FINALLY. Oh, right, we're supposed to remain indifferent.
Blizzard has announced that five card nerfs will be coming next Monday, August 26, including a wild-only nerf!
The Nerfs
Five cards are getting changed with two of those cards (Luna's and Extra Arms) being reverted back to their values before the Rise of Mechs event.
- Conjurer's Calling now costs 4 mana (Up from 3)
- Luna's Pocket Galaxy now costs 7 mana (Up from 5)
- Dr. Boom, Mad Genius now costs 9 mana (Up from 7)
- Extra Arms now costs 3 mana (Up from 2)
- Barnes now costs 5 mana (Up from 4)
Discuss the Nerf 
Discuss the Nerf 
Discuss the Nerf 
Discuss the Nerf 
Discuss the Nerf
Blog Post
Quote From Blizzard Now that Saviors of Uldum is live, new cards have been introduced and powerful decks have started to surface. To make for a better ladder experience for Hearthstone players in this new expansion, we’ve decided to make the following card adjustments in an update next week:
Mage
While Conjurer’s Calling is a powerful tool that’s found in a number of Mage decks, when used in decks focused around cards like Mountain Giant and Sea Giant, it was creating extremely powerful board states at a point in the game where opponents didn’t have effective answers.
Increasing the mana cost of this card will make using both copies of the Twinspell card in a single turn significantly more difficult, postponing these potentially overwhelming turns until later in the game when the Mage’s opponent has more available resources to react to the board.
Buffing cards with the Rise of the Mech event was a big change in philosophy for us. While we are happy with the overall outcome of the changes, Luna’s Pocket Galaxy has proven to be an exception.
An early Luna's Pocket Galaxy can often leave opponents feeling helpless if late-game minions were drawn in subsequent turns. This has occurred more often than we had intended, therefore we're reverting its mana cost back to its original value of 7, as was the case before the Rise of the Mech event.
Warrior
We’d still like Dr. Boom, Mad Genius to be a great option for control Warrior decks looking to close out games, but right now the card gets played a bit too early. Increasing the mana cost to 9 should make it more difficult to find a good turn to play Dr. Boom, giving opponents time to make powerful plays as well.
Priest
During the Rise of the Mech event, Priest was one of the weaker classes in the game. Buffing Extra Arms gave Priest a powerful spell for the early game to enable some of their board-focused strategies.
With the release of Saviors of Uldum, Priest has access to many more powerful early game minions and has seen a large jump in both popularity and winrate. Between all of Priests buff spells and heal effects, it can be hard to fight for the board against them early in the game. Increasing the mana cost of Extra Arms back to 3 should give room for other decks to challenge them early on, while leaving the powerful Priest minions and combos untouched.
Neutral
Barnes has been a hot topic in Wild format discussions for quite some time now, especially regarding how oppressive this card can feel when facing certain Priest decks.
While we’re okay with Wild having a higher power level in general, Barnes stood out as too consistently powerful early in the game. Increasing his mana cost by 1 will let opponents have an easier time reacting, but still lets Barnes retain its identity as a way to summon specific minions early in the game.
Comments
why not i play Naga in Phaoris big spell mage
I've noticed a lot of comments from people complaining about the warrior nerf, saying it didn't go far enough to deal with the endless arsenal of removal that represses mid-range and value decks. It only improves the life for aggro.
But this seems to be misunderstanding how the meta works. If control warrior is suddenly losing or going 50/50 against aggro, it's overall winrate will plummet. People play control warrior today because it has the highest winrate. It won't be everywhere like it is today if it ends up with just a mediocre tier 2 winrate thanks to aggro matchups.
Even if it doesn't improve the matchup for value/mid-range vs control warrior, it will quite possibly decrease the likelihood that you run into the deck on ladder.
this is the exact problem though. It doesn't address the inherent problem, it just supresses it.
It's the reason why Control Warrior always goes from god tier to garbage depending on the meta. Because either the plan of just outressourcing your opponent via removal is enough to win or it isn't because there'S a popular deck with a good enough value plan to beat you
It's a binary slugfest with no real depth. Either Warrior wins because of overpowered cards or they lose because of overpowered cards.
I remember when Control Warrior had a limited amount of removal and relied on some finisher combo (or an Elise race) to actually win games. I remember when C'thun was a thing
At some point Control Warrior just turned into a passive wall that just reacts to anything you play and wins after your hand is empty. It's broing, it's polarizing, and it's entirely the fault of cards like Boom or Brawl which give Warrior just too much efficiency in that department.
I mean they even gave us some good stuff this expansion with the taunt package. That's a good baseline for a more proactive Warrior build that allows you to beat aggressive decks while also having some sort of pressure (via big minions) against value...but there's no reason to really use it beyond just the taunt value package and shove it into the typical gameplan of being the fun police.
Warrior is basically the new Druid at this point. so many lategame strategies are completely useless because they have no chance at beating Warrior so everyone has to either go for highrolling BS like Mage or super aggression.
Mech Hunter and Control Warrior will be Tier S once more... -.-
I don't play mage, but there has to be a deck or 2 to keep Warrior in check. Mage CC nerf is ok, but PG nerf kills the class for many people. Shame..
Barnes' nerf is laughable at best.
Isn't Quest Paladin a counter to current Warriors?
lol finally they change Conjurer's Calling.
I had some extra and some golden ones of those and I didn't want to dust them since I knew they were about to nerf it
wohooo extra dust :D
Will be interesting to see what this does to the meta and what decks are more viable now. (Probably will need something that kills murlocs :P)
I'm thoroughly disappointed with these changes...
Luna's Pocket Galaxy and Extra Arms reverted to their original mana cost means both cards will be in the same spot they were before the buffs and that means no one is ever going to bother using them again...
Conjurer's Calling increase in cost is pointless since it does nothing to prevent those awfully highrolly turn 4 Giants into CC... The only instance I see this change being impactful is when the Mage goes second and has Giant,Arcane Intellect and CC,now Giant into Coin CC is no longer possible but that's it... The Deck certainly takes a blow from the Pocket Galaxy change but it's not like it was unplayable before they buffed the card...
Dr. Boom, Mad Genius's cost increase is once again borderline pointless... Sure,not being able to use the hero power the turn the card is played certainly has a big impact but the oppressive Rush aura and the broken hero powers (Blast Shield and Delivery Drone) are still there... Now the card is not as efficient as it was before against faster Decks but it's still a ridiculous value generator in Standard that will allow Warrior to steamroll any slower Deck out there that can't dish out enough treats to bait out their 5 AOEs and 6 (and that's assuming they don't discover more Devastators) single target removals...
Barnes: This is probably the most useless nerf of the bunch... I've said once but I'll repeat it again,Barnes IS NOT the problem with Big Priest... Sure no one likes to lose to a turn 4 highroll but it's not like losing two turns later because Shadow Essence pulled out Vargoth or Catrina and you don't have a transform effect feels better... All this nerf does is making Big Priest's MU against Aggro borderline unwinnable but no one cares about that because most of the times they lose to Aggro anyway... Even if we set aside the fact that NO ONE likes to kill the same minions 10 times in a single game (and other cards/Decks were nerfed to ground for the same reason),the problem is that Deck is oppressive to anything even remotely slow that doesn't have an OTK as a win condition (and even in that case if they get an early Rag you're screwed) and I'd be fine with if there were any tech cards against it but unfortunately you can't do much other than SMORC them or pray they brick... TL;DR Barnes is not the problem but the whole Rez mechanic is and this nerf is pointless because they'll just remove the card,go full greed and have 80% winrate against anything that isn't Combo or Hyper Aggro...
wow, this is ..... certainly disappointing
Galaxy nerf was predictable and basically fixes the issue. Probably the best nerf out of the bunch
CC nerf just ignores the inherent problem of not having an answer to turn 4 mountain Giant losing you the game on the spot, which doesn't change even with the increased mana cost. At the very least Mages are insanely weak to early snowballing tempo decks so I guess that's what you're gonna do from now on. Sucks to be any control deck that isn't Warrior I guess.
Extra Arms nerf is once again just dancing around the massive elephant in the room that is Divine Spirit, but hey, I guess that's what the need to keep the one-eyed mongoloid chained up in their basement happy, because I can't think of any other person that actually likes to play Inner Fire Cheese
Boom nerf is just a mockery at this point. Out of all the things in Warrior that are a problem, Boom's cost certainly isn't one. The only one to actually benefit from this are aggro decks that want to kill Warrior before they can stabilize...which is the one thing Warrior is supposed to counter....but hey, fuck literally every other class that wants to play a slower deck and doesn't have access to some nearly game breaking value engine (read Quest Paladin or Tess shuffle).
Last expansion I was betting on a second round of nerfs for these exact problems and now that the nerfs are here i realize that it wouldn't have mattered at all. I'm not even sure what their goal is anymore. This doesn't make me want to buy new packs or craft new cards. This just makes me annoyed that the same 5 cards are gonna define the class until the next rotation where they will be replaced with similar offenders.
People keep mentioning losing if you don't have an answer by a certain turn. I honestly think that is okay. Every deck isn't meant to be able to deal with every threat at every turn. You eventually have to draw the line somewhere that if Deck A doesn't have Tool Z by turn X then Deck B probably is going to win. The has always been the case in the back and forth struggle between aggro and control (Have Defile by turn 2-5 you probably win if you don't you probably lose), the same case for any form of handlock deck in the past, same for Reno against aggro, etc, etc. You can't use the excuse that some classes not having answers by certain turns as the reason to nerf something into the ground. Certain decks, playstyles, and entire classes intentionally lack answers for some things for a purpose. The key is not allowing plays that have no answer by any deck, strategy, or class by a specific turn to exist without balance checks
Just curious: how many games did you playtest the nerfs for before coming to this dejected conclusion?
are you seriously just gonna pull a "they tested this, they know what they're doing?"
you realize yo're talking about the same people who released SNIP SNAP and didn't even consider Reckless Experimenter when it's t he first thing the community noticed when it was announced.
but hey, you'll see it yourself when Warrior's winrate drops a SOLID 0,5% after this and people will still get highrolled to death by Mage.
A little confused here.... Dropping a win rate 0.5% is a pretty solid target. Is this actually a complaint about Blizzard not nerfing a card to the ground?
The card is objectively worse now, but seems like it should be playable. If it works out how it seems (and like you're suggesting) I'd say that's a pretty solid nerf!
Came here to say the exact same thing. WP, Ganashal.
Man, Barnes nerf, after all those years of ignoring it, feels like an atom bomb almost... It probably won't kill Big Priest, but that was probably their intention too. I am happy that they did it anyway. There's still no counterplay or interaction against Resurrect mechanics... maybe one day.
They could have done the nerfs differently, sure. But at least its about 2-3 weeks into expansion, so nerfs arrive REALLY quickly this time. Probably 1 week quicker than in RoS i think. So +1 to Blizzard for that :)
No counter play, except for literally any transform effect. Well, except Conjurors calling maybe, but that card doesn't need any more utility. But Plague of Murlocs, Tinkmaster (I mean, I know he's terrible now, but he would affect res mechanics), Poly, Hex, devolve, etc etc etc. All of these just destroy your res pool. Anything to summon minions for the opponent (Leeroy?? For a single example), all of these increase the chance of a whiff, and if you can do the transform before they load their res pool in the first place, then you're home and dry.
Not saying it's auto win every time, but I'm responding to the 'no counter play' comment; that's the counter play.
Sure it is an interaction, of course. I should have said it more clearly - I said "no counterplay" because in my mind, the counterplay options are extremely limited at this point.
We could see more interaction. I am annoyed at this point, that after 5 years in, there's still no mechanic, which can interact with Graveyard in some interesting ways.
Boom untouched, just slower. Hunter dominates where it once only did well.
man, they are nerfing 3 legendaries. I am glad they did this instead of nerfing just commons and rares
Yeah, good point here! Leeching Poison and Saronite Chain Gang's PTSD are still present