#5 Flame Leviathan
As mentioned in the section on Mogor the Ogre, good players like to be in control of proceedings. Flame Leviathan is another card that is basically like shutting your eyes, taking the hand brake off, and hoping for the best.
It might seem at a glance that doing 2 damage to all characters for no cost is a pretty spectacular effect, and if you had any idea when it was likely to happen, it might be. But as thing stands it’s one of the ultimate examples of draw RNG determining a card’s value. You also need to remember that it’s a 7/7 for 7-Mana, so if you don’t get value from the effect, you’re left staring at a suboptimal play. To make matters even worse, sometimes the Leviathan is going to do two points of damage to you and hit no enemy minions. This is not ideally what a control deck wants to do.
Long term, this card has a little more potential than many of the others on the list. If we see more cards that enable deck manipulation, so that you can put the Leviathan on top of the deck, it might end up being playable, in Wild, in the right deck, in the right meta, in the future... Maybe. (Which is another way of saying you can go ahead and dust it.)
#4 Millhouse Manastorm
Millhouse is the OG of bad legendaries, but his existence serves a valuable purpose. When you first start playing Hearthstone, eventually you stumble across someone (like me) talking about the ‘Vanilla Test’. The idea that any minion with no card text (boring, hence vanilla), is entitled to a certain amount of stats according to its mana cost. 2-Mana minions are 2/3 or 3/2, 3-Mana minions can be 3/4 or 4/3, 4-Mana minions are 4/5 or 5/4, and so on.
At that point, Millhouse jumps out of the screen and screams value. How bad can the downside be if you’re getting a whopping 4/4 for 2 Mana? It turns out that, yup, it’s really bad. Anyone who has every played Millhouse has learned a powerful lesson. Millhouse’s engorged stats make him worth about an additional 1.5-Mana of value, but that doesn’t amount to much if his effet means your opponent can play enough spells to almost certainly win the game. Oh, and probably kill Millhouse along the way.
It’s almost a shame that such an iconic card belongs on this list, as it’s well-designed card. Maybe, one day, as the focus of card design shifts more and more towards minions, Millhouse will serve as a tech card to be played against decks which contain no spells. For now, nothing is coming up Millhouse.
#3 Hemet Nesingwary
When the most remarkable thing about a card is that it’s an anagram of "Ernest Hemingway", then you know you’ve got your work cut out to find reasons anyone might play it. The ability to destroy a minion, albeit a Beast in this case, is a very powerful one. So Hemet ought to be playable in the right meta.... Hahahaha, who am I kidding? Look at his 3 Health! Nobody is going all-in on the idea of killing a Beast anytime soon. For 5-Mana, you expect a minion that can stick around longer than Hemet—or one significantly more consistent when it comes to activating its Battlecry.
Although Beasts are a staple part of Hearthstone, they are only regularly included in Hunter and some Druid decks. Even when you’re facing one of those opponents and the effect goes off, it’s a lot less impactful than other tech cards. Compare the effect of Golakka Crawler on an early Pirate, and the tempo that gains. Hemet has one job, and he doesn’t do it very well or very often. When you’re looking for legendaries to dust, the Bell Tolls for Nesingwary.
#2 The Boogeymonster
The Boogeymonster has evolved from hiding under kids’ beds at night to hiding in their Whispers of the Old Gods packs—a much more frightening proposition. A 6/7 minion for eight Mana needs to have a big upside to be playable, and The Boogeymonster falls way short of the mark. The word “attacks” in the ability even rules out any thought of giving it Taunt and at least having some fun with the card.
To put this into perspective, let’s take a look at our old friend Boulderfist Ogre. This is a card that you unlock for free at the start of the game and has the same stats as The Boogeymonster for two fewer Mana. Boulderfist’s flavour text is “ME HAVE GOOD STATS FOR THE COST”. Now let’s see what we get for the additional two Mana we have to pay for The Boogeymonster. If you manage to get the ability to activate once, then you will have an 8/9 minion (minus the damage it took when it killed something), which is still not fantastic for the cost.
Big piles of stats are rarely that great (you don’t see Gruul in any tier one decks either) and as big piles of stats go, The Boogeymonster is more like a big pile of something else.
#1 Wilfred Fizzlebang
Having seen so many horrific cards already, you would be forgiven for thinking that the polling was close when it came to deciding the absolute worst of the worst. You would be incorrect. Wilfred Fizzlebang was top by an absolute mile.
In some ways Wilfred is a weird choice. Cards that cost zero Mana have been a staple part of many incredibly powerful decks since the dawn of card games. Soulfire, Hunter’s Mark, and most recently Innervate, have all felt the sweet kiss of the nerfhammer as a result. On top of that, Raza the Chained is currently running riot in one of the best decks in Standard thanks to his cost reduction effect. Somehow, Fizzlebang does not manage to instill the same kind of fear. In fact he is all fizzle, no bang.
The problem here is the huge investment required, and the lack of consistency of the card draw effect. The first card you get to cast for free actually costs 8 Mana if you factor in the cost of Wilfred and the Life Tap required to draw it, which is very restrictive if you then draw an irrelevant card. The second card you draw costs… well… actually you don’t draw a second card, because by then Fizzlebang's paltry 4/4 stats means he's almost certainly dead.
Wilf’s meagre hopes for the future rest on either more deck manipulation effects, or Warlocks suddenly being allowed to use their Hero Power multiple times in the same turn. And even in those instances, it still feels unlikely that Wilfred would be good enough to see play. You know it’s truly a terrible card for the ages when even the meme decks aren’t interested.
