Hearthstone is finally nerfing Dr. Boom and several other problem cards

Balance patches follow expansions as surely as night follows day, and now that Saviors of Uldum is out, and the Seoul Masters is over, a batch of cards are about to be hit with their long-awaited nerfs. It's about time.

First, some Mage changes. The cost of Conjurer's Calling is being raised from 3 to 4 because, as Blizzard puts it, "when used in decks focused around cards like Mountain Giant and Sea Giant, it was creating extremely powerful board states at a point in the game where opponents didn’t have effective answers." That change will also make it harder to use both copies of Twinspell in the same turn.

One of the buffs from Rise of the Mechs reduced the cost of Luna's Pocket Galaxy—a change that's going to be completely reversed, increasing its cost back to 7. Blizzard don't normally buff cards like they did during the Rise of the Mechs event, and I guess this is why. The risk of over-tuning and creating a new problem is real.

It's telling that Luna's Pocket Galaxy has swiftly become regarded as even more egregious than Conjurer's Calling, thanks to it ability to enable Mage's to create upwards of 25-Mana's worth of stuff on a single turn. Reverting the change is 100% the right call.

Speaking of popular moves, control Warrior decks are finally going to have to stop crutching on Dr. Boom, Mad Genius as its cost gets bumped up to 9. Jesse Marczyk in particular, who wrote an entire essay for us about why the doc deserves to be nerfed, will be glad to see that.

Combo Priest saw a big boost thanks to Saviors of Uldum, and is now being slapped back down slightly in the form of another reversed buff. The cost of Extra Arms is going back up to 3 so it won't be such a popular power-play in the early game, encouraging Priests to try out a greater variety of the low-cost minions they gained from Saviors of Uldum.

On the neutral side, there's been a lot of complaint in Wild about Barnes and especially its synergy with the obnoxious Big Priest deck. In another change that's likely to be welcomed by a significant number of players, the cost of Barnes is being bumped up by 1 Mana to 5.

All these changes will come into effect on August 26, at which point you'll be able to dust the affected cards for their full value.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.