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
Mana cost nerfs will always be their preference because they don't confuse casual players the way functionality nerfs do. Like it or not, casual players are the VAST majority of the player base.
Adjusting the mana cost may be boring, but it's almost always the right thing to do. There are two big problems with changing what a card fundamentally does: first, it takes away from the fundamentally cool things that the card can do, and second, it may produce some other broken strategies that will simply require more future nerfing.
By only adjusting the cost, Blizzard hasn't made the strategies these cards support entirely obsolete or entirely different, they've merely made them less overpowering. Cards where the effects have been changed are pretty limited in Hearthstone's history, and the changes are usually small in scope. One example is Raza the Chained. You can still use his effect to do the fun things you used to be able to do (i.e. big damage turns Shadowreaper Anduin and/or early/repeated inspire effects), but it's basically impossible to OTK with it now.
Im impressed they decided to not hold on to 7-cost for Dr. Boom, which was part of its original flavor.
Hearthstone Team back at it with the braindead mana nerfs. There are so many ways to nerf a card, but no let's just increase the mana cost.
I mean, most of those cards deserved nerfs and since I don't play any of them I couldn't care less, but still, it's disappointing.
They will ALWAYS prefer mana nerfs because they're the easiest changes for casual players to digest. People who post on Hearthstone message boards are a tiny, tiny fraction of the player base.
A mana nerf may be boring but you can't argue against the effectiveness. Besides, the issue with every one of these cards is that they came down too soon in the game. How do you solve that problem if not a mana nerf?
Typical Blizz. Nerf mana costs and assume that it fixes everything. Boom is still good albeit a bit slower and Barnes comes out one turn later in wild. Could they have been any less inventive given all of the nerf suggestions on every fan site? We're not going to see any fewer Big Priests in wild nor will we see any fewer Control Warriors in standard.
Is the idea behind a nerf really that we should be removing an archetype from the ladder? I feel like the point should be to make those archetypes weaker, but still playable, not to completely invalidate the strategy.
Not to happy with Extra Arms and Luna's Pocket Galaxy. The first one shouldn't have been reverted back and the latter should have gone to 6 instead. Dr. Boom nerf was needed although I wish they changed the armour gain to 5 instead of 7. Barnes nerf, I want to say has been a long time coming.. but Big priest has so many tools to keep itself alive and resurrect now.. Idk if a 1 mana nerf will put a dent into that.. CC nerf I am not to surprised with. I am surprised with them not nerfing another Warrior card, considering how dominant it has been in the meta.. but we shall see if the Dr. Boom nerf will do the trick.
We need more than a barnes nerf, odd rogue is probably the best deck right now and it does well vs big prist already, rest of the nerfs mean value and control get pinned, leaving aggro alone, because mech hunter didnt see enough time on top?
Happy with all the nerfs.
Barnes nerf means nothing, big priest will still plague wild. Extremely weak nerf.
I agree big priest will stick around, but this nerf is significant
Agreed with that, too. Lazy developers at Blizzard should have changed Graveyard/Resurrection mechanics. Let's say your Obsidian Statue is killed and it's the only minion in Graveyard Pool. What they should have done in addition is:
I assume this means More Arms! is back to 3 as well?
Probably yes
man,i wished i hadn't dusted my golden Pocket galaxy when Boomsday launched :(
I personally don't dust ANY cards until they are in Standard (well, unless they are almost impossibly bad, like 5-mana 0/5 - Desert Obelisk in current set).
I don't know why you got -1, I buffed you to 0.
As a Wild Player I don't like any of these nerfs. Extra Arms and Pocket Galaxy are back to unplayable status. I'm especially upset about Extra Arms because it was so much fun at 2 mana and had a variety of uses ranging from Even to Egg to Miracle to Aggro Priest.
Dr. Boom is now complete garbage for Wild.
Conjurer's Calling was never really a problem in wild, but I'm sad to not be able to play it in Odd Mage with Corridor Creeper anymore. And from my understanding this doesn't really solve the issue in standard anyway since mage can still pay a giant on 3 and conjurers on 4.
And then there's Barnes...
Multiple years of complaints about Big Priest with no action whatsoever from Blizz and now all they do is bump Barnes up by 1 mana after printing enough support for Big Priest that losing Barnes barely hurts the deck at all... And now they'll probably never do anything else about Big Priest and act like they've completely solved the issue with Barnes.
Totally agree, as a Wild only player too.