The theme of Hearthstone's latest card expansion, which is called The Great Dark Beyond, is building and launching increasingly powerful Starships. Unfortunately those sci-fi shenanigans have not been happening nearly enough for Blizzard's liking, largely because a bunch of older cards and decks are so powerful that they've crowded out the new stuff. Which is why Team 5's latest balance patch, which is live now, features a whopping 15 nerfs and 14 buffs aimed at getting the meta moving.
You can read the details here but the headline changes are to Quasar and Reno, Lone Ranger, both of which have been deservedly nuked from orbit for being two of the most toxic cards ever printed. Let's start with Quasar. It's a Rogue spell that reads: 'Shuffle your hand into your deck. Reduce the Cost of cards in your deck by (3).' The deck archetype that was created by Quasar involved using egregious amounts of card draw and burn spells to refill your hand and cheese your opponent out of the game.
The experiences when this card does work are too sharp and end games too early, turning the dream into a nightmare to play against.
—Blizzard
Was it super powerful? Not really. Quasar's Rogue's win rate according to HSReplay.net is hovering around the 40% mark, and the Vicious Syndicate Data Reaper report ranks it as a Tier 4 deck (which is the lowest). However, did Quasar feel absolutely obnoxious to lose to, as you watched your opponent draw their entire deck and cast a bazillion discounted damage spells? Absolutely. And from the content creators and players I follow, pretty much everyone but the degenerates piloting the deck seemed to agree that Quasar should never have been printed.
"Yeah, our bad…" reads the Blizzard blog post explaining the nerf. "Every expansion we like to make a few 'dreamy' cards that get players thinking about how far they can push the game. These cards aren’t supposed to be the most competitively viable; the fun of them is wondering 'what if.' Quasar mostly fell into that category—it certainly got the dreamers cooking and it hasn’t turned out to be a competitive power outlier—but the experiences when this card does work are too sharp and end games too early, turning the dream into a nightmare to play against."
And so the hammer fell. Quasar now costs 8-Mana to cast, up from 6 previously. That kind of Mana increase is effectively the same as deleting the card. A strategy that was already sub-optimal will now be all but impossible, and the game will be better for it.
Also getting kicked into another solar system is Reno, Lone Ranger. It's a neutral Hero card (ie it replaces your current hero power) that previously read: "Battlecry: If your deck started with no duplicates, empty the enemy board and limit it to 1 space for a turn." That effect amounted to fully resetting your opponent's board state. Reno even removed Dormant minions and Location cards, without triggering any Deathrattle effects in the process. Now, not only has the restriction that your opponent could only play a single minion on the following turn been removed, Locations and Dormant minions will remain in place.
Here's the Blizzard's spiel: "Reno has been a polarizing card since its release. He’s a necessarily strong payoff to singleton decks, which many players really enjoy, but playing against him can be really frustrating—especially his next turn board limitation. It’s been difficult to balance these competing player interests, and we don’t make this change lightly, but we felt Reno was due for an update (to no longer hit non-minions, Dormant minions, etc.) so we could give Starships a better chance to fly."
Given that Reno already restricted your deck-building to not including duplicates, at 10 Mana it now looks wildly over-costed and play should plummet. Reno was such a hard counter to Starships, because you could spend many turns building yours only to see it go *poof* with no reward whatsoever. Again, that felt terrible, and Blizzard is correct to balance around play experience as well as pure power.
Starships will also get a helping hand from some of the buffs being dealt out, most notably to The Exodar, which auto-launches your Starship along with one of three bonus effects. It's cost is dropping from 8 to 7 Mana, and its stats are changing from 6/10 to 6/8. That seems like a very good deal. "This last change is particularly spicy," said Blizzard. "We wanted to make sure that Starships got a chance to shine, but we’ll keep an eye on this one after all the changes go live to make sure we didn’t push too far." Don't worry, when has buffing cards ever got Blizzard into trouble?!
As usual, all the nerfed cards will be eligible for full dust refunds for two weeks from today.
