We've got a ton of nerfs hitting Hearthstone's constructed play this week on August 17, let's check them all out!
Card Nerfs
- Incanter's Flow - Cost is now 3 mana (Up from 2).
- Battleground Battlemaster - Cost is now 6 mana (Up from 5).
- Granite Forgeborn - Health is now 4 (Down from 5).
- Conviction (Rank 1) - All ranks now cost 2 mana (Up from 1).
- Flesh Giant - Cost is now 9 mana (Up from 8).
Card Adjustments
These cards have received cost increases but have also had stats increased to somewhat compensate. Seeing these later in the game should help.
- Il'gynoth - Cost is now 6 mana (Up from 4). Stats increased from 2/6 to 4/8.
- Darkglare - Cost is now 3 mana (Up from 2). Stats increased from 2/3 to 3/4.
- Kolkar Pack Runner - Cost is now 3 mana (Up from 2). Stats increased from 2/3 to 3/4.
Quote From Blizzard Dev Comments: After two weeks of monitoring the rapidly evolving United in Stormwind launch metagame, we’re making a few balance changes to slow down the speed of the game by a turn or two. Overall, this translates to two things: limiting the efficiency at which combo decks can assemble the pieces they need to win, and reducing the burst damage that board-based decks have access to from hand. We hope that these changes will give a bit more room for slower strategies to find success in this meta, and we’ll continue to keep an eye on the live game to see if any further changes are needed.
Cards that have been nerfed should be disenchantable for two weeks after the patch hits tomorrow, August 17. That gives us until August 31 to get a full dust refund for the cards.
What do you think of the changes? Are there any cards on this list you're surprised to see or any that you're surprised that they didn't make it? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
More Patch Notes
Quote From Blizzard Arena Balance Update
We’ve updated the appearance rate of cards to ensure class balance remains close to the ideal 50% win-rate. Specifically, the win-rate of Druid, Warrior, and Demon Hunter should now be decreased. The win-rate of Mage, Priest, Rogue, and Shaman should now be increased. The win-rate of the other classes should be roughly the same as before.
Bug Fixes & Game Improvements
- Updated the Stealer of Souls animation to now only trigger if the card ends up in your hand (it does not trigger for cards that are Cast When Drawn, such as Soul Shards). The animation will also no longer trigger if the drawn card already costs Health instead of Mana (such as when you have two Stealer of Souls in play).
- Fixed card text errors for Psyfiend and Florist (no functional change to either).
- Fixed a bug where Prismatic Jewel Kit would trigger when effects returned a Divine Shield minion to the owner’s hand or moved a Divine Shield minion from the owner’s hand to the owner’s deck.
- Fixed a bug where Seek Guidance (the Priest questline) would sometimes count the original Cost of cards, instead of the Cost actually paid for the card.
- Fixed a bug where the Initiate Set version of Eye Beam did not properly display card art in the Collection Manager.
- Fixed a bug where Reborn Rites, The Lich King’s Battlegrounds hero power, caused players to disconnect from the game server.
- Added interactions between Pave the Way (part of the Paladin Questline) and Duels-specific hero powers.
- Fixed various bugs in Book of Heroes Gul’dan and Book of Heroes Illidan.
- Fixed a bug where Duels achievements were not tracking properly.
- Fixed a bug where Witchwood collection achievements triggered even though the requirements were not yet met.
- Fixed a bug where completing all Book of Heroes installments would not display the proper achievement or give the proper award. All players who have already completed all 10 Book of Heroes will automatically receive the proper award of a Golden Standard pack.
Comments
Incanter's Flow at 3 mana now makes it so that aggro decks have more time to smorc it down while doing nothing for control decks, as usual. You can still complete the quest by turn 5/6 of course, so I'm not sure what this nerf was even supposed to do.
Flesh Giant now can't be dropped on turn 4! Wow! What a great change! Now I only have to deal with 2 8/8s at turn 5.
Haven't seen much Elemental Shaman, but Forgeborn does essentially nothing, with the biggest problem coming from the consistency of Doomhammer honestly. I guess it just makes it a worse 4 drop.
Conviction nerf is expected and kind of long overdue. I expected a nerf to something like +2 attack, but lets just increase the cost by 1 because balancing is hard.
Battlemaster is still a pretty huge problem, and putting it at 6 cost won't change anything, at the least it becomes a garbage arena card. I expect they don't want to change the actual text of the card because when it inevitably shows up in the Battlegrounds content patch, it could cause some confusion.
The cost/stat changes were also pretty interesting I guess. They keep trying to sweep Darkglare under the rug, but just like a really annoying cockroach, I doubt this will kill it.
Il'gynoth can honestly go to hell because the DH otk deck is such a braindead strategy that I hope it gets killed off entirely (of course it won't.... but one can dream).
Kolkar was a whatever kind of adjustment as well, it just barely slows down Hunters by removing a good 2-drop, but I expect their swarm of 1-drops to be able to fill in that hole easily.
2 mana fireballs coming down on turn 7 (the turn after you completed the quest) are far less likely now since you're more squeezed for mana.
Don't sleep on 1 mana changes, they can be quite significant in impact (as others have done well to point out).
Card changes are nice to see, the meta is not fun. Small changes are important as to not nerf too much.
Outside of the obvious Wild stuff, Conviction (Rank 1) is no longer in Odd Paladin which I like (card was bonkers from the start). However, Flesh Giant to 9 and not 10? This hurts Even Warlock the most :(
just play Frost Giant instead
That's... not a bad idea actually. But it's still considerably slower since it doesn't reduce from healing or non-HP damage.
also card adjusted are eligible for refund or only nerfed? tks
The rule of thumb is any of the following is considered a "nerf", and therefore eligible for a full dust refund:
Anything else is considered a "buff", and is not eligible for a refund.
I am not 100% sure, but about 98% sure that changed cards give full dust value too iirc.
For anyone who wants to be lazy about finding cards to dusk for full value, you can filter for "refund", to see anything you can disenchant for full dust value. Very handy!
All 8 cards will give full refunds, the original blog is quite clear about it.
This is extremely disappointing. They pretty much made the smallest possible change they could have made to these cards without actually fixing the issue.
Incanter's Flow: They had the opportunity to make a stand and say that they don't want mages to play this way. It's uninteractive and obviously broken. The card is still essentially free. You pay 2 mana for it, 3 mana for it, whatever. If your deck is stuffed full of spells, it takes 2-3 spells for you to break even on mana, every spell after that turns Incanter's Flow into a free Innervate. The amount of mana you cheat with this over the course of the game is unreasonable. So yeah, you slowed down the discount by one turn. The deck is going to play the exact same way and require the exact same response: kill them as fast as possible, before they enter solitaire mode. They still have Refreshing Spring Water, which is a cheaper, one-sided Research Project. Once they've discounted the cards they can still draw just as fast and start going off on mana cheating as they did before. They had the opportunity to axe this playstyle, and even finally nerf Sorcerer's Apprentice, which, much like Aviana + Kun of old just enables like 5 different combos, and they chose not to.
Flesh Giant: Again, the smallest possible adjustment. It's still cheaper than most other giants (Mana Giant is the only one cheaper) and it's still one of the easiest to discount. It also now can't go into Even Warlock for some godsforsaken reason. So yeah, goodbye to that deck I guess. This change is barely gonna do anything. Making it cost 10 was the expected minimum, and they didn't even do that. Also worth noting that, once again, Animated Broomstick remains untouched somehow.
Darkglare: Who would have guessed it, the smallest possible adjustment. Similar to Mage, they once again could have finally said enough is enough and axed the ridiculous mana cheating and they didn't. They chose to keep the card just as broken as it was. Is it broken a turn later? Yeah, sure. All that does is promote aggro, force people to try to kill the warlock before the mana cheating becomes too much, same as they did with Incanter's Flow. They have not opened any new opportunities for control. Doesn't matter if Darkglare costs 2 or 3, or if the giant costs 8 or 9, control is not even gonna make it to turn 8. And apparently, they're perfectly fine with that. Why finally balance Raza Priest when they can just render it irrelevant. Note that Raise Dead once again also remains untouched.
As for the complete annihilation of Il'gynoth...I honestly have no explanation. I get that they don't balance for Wild specifically, but it's hilarious to me that they're ok with Mages blowing people up at incredible speed, in Wild hiding behind Ice Block and cheating insane amounts of mana with Incanter's Flows and Sorcerer's Apprentices, while DH with its one measly, noticably weaker and more vulnerable OTK gets nerfhammered by 2 mana on its key minion. Apparently DH is only supposed to do mindless aggro, nothing else is allowed. It's not like the Il'gynoth combo was even fast compared to how many other decks uninteractably kill the opponent.
I stopped reading after...
You pay 2 mana for it, 3 mana for it, whatever.
You're severely underestimating how hard the Flow nerf is going to hit. Not being able to Flow on two is huge. You get one less discount because you have to wait an additional turn and you spend one more turn doing nothing.
You also can't go Flow into Intellect anymore, which was a great way to shore up cheap ressources.
Basically Flow was the card that enabled mage to win unfavored matchups because it was just that unfair. Now they give their opponents and extra turn of early pressure. This is literally the Wild Growth nerf again and that basically turned a must-play on turn 2 into an optional card that's only played in very greedy ramp decks.
I doubt that Mage will even be around after this (unless some other archetype picks up the scraps). Their only purpose now is to beat slower control deck that don't currently exist (outside of maybe Shaman).
Flesh Giant is too low though, I agree. I've played copious amounts of Warlock at this point and most of the time you're either 1-mana short or have the discount overcharged anyways. With Battlemaster only at 6 it makes no difference for the Soul Rend decks while the other two builds are basically dead thanks to the Darkglare nerf.
Also you seem to have no real grasp on how much of a difference a single mana crystal makes. Darkglare is now basically unplayable in Standard because you can't discount it to 0-mana anymore and it requires way more mana to pop off. Also it's way less useful when it comes out of Raise Dead now.
I disagree. The parallel between Incanter's Flow and Wild Growth is not quite correct I think because the cards work differently. Wild Growth on 2 allowed you to skip from 3 mana straight to 4, which allowed you to cut a lot of the mediocre garbage on 3 and go more heavy on 4 drops, which Druid had an abundance of (Oaken Summons, Branching Paths, now Overgrowth). Wild Growth also only had value until players reached 10 mana crystals, so with Wild Growth a turn slower, its mana benefits decreased. But there's a world of difference between having 1 extra mana crystal for 6 turns or 7 and discounting 24 cards by 1 mana or 23. You still cheat way too much mana for way too little investment. With Flow you're not really changing the design and curve of your deck, you don't get to skip to a specific power turn ahead of schedule since what you really want to do with your mana is draw draw draw, without on-board progress, and if you're literally doing nothing on turn 2 with Flow nerfed, you're building your deck wrong. You can still prepare a Conjure Mana Biscuit, kill something off with Runed Orb, power up an Ignite, ping off a one-drop to slow down the opponent, in Wild you'll take that opportunity to play Ancient Mysteries before you hard-draw your Ice Blocks.
The turn-to-turn play pattern changes very slightly but the overall game-wide pattern remains the same: Control can't stop you and aggro is your counter. That hasn't changed. Aggro might have a slightly bigger window now but control is not in any better position than it was. Same goes for Darkglare. Sure, you slow the deck down a turn. It may pack a bit more removal, be a bit more defensive. Control still can't beat it. By the time they get to answer the Darkglare it will have cheated 3-4 mana (making itself essentially free, like Flow), made dramatic progress on the quest, and once the quest is online, it's over for control. Between Flow and Darkglare, the cost to complete the quest, or simply the cost to do broken stuff is too low because both cards allow that cost to go into the negatives. Mana cheating will never be balanced because if your opponent mana cheats, the only way you can keep pace with them is to either mana cheat even harder, or kill them real fast.
The devs had the opportunity to put a stop to this mana cheating pattern that has been a problem in both formats pretty much since the cards' introductions. Instead they let cheating continue and bumped it one mana. The meekest change they could have made and also one that is most prone to result in relapses in brokenness.
that's just demonstrably false and has been proven to be false many times over in the past.
Flow and Growth are absolutely comparable because both of them WANT to be played at 2 and are significantly worse when played at 3 (and are also much worse when you want to play them later on because you have to pay extra mana.
Quest Mage right now thrives on being able to turbo out the quest while filling out their curve efficiently. Can't fill out your curve with 3-mana do nothing.
The Darkglare one is also way more huge than you realize because
a) Free Admission no longer discounts it to 0 but only to 1 and the difference between those is MASSIVE and
b) Zoo can't get it down nearly as fast giving you at least one more turn to assemble countermeasures. WE're no longer in a meta where 2-mana deal 3 is all that common so it's so much easier to stick a 2/3 in the early turns. A 3/4 is sturdier but less likely to land on an empty board.
At the end of the day I don#t really have to convince you because the results will speak for themselves. Mage will pretty much disappear after this because it has no game against any tempo deck and can only counter slow control decks and all the Warlock builds that used to abuse Darkglare will become way too slow (there weren't even that good to begin with).
Still getting consistent turn 7 lethals with Ignite Mage after Incanter's nerf. The combo hasn't slowed down by even a turn, I get one less discount, and still have infinite mana turn 7.
sample size and matchups please. I doubt you're gonna perform all that well when your opponent casually decks you in the face over multiple turns while you were busy not clearing his threats on 3.
The data's gonna roll in eventually, Mage wasn't even that good before the nerfs and it most certainly hasn't gotten better.
I guess things may have been different in Standard; I play Wild. Currently 12 games in, 2 losses against tax Paladin (obviously) and 1 loss because I ran out of time on the combo. Every other game ended on turn 7 or earlier (if going second), beating Pirate Warriors (Quest and non-Quest), Odd Paladin, Warlocks (Quest and control), Odd DH, Odd Quest Hunters, one combo Mage that was slower than me because he didn't get Flow on 3. The deck feels just as broken as it did before, hence my complaints about the timidness of the nerfs.
I mean they do balance around Standard primarily so I don't know what you were even expecting. As far as I'm aware Mage isn't the nnumber one problem in Wild right now