would cackle in glee.
Point is, Scholar rules.
The Scholar! I love that guy! I feel he's very similar to Abslolute Zero, in that he has a killer card engine that allows him to do stuff, but he also can heal if he doesn't get the cards he wants/doesn't have enough cards. I aslo like how he can deal damage if anybody else heals him. Of course, he needs to take damage to deal it, so that's another drawback. But I like him! The Scholar abides.
I prefer the flexibility of Scholar over AA. Certainly he isn't as good as focused damage, but if AZ isn't doing damage he is in trouble, but Scholar can tank while doing other things, which is awesome :)
Like Nightmist its almost impossible to have a draw that is just bad because you cycle through your deck so fast you'll probably see the entire thing before the game is over. I really like a lot of card cycle!
Another thing I like about both Scholar and NM is that no card is wasted because even if you get a card you don't want it makes for great discard fodder.
I've heard someone say that CR is like a more refined version of Expat or Fixer. I feel like Scholar is a more refined Haka. Now Haka is a powerhouse hero t hat everyone loves in my group, but I can't help but notice that he shares a few cards with Scholar (heal and draw one-shot, 2 damage and draw power) and Haka has a little bit of the theme of draw lots of cards and use those to power other effects.
Knowing the little bit that I do about Haka's personality, being all well read and dare I say it... scholarly, the two of them are probably really good friends.
I just had the mental image of the two of them sitting in deck chairs (Haka's would be larger) out behind Freedom Five HQ with some fresh squeezed lemonade and sunglasses on, taking naps.
Or discussing Plato or Socrates 
(I sure hope that I'm not the only one whose mental dialogue pronounces Socrates "Soh-craytes" after Bill & Ted.)
That may be my favorite art picture of the scholar. Its also an amazing card if you can get it played out of turn. Because 5 cards is AWESOME
YES. AA's play a card and Scholar's know when to hold them (I think that's what it is) is a beastly combo.
I kinda imagine the scholar working out like this: All the other heroes are running around, trying to save the world, then all of the sudden, out of NOWHERE comes this guy in a bathrobe. And he's like "Hey, relax. Life's too short." and then he lightnings the bad guy for some ridiculous amount. And then he's gone, leaving everyone else incredibly confused. He would never have his own comics or even a place where he "belonged"- he'd just show up in everyone else's completely unexpectedly.
Basically: Greatest Cameo Hero Ever :)
His fluff is so awesome and yet so random and simple at the same time!
Yeah, I picture the image from Truth Seeker happening just as Gloomweaver is about to destroy the heroes. He's in the middle of some villainous monologue, pronouncing their doom, and The Scholar just walks up, cracks him on the head, and while Gloomy is going "wtf?" the heroes escape and womp him.
I got to play the Scholar a couple times last weekend and I definitely really, really enjoy his deck. With a lot of the other characters, it's usually pretty easy to decide on something to discard as long as you've got at least a few cards in hand. With the Scholar, I'd almost never have any cards I didn't want to play on my next turn! He just has an amazing amount of cards that are good in a wide variety of situations. About the only cards I ever didn't feel bad about discarding were the "discard your hand to deal damage" and the "skip your turn to draw 5" cards, and that's only because of the specific game situations at the time (being the tank with multiple elemental cards out in the first case and not really having a good chance to skip my turn for the second).
Incidentally, that game was against Grand Warlord Voss; the other heroes were Visionary, Ra, and Tempest. The heroes got pretty beat up pretty quickly and after a Forced Deployment that brought 11 minions back pretty much everyone was in single digits. We managed to wipe out all of the minions thanks to Ra's AOE damage and I actually managed to heal myself significantly on the Scholar over the next couple turns. Then Visionary's player lamented that she was too low on life to use her "place the villain trash on the bottom of the villain deck" card. I looked through my hand, saw I had the card that let me take all player damage, looked at my life, saw that I had just enough, and told her to go ahead and play it that round. Sure enough, I survived Voss's turn with exactly 1 hit point left over, and he never really threatened us ever again because we weren't worried about another Forced Deployment.