Winner of most depressing card design contest: Monkrik

Anybody else a little disturbed by this card? What a real kick when life is already down, guess you can remember this card as being how depressive these last bunch of months have been.

If I designed this card, it would be randomly what it does now or summoned a 2/3 or restored 5 health to your hero in condition the wife is alive. 

Holy freaking crap, thanks for the extra sadness Bliz!

Before you read my response, I want to acknowledge how tough the past year has been on many/most people. My answer is not intended to belittle that at all. In fact it is more interested in raising questions than imposing answers.

---------------

The cold and rational viewpoint is that we should hardly be surprised about a character dying in a game based on something called "Warcraft". A game in which players and card texts casually use words relating to death, and in which many characters are in a state arguably worse than death (I'm looking at you, mindless scourge). We can jokingly call Hearthstone a children's card game, and point at Warcraft as an exaggerated and cartoony fantasy franchise, but that dramatically understates how dark the story often is. Death is everywhere in it, and the only difference here is that you are explicitly shown the emotional response of a loved one. 

For the sake of starting a meaningful discussion, I wonder what your thoughts are regarding Hearthstone's handling of Scholomance. In WoW it is incredibly dark, and if you feel bad for Mankrik you'll turn away in horror at the atrocities performed by Doctor Krastinov.

The question is: is HS's 'family friendly' take on Scholomance any less sinister? The implication is that the atrocities are just getting started, and so the logical step is that the characters we see there will soon be (un)dead. Just look at what Disciplinarian Gandling actually does!

Perhaps the card closest in flavour to Mankrik is Infiltrator Lilian, which tells the story of a character who despises the undead being killed and brought back as the very thing she hates. Surprise, surprise, she lashes out at the world in anger, just as Mankrik does. Granted, WoW lore lets us dissociate that process from Scholomance, but the process still happens.

It's interesting - and not at all unusual - that even in that context the fate Mankrik's wife manages to provoke a significant emotional response.

It's a reference to an old WoW quest that became a meme

https://wowwiki-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Mankrik%27s_Wife

It could have been "summon a 3/1 beaten corpse that attacks your opponent's face and then dies. Horribly".

Jokes aside, while Im not exactly completely apathetic about life in general, I tend to think of this card the same way I would think of Sneaky Delinquent or Fishy Flyer. Its not like hearthstone has ever shy away from darker themes, and I think its preferable to have a wider variety of flavor than the usual bland triple A tripe we see in everyday entertainment.

But ultimately as have been pointed out by Koetti, its basically just a reference to an old WoW questline.

If you thought that was heartbreaking, wait until you see Lucian and Senna in Legends of Runeterra. You have to literally kill one of them in front of the other, and they become more powerful because of their grief and rage from seeing the love of their life killed. Lucian levels up instantly when he sees Senna die, screaming in anguish as it shows an animation of a couple's love being ripped apart. Of course, LoR (and League of Legends) in general is a mix of emotions, so it's hard to judge by Hearthstone's standards, but it fits the subject.

If we were always so vigilant about triggers, we as a society would have a tragically tepid body of literature, art and video games.

It's up to the individual with the problems to avoid things that might make them depressed. It is not the job of artists or game developers to protect their audience from sadness. (Indeed, negative feelings are often intentionally invoked as a way to provide catharsis.)