Hearthstone has a lot of cool mechanics, although it's also somewhat infamous for locking a lot of them behind certain expansions and then never bringing them back. While some expansion-specific mechanics like Reborn, Magnetic, and Spellburst were really popular, managing to convince the Hearthstone team to give them more opportunities, some keywords were also very lacking and it left them being abandoned permanently because no one really cares about them.
In this article, we're going to look at what I consider to be the top 5 worst keywords in all of Hearthstone and explain why they failed.
5. Inspire
Inspire isn’t a bad keyword because it’s a bad ability in the game. It’s a bad keyword because most of the cards it’s featured on are bad… and it’s a bad ability in the game.
Inspire as a concept is a mechanic that encourages slowing down the game by giving minions abilities they can activate each turn they stay on the field. This isn’t necessarily a bad idea in and of itself, but the problem is that minions in Hearthstone are not designed to stay on the field for very long, often played with the idea that they might not even survive long enough to get one attack in because removal is everywhere. As a result, Inspire was mediocre in Constructed, but problematic in Arena where removal is rare and a surviving Inspire card could snowball.
This means that ideally you want to play an Inspire minion and then guarantee you’ll get one activation by using your Hero Power on the same turn, meaning that you also need to spend 2 extra mana in the process (Demon Hunter didn’t exist until 5 years after The Grand Tournament, so it’s not part of the argument). A Hero Power is like a convenience store, useful because it’s always there, but overpriced because it’s always there.
Because minions have good effects that are repeatable in theory, this means that Team 5 ended up horribly overestimating how strong the effects are. Orgrimmar Aspirant for example, requires you to play a 3 mana 3/3 and then 2 mana for your Hero Power to give your weapon +1 Attack, which in turn also requires you to have a weapon in play. Argent Watchman gains only 1 statpoint over the typical 2-mana statline with a decent effect, and trades the “decent effect” for a backbreaking downside requiring 2 mana to attack. This is a problem that plagues a lot of Inspire cards.
In the end, only a tiny number of Inspire cards actually ended up being good enough to be used anywhere: Savage Combatant, Thunder Bluff Valiant, Murloc Knight, Confessor Paletress, and to a lesser extent, Nexus-Champion Saraad, all saw some amount of success in Constructed, but the vast majority of them quickly fell into obscurity. When the game prints cards like Phase Stalker, make them 10 times stronger than the old Inspire cards, and then not give it Inspire, it just speaks as to how much they'd rather forget about Inspire.
4. Honorable Kill
Just like Inspire, one could make the argument that it’s not Honorable Kill as a mechanic that’s bad, but rather the cards that feature it are bad. Also just like Inspire, I will have to disagree with that take and say that both the mechanic and the cards that feature it are bad.
In all fairness, it’s not so bad on spells or weapons. On minions though, it’s a different story. Honorable Kill has a similar problem with Inspire in that you need the minions to survive for the Honorable Kill to really do anything, but while Inspire gives you the option to pay 2 extra mana to activate the effect right away, Honorable Kill gives you no such option. Barring a couple cards that can act right away, your only option is to play it and pray that it survives a turn. If you look at all of the Honorable Kill cards, you’ll notice that the best ones are the spells (and Bloodseeker) and the worst ones are the minions.
A good Honorable Kill card versus a bad one. The good one can act immediately, but the bad one cannot.
The minions are quite easy to deal with, not only because they need to survive a turn before the opponent can make them attack on their own accord, but also because they can’t activate on your opponent’s turn. I’m not sure if allowing this would be healthy, but at least it would’ve made it easier to set up Honorable Kills and force your opponent into awkward situations at times. As is though, Honorable Kill minions right now are easy to deal with before they can do anything or require other mechanics to make the Honorable Kill work. The puzzle of dealing exact lethal damage to a minion is sometimes interesting, but it puts yet another hoop that the minions need to jump through.
Overall, the keyword is just an awkward, unwieldy mess when it’s put on a minion.
3. Quickdraw
Quickdraw is a keyword that makes it on the list not only because it’s bad, but also for very personal reasons. What do I mean by that?
If you’ve been following me for a while, you might remember that I used to design my own custom class called Time Traveler, and it had its own class-exclusive keyword called Quick-Time. Quick-Time was a mechanic that triggered if you played the card on the same turn that it entered your hand. Kinda like Quickdraw. I started making the class right as soon as 2018 was rolling around, so I’d only really been in the custom Hearthstone scene for about a year or a year and a half, so I still was growing my repertoire as a designer.
I have since come to accept the fact that it was a flawed keyword from the very beginning, but given that I was too deep into designing the class to change it, I stuck with it and I supported it as best as I could. I realized early on that the randomness of card draw was an inherent flaw with Quick-Time, and the way that I worked around this was by making the class very draw-heavy, and making a lot of shuffle and Scry effects (its base Hero Power was itself a Scry effect). The randomness is still a bit frustrating, but the point is that I at least attempted to design my way around it.
So when Quickdraw was announced in Showdown at the Badlands, I was really excited, but I was also skeptical. This mechanic that I had been supporting for several years was finally making it into the game, but they also may very well drop the ball by not giving it any meaningful support in any way. I thought maybe they’d implement some new Scry effects, shuffle mechanics, or really just anything to help with the Quickdraw randomness, and then they made absolutely no attempt to work around the inherent flaw of Quickdraw. They thought enough ahead to make two of the Quickdraw cards Tradeable (Sunspot Dragon and Lay Down the Law), but not any of the others apparently.
With absolutely no mechanics printed alongside Quickdraw to help mitigate the randomness of drawing it at the wrong time, every single Quickdraw card is just a crapshoot because you either draw it at a good time or you don’t and then you can’t do anything about it. That’s not fun, is it? I really wish they would’ve printed more cards to try to work through the randomness of drawing it like Scrying or specific shuffling, or even just making them Tradeable. The tilting random element of when you draw them would still exist, but at least I would’ve appreciated the attempt of trying to work around that. But then they just did nothing about it, leaving me wondering why they even bothered printing the mechanic in the first place.
2. Overkill
We already discussed why Honorable Kill was bad, so how can it be even worse? The answer is Rastakhan’s Rumble. It’s sometimes thought of as the worst set ever printed, and the Overkill mechanic is certainly not doing it any favors. Pop quiz: Minus Linecracker, how many Overkill cards do you even remember?
I will concede that the mechanic is flavorful, but it has all of the same problems as Honorable Kill, only even worse. On spells and weapons, it’s okay (although most spells and weapons with the keyword still never saw play because they were just bad cards). On minions however, the Honorable Kill problem just repeats itself. The minions need to survive a turn before they can attack, and they can’t trigger during the opponent’s turn. A couple Overkill cards have Rush, but that doesn’t make the mechanic good. It’s giving a crutch to a kid with a broken leg. Sure they can walk now, but their leg is still broken.
The cards themselves were also just incredibly weak since they seemed to be designed around the idea that they’d trigger a bunch of times. So many Overkill cards are ones that I look at and I think to myself that there’s absolutely no reason the card needed to be as bad as it is. Sightless Ranger is a 5-Cost 3/4 minion that summons 2/2 worth of stats across two tokens. Or in other words, it’s Pit Fighter (a card that was 3 years old when the set came out and never saw any Constructed play in those three years) with the stats spittled around three bodies. Are we afraid that in another turn, Sightless Ranger is going to summon another 2/2 worth of stats? The reward isn’t worth anything. Overkill is realistically only going to ever trigger only once if any times at all. Every once in a while, you might get a second one, but that’s going to be quite rare and it’ll rarely be significant. Yet cards like Sightless Ranger, Arena Patron, and Half-Time Scavenger appear to be designed with the idea that you’ll regularly trigger it at least 3 times. That’s never happening.
Three Neutral Overkill cards that were all terrible, and none of them needed to be.
Overkill and Honorable Kill really should’ve been combined into one keyword. It would still have the problem of being slow and unwieldy since they need a turn before they can attack, but it would make actually using their effects much easier should they still be alive in time to use them.
1. Rewind
Across the Timeways is home to one of the best expansion keywords in the game, and also the worst. This is the latter. In my possibly controversial opinion, Rewind is the worst keyword in the entire game.
First things first - I’m pretty sure Rewind is the only mechanic in the game that has genuinely broken it and the developers needed to patch things up for it to not destroy the game even further, and if it’s not the only mechanic that’s done that, it’s definitely the one that’s done it the most. If you choose to Rewind, you have the admittedly pretty visual effect, but it also eats up such a huge amount of your turn time. Multiply so with Mister Clocksworth.
Mechanical hiccups aside, Rewind is also an extremely boring keyword to design around and it forces unnecessary randomness. Cease to Exist is for example, a card that feels like they made it random exclusively for the purpose of being able to put Rewind on it, but then again it might be the least terribly-designed Rewind card so perhaps I should cut it some slack.
Then you get to cards like Druid of Regrowth and Stadium Announcer, where the effects have an obscenely high scale of randomness and then Rewind is slapped on as a miserable attempt to justify how huge their amount of variance is. At that point, you could bring back the random damage mechanic from Shaman on cards like Crackle and claim that Rewind makes it acceptable. Do you guys like randomness? Now we have a mechanic that lets you replay the randomness so you can get more randomness, and maybe you’ll see it do the exact same thing you just rewound.
The two worst examples of Rewind being used to justify poorly designed randomness.
It’s pretty telling when the mini-set for the expansion didn’t feature a single Rewind card (it had Morchie, but that only interacted with the mechanic. It didn’t actually use it herself) because the mechanic is so botched. At best, it simply adds randomness where it’s really not needed, and at worst, it encourages poorly designed randomness and then sticking a band-aid over a gaping wound and pretending that it actually fixed anything. And on top of that, the process of actually rewinding the match BROKE THE GAME and the developers needed to fix it after they released the keyword. It’s quite obvious that Rewind was not shipped in a finished state.
Your list may differ quite a bit from mine. What are your least favorite keywords? Feel free to share your list in the comments below.
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