Opinion: Death Knight's Rune System Needs to Be Addressed

It may hard to believe it, but it's been almost two whole years since the release of Death Knight, Hearthstone's second post-launch class, and it very well may not be the last. But the original design philosophy of Death Knight has not exactly held up over time as we've seen the class move in a direction that's not too healthy for it.

What do I mean by this? Well, Death Knight's biggest design flaw and the stake through its heart is the Rune system and how it's supported. You can find a lot of people talking about how the Rune system has flopped pretty hard for the class if you do even a little bit of looking around. But how exactly did we get here?

1. Death Knight Gets the Same Amount of Cards Per Expansion as Other Classes

One of the biggest perpetrators as to why Runes have failed is that Death Knight receives the same amount of cards per expansion that other classes do. This is obviously fine for Demon Hunter since Demon Hunter isn't restricted in deckbuilding by an arbitrary dynamic "banlist" like Runes are for Death Knight. Death Knight being split into three subclasses effectively means that support for the class is extremely fragmented and tiny for each Rune. When Death Knight only gets 10 cards per set, then each of the individual Runes get such a tiny amount of support per set. You see how Mage or Shaman gets 10 cards of support per set, but Blood Death Knight only got 3 or 4? Precisely.

But all 10 cards for Mage or Shaman will be good, right? If you count only the cards that see play, then maybe they only "got" about 6 cards or so. By that same ratio, each Rune for Death Knight would only "get" about 1 or 2 cards, so the comparison does not exactly look good for Death Knight. One such argument you could make here is that Death Knight is supposed to be about Rune mixing, so maybe Blood didn't get only 3 cards since you could make any Rune combination deck you want with the non-triple Frost and Unholy cards. In an ideal world, this would be true, but Rune mixing has not exactly worked out the way that it should've.

Team 5 appeared to recognize how important the quantity was when they initially printed the class since Death Knight launched with 68 cards, which is just over 50% more than Demon Hunter's launch which contained 45 cards. In March of the Lich King and Path of Arthas, Team 5 heavily pushed the angle of giving you all sorts of different paths and flexibility to take. It's clear that they wanted to support the idea of going both all-in on one specific Rune type and also support you for trying to mix a little bit with some strong double and triple-Rune cards for each Rune type. By printing a whole lot more cards, they made sure to give each Rune an ample amount of support. But with only 10 card per expansion now, the support for each Rune becomes so minimal unless you exclusively focus on one Rune and leave the other two in the dust...

... Which was Team 5's original plan for supporting Death Knight moving forward until a bunch of players complained that basically meant that one Rune received "favoritism" over the others and left the class with a smaller number of routes to go per expansion. If you make an expansion that's entirely Unholy for example, then the hope for Death Knight for that expansion is just pray for Unholy to be good or you bust completely! This route might've lead to more even support for each Rune, but it also means that the class has much fewer ways to go, and people who don't like that way don't really get anything. If you love Unholy Death Knight for example, then this hypothetical only-Unholy expansion might be pretty exciting for you. But then in the next set, if they only print Frost, then the set's not really that exciting for you because there's not much (if anything) to add to your Unholy deck. In a world where the concept of Rune mixing was more successful, then this would be less of a problem, but well, we've seen first hand how that doesn't work so well.

The solution here should be to just give Death Knight a lot more cards than everyone else, right? While that might fix the issue of Runes receiving inadequate supported or being the "favorite" Rune over the others, there are some pretty nasty side-effects of this (which will be elaborated on later). Do you possibly give those cards out another way to get around this? What other way would that be? If it was locked behind a paywall, then people would complain about the game being "pay to win" if the class is meta or the class being a "scam" if it isn't meta. What about giving them out for free then? In that case, you basically just gave every player a way to reach the top ranks if the class happens to have at least one good deck.

2. Double and Triple-Rune Cards Discourage Rune Mixing Instead of Encouraging Decision Making

At least in its current state.

This is something we have a small sample size since we don't have many non-mixed Double or Triple-Runed cards (more on that later), but Double and Triple-Rune cards have not exactly had the intended amount of decision making involved in them. The intention was that you had to make an impactful decision on whether or not you chose to run your Double or Triple-Runed cards or try to dip into another Rune for support that you otherwise wouldn't be able to have.

This very well could be down to the way Triple-Runed cards are designed, but giving them up doesn't really make that much sense. Frostwyrm's Fury is an absolutely monstrous reward for going Triple-Frost and then you could even get more of them with Lady Deathwhisper, which many Frost decks ended up cutting, but she saw her fair amount of use (and I continued to run her in my Frost deck because she generally served me pretty well). Now, you tell me: What am I going to replace a Frostwyrm's Fury for? What single-Runed Blood or Unholy cards are so good for my Frost deck that I would be willing to sacrifice these two powerhouses for? The answer to that question is absolutely none of them, because even if the single-Runed Blood and Unholy cards are good by themselves, they wouldn't really go along with what my Frost deck would want to do. Triple-Frost Death Knight was a deck that I played quite a lot of when the class released, and while some of the single-Runed Blood or Unholy cards could've been theoretically good in that deck, I'm definitely not replacing Frostwyrm's Fury for just two of my thirty cards to be one of those cards that probably doesn't synergize with the deck as well as the Frostwyrm's Fury would've.

If we look at the other Runes, the situation isn't really any better. If I'm playing Triple-Blood, it's not like I'm replacing Vampiric Blood for, what? Plague Strike? Lord Marrowgar is an absolutely absurd finisher for Triple-Unholy which loves to hoard up a bunch of Corpses. Here's a crazy idea. How about instead of Lord Marrowgar, you could run... Bone Breaker! They'll never see it coming! On the other end of the spectrum, if Triple-Runed cards are extremely good, then those basically shape the meta and the aspect of needing to pick Runes is wasted since only one combination of Runes can run the card in question.

How do we fix this? As with every other problem with the class, the answer is not quite so simple. One suggestion I've heard is to not print any non-mixed Triple Rune cards meaning that there would still be that element of choice, but you could still specialize in one Rune. This does sacrifice the element of feeling you get when you would go "all-in" on one Rune type though. Additionally, the design could be in the way Triple-Rune cards are designed. Maybe the way to design Triple-Rune cards isn't by making them super powerful, but by limiting what they can do to certain Rune combinations. Maybe a Triple-Rune card of a Rune type wouldn't be "broken" if you could play it with another Rune, but rather it gives you access to something the other Runes shouldn't have.

This type of philosophy was originally present in Freeze effects on Frost cards where cards that only froze one minion had one Rune (or none in the case of Icy Touch which was an extremely small and simple card), and if they froze more than one, then they would need two or more Runes as is the case on Might of Menethil and Frostwyrm's Fury. This philosophy however was broken almost right away as the mini-set for March of the Lich King gave us Rimescale Siren which can Freeze multiple minions despite only having one Frost Rune. You might argue that this balanced because it has the condition of needing to cast three spells while holding it, which would be a valid point to make, but... Frostbitten Freebooter. No condition, freezes multiple minions. Only needing one Frost Rune. This leads into my next point which is sort of two points.

3. Over-reliance on "Rainbow" Strategies

Perhaps this second point could be lessened if not entirely rectified if there was decent support for non-mixed Double or Triple Rune cards, but here's the thing: There isn't. There never was. Pop-quiz: How many Triple-Rune cards have been printed since Death Knight's launch? The answer. Only 1: Climactic Necrotic Explosion, which is a "rainbow" card (meaning one of each different Rune type). Cards with more than one Rune of the same type have seen extremely little support since Death Knight's launch, and with the exception of the Plague cards (Distressed Kvaldir and Staff of the Primus), none of them have seen any decent play. It seems that Team 5 doesn't print any of them because they don't see play, when in reality, it's the other way around. They don't see play because not enough of them are printed. Slippery Slope which was printed in Perils in Paradise is the first card (and at the time of writing this article, the only card) with two Frost Runes printed since the class's launch. The number of Triple-Runed cards has actually decreased since the class launched.

What we see here is that basically any Death Knight deck that isn't Rainbow has received practically no support over the past few sets. I'm willing to forgive them for going this route for Perils in Paradise since it was most likely done so Warlock wouldn't be handicapped as much as other classes with the Tourism mechanic, but even in sets before that, everything has basically been Rainbow. Whizbang's Workshop for example, printed only Helm of Humiliation for non-Rainbow decks. Showdown in the Badlands printed only Farm Hand (and then printed Toysnatching Geist one set later, which is basically a stronger version of that card). Titans, as mentioned before is the one exception since Plagues ended up being a good deck. Festival of Legends gave us Cage Head and Death Metal Knight, neither of which ended up being meta-relevant.

Of course it makes sense that Single-Rune cards will be printed more often than Double-Rune ones since the Single-Rune ones will be applicable to more decks, but it seems as if this part of the Rune system has been almost entirely abandoned. Without any good Double-Rune cards, naturally people will just end up playing Rainbow instead and Single-Rune cards also have the side-effect of being playable in Rainbow no matter what just by virtue of the fact that they only have one Rune. Team 5 seemed to take note of the fact that Double-Rune cards didn't see play and instead of printing more of them to try to give Double-Rune combinations an extra push, they took Runes off of some cards. Soulstealer, Marrow Manipulator, and Plagued Grain all went from being Triple-Runed to Double-Runed despite the fact that the former two saw play early in the class's history. All three cards in the Rune-Discover Trio went from being Double-Runed to Single-Runed.

This doesn't exclusively apply to non-mixed cards either as Gnome Muncher and Nerubian Swarmguard went from being one Blood and one Unholy respectively to both becoming Runeless. Plagues started off as a Frost/Unholy hybrid, but eventually became exclusively Unholy when Down with the Ship and Tomb Traitor both had their Frost Runes taken off to become single-Unholy cards. The intention appears to be that there would be a meaningful deckbuilding choice of going Triple-Unholy in exchange for losing a few support cards, or spec-ing one Rune into Frost and losing only Marrowgar and the ability to spec into Blood. Instead, what ended up happening was that one route was blatantly better than the other one and the other one saw absolutely no play at all.

And with no Triple-Rune cards, there's no point in going all-in one one specific Rune... because there's only four Triple-Runed cards in Standard right now. One for Blood, one for Frost, one for Unholy, and Climactic Necrotic Explosion. Now, if there were a lot of good Double-Rune cards, this wouldn't be a problem. But as we just covered, we don't really get any of them, do we? With a lack of support for non-mixed Double-Rune and Triple-Rune cards, every Death Knight basically just becomes Rainbow or bust.

Now, I don't hate Rainbow synergy. In fact, I love it. I think it's great. It's a fun combination of try to grab a little bit of everything, but without any support for non-mixed Double or Triple-Runed cards, what other option are we given? Plagues was the one exception, but otherwise it's not looking great. I think Team 5 has actively acknowledged that the Rune system has failed, but haven't officially made any such announcement yet. If you look at the way they've printed the last few sets, they've pretty much given up on anything other than Rainbow. Of course, it's not feasible that all ten Rune combinations would be viable since it's extremely rare for any class to have more than three viable decks at a time. Sadly though, many combinations just don't get attempted anymore. When the class was launched, only non-mixed decks were viable, but when the good Double and Triple-Runed cards were rotated out, Plague is the only non-Rainbow deck that has managed to see any play.

Fixing Runes

As I'm going over why the Rune system has failed, it'd be kinda dumb for me to not give out any suggestions on how to help fix this. There are a few things that I've read about this problem.

1. Remove the Rune System Entirely

This is by far the most drastic approach, but also the most effective since the Rune system can't fail if there's no Rune system. I would wager that still early enough into the class's lifespan that this route can be taken, but if Team 5 wanted to take this route, you'd need to do it as soon as possible since the longer they wait, the more cards this solution would break and the harder it would be for them to swallow their pride.

Some cards were of course need to be changed, either for balance reasons or technical ones. I don't think we'd want to play against a deck where you could run Alexandros Mograine and Frostwyrm's Fury at the same time. Similarly, the cards that interact with Runes (like Rainbow Seamstress) in some way would obviously need to be reworked since there would be no system for them to interact with.

The biggest upside of this solution over some of the others is that it's something to implement once and then it's in effect forever. At the same time, it also strengthens the feeling of consistency since it now works a bit more like all of the other classes. Some cards would need to be changed initially, but since the classes now work the same way all of the others do, they already have a basis for how to design it going forward.

2. Give Death Knights an Extra Rune Slot (Whilst Keeping the 3-Rune Limit on the Cards)

Adding one more slot for Death Knight dramatically increases the flexibility of deckbuilding. If you've ever wanted to play Soulstealer and Overseer Frigidara in some super grindy Blood-Frost deck, then now you can.

This solution also comes more freedom to print non-mixed Double and Triple-Rune cards since they're still restricted by the Rune system, but their playability is increased dramatically because of what you can play with them. Now you CAN play Reska, the Pit Boss in your Triple-Frost or Triple-Unholy deck. Sounds like a pretty good deal. The Triple-Rune cards also doesn't receive as much of a massive power-spike because you can only run Single-Rune cards of one other Rune type. I don't think Triple-Blood is going to become super broken because it can now run Glacial Advance, although it does help to give the archetype some extra stalling tools.

The downside here is that the flavor of fully spec-ing into one Rune type is lost because you always need to do at least a little bit of mixing, but a flavor loss is much less egregious than a balance loss if you ask me.

3. Give Death Knights More Card Per Expansion than Other Classes

I did mention before in the article why I don't think this is a good idea, but for the sake of completeness, it is worth mentioning in this section.

As mentioned earlier, Death Knight simply does not get enough cards for each of its Runes for the Rune system to be particularly meaningful as while classes get 10 cards per expansion, Death Knight being split into three subclasses causes them to get less than that. It is true that you can mix some of the new Blood cards with some of the new Frost cards or even your own Frost cards, but the cards in question may not necessarily have synergy with those other cards or your decks in question since each Rune has its own design philosophy. In Perils in Paradise for example, you're not dying to run Snow Shredder in your predominantly Blood deck, are you? Giving more cards to the class in each release would ensure that each Rune type receives an adequate amount of love for them to stand a chance of them being viable (provided that Team 5 stays mindful of the Rune ratios, which they already do not have a perfect track record of) and can open new cross-Rune synergies.

Some problems arise from this however. Most prominent of which is that the game starts becoming a lot more expensive, and when money is already a fairly controversial subject in Hearthstone, it makes sense that Blizzard would want to avoid this. Extra cards also means that it bloats card pack openings with more Death Knight cards than any other class, meaning that people who can't or don't want to play Death Knight will get screwed over even more.

Additionally, if we assume that this means there are 10 or 15 extra cards being printed, this decreases the average amount of time spent on each card per expansion development cycle, which may lead to lesser overall average quality of the cards. Not just in Death Knight either. This problem could end up spilling out into other classes. Sure it has ended up surviving going from two full-size expansions per year to three, the addition of 10 extra cards per set on top of that, and three mini-sets per year, so the addition of a few more cards doesn't seem like a lot, but eventually we will reach the breaking point where it becomes too much work.

4. Print an Extra Abundance of Non-Mixed Double and Triple-Rune Cards

If Team 5 wants to emphasize of aspect of combination possibilities in the class, then there needs to be the element of choice which means that the Runes actually need to matter more for the decision element and a way to do this is by printing more cards with two or three Runes that don't mix themselves... Or Triple-Rune cards that do mix themselves, but still have two of the same Rune. The number of non-mixed Double-Rune cards in Standard right now is 8 (5 for Unholy, 2 for Blood, and 1 for Frost), and as mentioned before, there's not a lot of Triple-Runed cards in Standard.

But the current double-Runed cards don't see play, do they? I would wager that this is because there's just simply not enough of them, so why would there even be a thought of doubling up on one of the Runes if there's only one or two cards it supports and you lose dozens of others? If there was a larger abundance of super good Double-Runed cards, then all of a sudden it might become a challenge to find if a Double-Frost deck combines better with a Blood Rune or an Unholy one. This system is not entirely perfect since there's no clear number as to how many cards of this type you'd need to support the decks, and some good Triple-Runed cards means that the situation would likely resolve itself like launch Death Knight where the decks were just all of one Rune type, but a solution of being more vigilant of printing Double-Rune cards for one or two sets may be worth a shot.

This however does run into the same problem that Death Knight already runs into with card count. The number of cards supporting Double-Runed decks might go up, but at the end of the day, the average support per Rune would (likely) stay exactly the same, so those cards in question would need to have a huge impact unless this solution was implemented in conjunction with the one to give them more cards.

5. Some Other Option?

It's entirely possible that neither of these four options are the best way to go and maybe there's something better. If you can think of a good solution, feel free to tell us about it in the comments below.