PURIFY IS NOT AS BAD AS YOU THINK (I have a PhD in clinical psychology btw)

TLDR(CONT.);

This brings me to another upcoming release: Medivh’s Valet. This card has also received some pretty high ratings, given its powerful effect. In assessing the card, however, I’ve yet to see people explicitly consider precisely how many turns you will be holding River Crocolisk in your hand. As I mentioned, Dragon Warrior plays about 8 dragons to consistently activate cards like Blackwing Corrupter, and those dragons don’t need to be in play first either. How many mage secrets do you want to run in order to activate the Valet often enough to get value? The only secret unlikely to get consistently triggered is Ice Block, but you can only run two of them, and that’s assuming you’re playing a deck that wants you to run any. Playing two blocks alone is like playing 2 dragons and 2 Alexstrasza’s Champions, hoping for the best. Will you want to play Counterspell or Mirror Entity as well?

I don’t have the answers to these questions, and it’s quite possible Valet will turn out to be good (the effect is strong, to be clear), but when assessing the card I haven’t seen many people doing the math on it.

The take-home message: redundancy of effect builds consistency of deck. Speaking of decks, however…

Lesson 3: Build the deck the card belongs in

This is an important exercise for anyone in assessing new cards for a very simple reason: all cards have opportunity costs. Opportunity costs refer, roughly, to what could have been. If I spend an hour playing Hearthstone, that’s an hour I can’t also spend writing. When cards are assessed in a vacuum, people can think of all sorts of best and worst case scenarios for them; it’s often not until you see them in the context of a deck, however, that their weakness become clear and you think about what else the deck might want to include that it currently lacks.

To put this in a concrete example, I’m going to return to Beast Druid. I tried throwing together a hypothetical beast list with the Tiger/Warden combo being an option. The problem I quickly saw in the deck, however, is that it contained effectively no card draw: the two Marks do cycle, but not only are they conditional in their ability to do so, but that was all the deck had. I then turned to what cards were capable of drawing, and like many others, settled on Azure Drakes as a good option: their body was fine, they combed with spell damage cards, and they had some great synergy with the upcoming Curator (draw two cards, one of which draws another card? Now we’re talking about gas in the tank). However, this displayed another problem: I was now playing six(!) 5-drop minions in my aggressive beast list (two Tigers, Drakes, and Druids of the Claw). Not only did that upset the curve a bit (too many of the same costed cards becomes awkward), but that draw package had to come at the expense of something else. Should I cut more of my early game? That aspect of the list didn’t seem overly strong as it was, especially if I’m going to be competing with decks like Zoo and Dragon Warrior. Should I cut out the burst potential in the form of Savage Roar? How about the late game; even with the gas, are enough of these drops going to be able to seal the game often? Maybe I should rethink that whole Tiger package after all…

The take-home message: it’s not until you see your cards in context that their hidden costs and benefits become apparent.

Lesson 4: Never underestimate small effects

There is a frequent call for Blizzard’s design team to buff or nerf cards that aren’t seeing enough – or seeing too much – play. The team is hesitant to do so for a lot of reasons, one of which, I’m sure, is that Hearthstone is a very dynamic environment, and the law of unintended consequences is always at play. Changing even a single number on a card can make the difference between it being trash or broken, and this holds true especially in the early game.

It’s for this reason that a card like Zoobot seems like it has real potential. When compared with something like Shattered Sun Cleric, the Zoobot only needs to hit a single target to have the highest combined stats – in terms of raw numbers – than basically every other three drop in the game. In fact, Shattered Sun used to be a 3/3, but was nerfed as it was believed the stat line was too strong at the time. Would that be the case in today’s meta? Only one way to find out. This point about small effects is an easy point to make across a number of cards. Voidwalker is a Zoo staple and Goldshire Footman is never played anywhere; if Living Roots only summoned a single Sapling, it would be quite underwhelming; Kobold Geomancer doesn’t seem much play, but Cult Sorcerer does; if Novice Engineer cost 1 mana it would be in almost every deck, whereas it’s barely touched at 2.

Speaking of Novice Engineer costing one, I’ve seen lots of people down on two new cards: Swashburgler and Babbling Book. While people – especially pros – seem to dislike the latter more than the former, I’ve seen too many comparisons to Wisp to stomach. Because people underestimate the effect of “draw a semi-random card,” they can only see the body. The exact same thing happened when people saw Dr. Boom and underestimated the effectiveness of those little Boom Bots, even going so far as to compare him to War Golem.

In terms of their body, they are indeed comparable to wisps, but in terms of their effect they’re quite a bit closer to 1-mana Engineers. Not only that, but they come complete with synergies that both classes might want: Swashburgler can enable combos effectively, give Rogue something to do on turn 1, pair with a dagger poke to trade with a 1- or 2-drop while maintaining tempo without losing card advantage and, who knows, maybe Ethereal Peddler will turn out to be a real deck. The story is much the same with the book: it has synergy with Flamewaker and Sorcerer’s Apprentice, can kill a 2/1 or help kill a 2-health minion with a ping, helping you maintain tempo, and provide a more consistent proactive turn 1 play (of which mage currently has effectively Mana Wyrm and that’s it). Now sure, maybe Tempo mage doesn’t want to ping on turn 2 to finish off a King’s Elekk with a book attack, but it certainly doesn’t want to throw away an Apprentice or Sorcerer (possibly to a bow attack and not a trade) either.

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