Hearthstone 23: The Evil League of EVIL

[Zevox]

Nerfs of the Expansion has finally been announced, and I think it's to no surprise that Rogue got hit the hardest.

Before getting into the actual nerfs, can I just say that it bothers me that "nerfs of the expansion" has just become a thing that we all assume will definitely happen? It feels like they just quietly made that a regular thing starting maybe a couple of years ago, and now there's no possibility that we get through an expansion without nerfs. Which makes it feel like they're doing them less because things are genuinely too powerful and require nerfing than just to shake up the meta in the mid-expansion period, and if that's the case, I do not appreciate it at all.

Because honestly, right now, I don't think anything really needed nerfing. Yes, Rogue's probably the best deck around at the moment, but not to a degree that I think warrants much, if any, nerfing. And it sucks to see otherwise good cards we could continue using for a long time become unusable if there's not a damn good reason for it.

EVIL Miscreant: Goes from 1/5 to 1/4 stats.

Raiding Party: Cost increased to 4 Mana.

Preperation: Now only reduces the next Spell's cost by 2.

Archivist Elysiana: Cost increased to 9 Mana.

Okay, lets get to it...

EVIL Miscreant: Eh, that's fine I suppose. Surprisingly mild even, I'd have expected them to raise it to 4 mana if they were going to target it, that would be a lot more meaningful. Almost certainly still sees play.

Raiding Party: Big, but if they were going to nerf Rogue, I think this was the best call to make. Draw 3 is worth around 5 mana historically (Nourish), so it's still a good deal at 4 here, and should still see play. Or at least it would, if this next one doesn't kill Rogue entirely...

Preparation: Ouch. Okay, you all know by now what I think of nerfing the Classic set, so I'll just say that fully applies here and move on to my other thought. Namely, why one earth do this and nerf Raiding Party? One or the other seems sufficient. And this one impacts a lot more than the current deck, since Prep has been a core Rogue card literally forever. Anyway, this one doesn't hurt me personally as much as some of the other classic nerfs, since Rogue is my least played class that isn't Hunter, but it's still likely up there with Firey War Axe, Wild Growth, and Equality as one of the biggest, most impactful nerfs they've done to the classic set, and thus it sees no approval from me.

Elysiana: Eh, if they were going to do anything to Warrior, this is the change I'm most okay with. Just prevents double Elysiana, which is fine. She'll still be useful for Control v Control - and this could even create an interesting new dynamic between Control Warrior and Control Shaman, since the latter can still get a second Elysiana by holding Shudderwock long enough. Guess I should just be happy they didn't touch Doctor Boom or important classic cards like Brawl, which I was afraid might happen.

Prep is the clearest example of the issue with nerfing the Classic set in general (or the issue WITH the Classic set in general).

The entire game since day 1 has been balanced around those cards. Every card released at the same time AND after release has been balanced around the Classic set. So nerfing those cards creates immense imbalances with those classes.

When you nerf core cards that classes are based around like that it heavily impacts them for the foreseeable future. The Equality nerf is the same way. Control Paladin is pretty much gone; all its removal is too damn slow now. And thus, Paladin AS A CLASS is gone, kaput, out of the meta until AT LEAST the next expansion.

Well, we agree on that much, at least. And Paladin at the moment is indeed a huge poster boy for the problems that mucking with the classic set causes, though it's not just Equality (even though that one hurts me personally much more). The other thing that killed the class was rotating Divine Favor, which killed its aggro potential. If that card were still around, odds are that Secret Paladin would actually have been as strong as we all expected it to be before the set released, and then the class wouldn't be totally dead. But they managed to take away the keys to both the class' midrange-and-slower decks and its aggro decks at almost the same time, and its current sad state is the result. (And of course, it's a state that will only be fixed by them printing new, more powerful cards for the class to take those ones' place, so the nerfs become an indirect way to incentivize buying new sets' packs. )

I just come to the opposite conclusion about what they should actually be doing - namely, accepting that certain classic cards seeing consistent use over the game's lifetime isn't a problem, but a core element of how the game was designed from the outset, and don't try to change that, just design around it being the baseline. Which is, you know, what they said it would be.