Blizzard has confirmed that the first nerf to hit Showdown in the Badlands is none other than The Azerite Snake!
The Azerite Snake is the Warlock legendary Excavate treasure, so while the uncollectible card doesn't belong to one particular card, the reward is clearly quite powerful and it is too consistent to obtain with how powerful it is. We're left wondering what the plan is for dust refunds as anyone that spent dust to go out of their way to craft Excavate cards to play the deck might not feel great should the snake be nerfed into the ground.
Details on the nerf will be announced on Friday, and with the nature of the fix coming being via a hotfix, we're expecting the nerf to arrive that same day.
Quote From GallonHS Howdy partners, hope y'all are enjoying the first few days of Showdown in the Badlands! We're planning on a hotfix nerf for The Azerite Snake, as it's a clear sentiment outlier. More details to come Friday
Looking to Play an Azerite Snake Deck? Excavate Warlock!
While things are still early on and the meta is not stable, so if you're looking to play with The Azerite Snake, here's an idea to start with!
Comments
This is going to be interesting wrt the dust refund structure here for an uncollectable card. I'd be very surprised if Blizzard gives a refund on all warlock Excavate cards coz that's a lot of dust and that will incentivize players to dust an entirely new class archetype which I'm sure Blizzard wouldn't want. I'm assuming more and more Blizzard will give us the "harsh treatment" and there won't be any dust refunds at all.
I am pretty confident they will give us dust refunds for the Warlock and Neutral excavate cards. Is it really a lot of dust though? Looking back at the wildseed nerfs, we got dust refunds for all related cards which is worth a bit more dust actually.
Honestly, I would even be perfectly okay if they would exclude Tram Conductor Gerry from the dust refund.
They refunded Kargal Battlescar after nerfing the watch posts so I wouldn't be surprised if they also offered refunds for Tram Conductor Gerry.
It'll probably be something like reduce 2-4 damage, or just flat out make it deal damage instead of stealing health.
Whatever it is, Im not optimistic that snakelock would be gone for too long. The point is simply to slow down the snake so other things thats not aggro can actually play the game.
Well, good thing I got my Wild Excavate Warlock games in now, I knew before release the playstyle wasn't going to last the month but I didn't expect it to go this fast.
On the plus side they can't exactly kill the card without killing Warlock in Standard (I imagine) so the nerf might be fairly tame. But, pretty much any nerf in Wild is likely to kill the deck there.