Comparison of Design: Wild Growth and Breath of Dreams

While Wild Growth has been out of the meta for a time since its nerf, the recent release of Winged Guardian has brought a Midrange, Dragon/Ramp/Embiggen Druid back into the game leveraging the new ramp abilities provided by Breath of Dreams. It remains to be seen how this deck will fare over time as the meta settles and new cards are released, but for now it's putting up an appreciable presence, making this a good time to look at it.

One thing to note upfront is that this isn't a discussion of nerfs. While you could make a case for nerfing Breath of Dreams, you could also make a case for nerfing tons of stuff from Descent of Dragons, given the immense power creep in the set. For what it's worth, I'm a bit pleased that Druid at least has a deck to work with now after its period of dormancy.

Not every tier 1 deck needs immediate nerfs the card is powerful but you need to build your deck to use it.. as time will go and other expansions will bring other tools you might not want to run dragons in druid.

which will make your ramp bad again..

The Dragon restriction is enough to keep Breath of Dreams in check.

They need to add many OP Dragons before you notice a serious problem, and even then, it will be because of the OP Dragons themselves, not just Breath.

Tbh, Wild Growth itself was only problematic because of a stack of OP high cost cards in Druid: they preferred to nerf one solid core card, instead of multiple OP ones...

Frankly, Wild Growth wasn't a problem card at all. The problem was they wanted to print Breath of Dreams, and similar cards, but there was no real point because Wild Growth already existed. The only solutions to that problem are a) don't print Breath of Dreams, meaning come up with another card, b) print something more powerful than pre-nerf Wild Growth, which didn't go down well when they did it with Jade Blossom (because people either played both or picked the preferable option), or c) nerf Wild Growth then print a very similar card in the new design space opened up.

Option c) is the easiest one, provides them with the most long-term benefit, and they can always keep printing similar cards if they want to retain that part of Druid's identity. 

Pretty much what Bystekhilcar said, the problem wasn't Wild Growth per se, it was the fact that Wild Growth existing as an evergreen card at that power level meant that any other ramp card they printed in future expansions would have to be piss-poor or it'd immediately push druid to top-tier. They could have HOF'ed the card IMO, but instead they chose to nerf it. Either way, the point was not to get rid of ramp but to free up design space for cheap ramp cards, as they're such a core aspect of the druid identity.

The same argument can be made for other class cards; notably a lot of the mage evergreen set is extremely powerful, think Frostbolt, Frost Nova and to a lesser extent Blizzard and Fireball. Now you can argue that these cards are doing their job at providing a playable skeleton for mages to build around, but at the same time it seems pretty obvious that mage rarely gets good burn or freeze effects because of how dominant its evergreen cards are.