Without scaling Pufferquil doesn't do much even when supported. It gets popped by the Divine Shield minion its set against and/or ends up overhwlemed by recursion, poison or no. It probably needs a Heatlh boost when it gets spellcrafted or blood gem'd.
The nerfs can be described with the word “obviously” typed over and over, but one notes that Wildpaw Gnoll is so egregiously Blizzard’s own fault that it’s not even funny. As for buffs:
Battlefield Necromancer and Boneguard Commander are both burdened with the same problem: Blizzard was too afraid of Unholy being strong (which seems foolish — board-based build-up decks are always weaker than other concepts in modern Hearthstone — but maybe I missed something) so their summoned minions don’t contribute Corpses. This is even more hilariously bad because Blood has Soulstealer which, alongside normal play, often gives it better Corpse generation than Unholy.
In that vein, Unholy Frenzy getting a buff sounds very good indeed. If you pair a cheaper Unholy Frenzy with a rush minion you’re getting some pretty good early board control.
Vengeful Walloper will not save minion-based DH. The nerfs might. Here’s hoping.
I rarely give Blizzard praise — I rarely have cause to — but the list of buffs looks very good. I especially like how they’re hitting multiple cards in a package. Priest Undead is getting a shot in the arm spread over three cards and Dar'Khan Drathir is getting its inevitable teammate Infantry Reanimator buffed. That’s far, far better than their previous trend of doing few buffs and usually for single cards in an archetype. That’s a really good sign.
I question whether or not minion DH and Dragon Pally are getting enough bennies for exactly that reason, though. Still, good trend.
I’m hoping that nu-Asvedon, the Grandshield gives you a copy of the spell that costs zero and that leaves your hand at the end of the turn. It won’t, but I’m wishing it.
Mana Burn and Illidari Studies as a cheeky lark ran into its only hard counter, Counterfeit Coin and Murloc Holmes. Note that the latter is absolute garbage and would auto-lose to all [Hearthstone Card (Patches) Not Found] decks and only just barely keep up with many others, and it lucked into the only deck it could soundly beat.
After that noise, we employ Renew and Shard of the Naaru, a go-to in this Brawl, and face Boar Shaman opening with Boars and Hero Power Totems. Entombed the first Boar. Before I could Drown the second, Shaman conceded and their second card was never revealed.
It absolutely had to be Earth Shock. I played no minions and both of us skipped a turn or two, suggesting that he physically couldn't play the card until I played something. This would mean that the first boar I copied or stole would be silenced and destroyed, but it also meant that he could never get the Sword of a Thousand Truths: I would simply silence his 6th+ boar once I'd allowed them to be destroyed and he can't destroy his own because this always silences the Boar.
Here's a lifesteal Demon Hunter deck, mentioned because there isn't one above. I haven't refined it because I won a pack and have stopped trying to play the Brawl right now (no time and/or bored by it) so note that it can definitely be improved.
### Brawl Deck # Class: Demon Hunter # Format: Wild # # 2x (1) Double Jump # 2x (1) Felscream Blast # 1x (1) Final Showdown # 2x (1) Sigil of Alacrity # 2x (1) Unleash Fel # 2x (2) Mo'arg Artificer # 1x (3) Brann Bronzebeard # 1x (3) Coldlight Oracle # 2x (3) Stiltstepper # 2x (4) Glide # 2x (4) Guild Trader # 1x (4) Il'gynoth # 1x (4) Prosecutor Mel'tranix # 2x (4) Sightless Magistrate # 2x (5) Azure Drake # 1x (9) Alexstrasza the Life-Binder # 1x (9) Malygos # 1x (9) Malygos the Spellweaver # 1x (9) Sathrovarr # 1x (10) Sire Denathrius # AAEBAZvoAwq0A/gH/bYD0N0D9/YDsIoEtYoE6dAEmNQE7u0ECum+A9bRA/nVA8fdA8/dA4r3A8X5A6TUBL3tBIuSBQA= # # To use this deck, copy it to your clipboard and create a new deck in Hearthstone
Notes:
Any Battlecry that draws a card is amazing in this Brawl, such that your real gold standard is play-one-draw-two cards.
Unleash Fel looks like a win condition but you will likely lose if you wait until turn 6. It works better as a board clear until you do the more traditional Felscream Blast finish on 5 or before.
Switcheroo is banned in this Brawl. Of all the classes to be concerned with, the reliable turn-5 winning-with-everything Rogue wasn't touched to the best of my knowledge, but Priest was.
My understanding is that Bwonsamdi, the Dead doesn't work. Your cards are full price in the deck, not 1 drops, so he pulls nothing.
I can't get into Hearthstone to check these for a few minutes so I don't know if Switcheroo's status was change, but it's likely too slow in this Brawl anyway. As mentioned, you generally want to win by turn 5 and eating up turn 3 (unless you're regenerating that mana) with one spell seems like a bad plan.
I noticed that minions in the deck are not 1/1s. For example, a "draw two 1-health minions" effect will only draw minions that are normally 1-health minions.
I saw that too.
I had an elaborate plan to run Bwonsamdi but decided to not even try because I realized that it probably wouldn't work.
Note that the game ends on Turn 5 or sooner against tuned or lucky decks, so you can't use any of the high-cost spells that reduce costs.
Instead, recall that every minion that draws a card costs only 1, so that makes all draw-plus-upside minions insanely good. Stiltstepper plus Brann can draw multiple ards and give you big swings, for example. Azure Drake is spell damage plus draw.
Rogue is the deck to beat here as basically every mana-cheating minion-support Rogue deck that has ever been invented works. Like, old-school Auctioneer works here.
I was going to make a counter-deck to punish the bullshit mana-cheaters by trying to abuse Mutanus, but I realized that I'd have to craft some things to really attack the opponents' hands and got bored and already won my pack so I didn't do it.
Accidentally queing into ranked with a jank "Oops! All Lifesteal" lifegain-and-defense absolutely-not-serious casual deck and finding out, for the very first time, that the entire meta was burn decks and getting a pocket of 4 players in a row utterly tilted that they were at least two damage from winning the game by burning me down from full life, all while I'm saying "why is this trash winning?"
The random assortment of cards I put together in 25 seconds and didn't play with any care was more successful than the grand plans I had for clever and interesting decks.
But, as sad as that is, playing the Unexpected Reno against someone working way harder than me for the win was sublime. Stupid, but sublime.
I don't have Evolve, but I did have access to all the other evolve-style effects. Putting in all of them -- save for Devolve effects (like Primordial Wave) which can remove your opponent's gifts which hurts you -- and Crazed Alchemist led to a game where I had hand advantage at every point and board advantage most of the time.
Blizz has a hardcore bias for the new and it will remove the less-recent card for the sake of the newest. Witness the tragedy of Caria Felsoul.
Note that, in this very set, Tome Tampering was hit -- but Wild players had that card before now. Meanwhile, Soul Barrage is wrecking face in Wild and the devs don't even mention the card in their writeup.
Their goal isn't to fix the problem but to quiet it. The newest set must be kept as attractive as possible.
Ironically enough, this is yet another reason not to play full Unholy. The boost to a Blood card is a bigger deal than the boosts to a number of Unholy cards.
One of the signs that your design is bad is that you have to absolutely destroy other cards that, alongside 99% of the card base, present no problem to preserve the problematic card.
Shadowstep was specifically built in a world where the Battlecries of today and the Rush keyword would have been rejected or toned down due to power level. Cheap bounce is out of place and limits the crap out of design space.
Guff may break it in the late game, but to me it is druid's early ramp nonsense that really makes it a viable deck against all but the most aggressive aggro deck.
And that's what the devs have been building towards all along!
Remember when Wild Growth was nerfed, not because Wild Growth was broken, but implicitly so it could make room for more cards that did the same thing as it but better? That was Team 5 saying "we have this bad idea to take a good thing (ramp to reasonable value) and turn it into a bad thing (ramp into meta-warping value) and we need to crush the infrastuctre that makes the good stuff happen."
You can't easily isolate Guff because Guff is part of an overall plan where the outcome is exactly what we're experiencing now. This is what peak performance looks like. And the only way to get that changed would be for the design motifs to have a) existed a year ago, b) have been a problem a year ago such that c) people on social media lose their shit over them all. That's how Discover got dialed back -- a little. And it has to be a year because the sets are made a year in advance and changes after set design are pulling teeth.
Druid has bad bones.
Worse, the kind of changes it takes to fix it are changes to Hearthstone itself because the balance is built around its power level. The absolute most you can hope for are a series of neutral cards that gain in power if the opponent has more mana crystals than you, with an increasing benefit as the difference rises. And you will never get those, or nerfs, or anything else for the same reason they never fixed Nozdormu's turn-eating: it's not a bug, it's a feature.
Every single problem Druid creates with high-value cards -- every single one -- was predicted and predictable. Even the Denatrius nerf was floated in forums within days of his release. Team 5 has enthusiastically driven Druid into its present direction with unbridled enthusiasm. This isn't a symptom of a greater goal, this is the goal.
Druid (from our perspective) ruining the meta, card quality, and experience isn't a bug, it's a feature.
We simply have different goals from the devs.
If Guff is changed again, it will only be well-after maximum damage is done.
Bit of really, really minor trivia: you can get an effect similar to Patron in the unlikely event that both Hydralodon and Glugg the Gulper are in play on your side.
I had that happen just today when my opponent played a corpse explosion. Hydralodon's Hydralodon Heads fed Glugg to the point that it was a one-card-lethal over the course of a long animation. (And since the opponent relied upon a single minion with Taunt to protect him from said lethal and a Nagaling I created that following turn rolled Asphyxiate, that didn't work.)
(If that seems lucky, know and understand that my deck and hand had been stripped of every win condition due to random effects from my opponent such that I was dying to fatigue and several copies of Alexandros Mograine 's effect at the start of the next turn, so the luck was theirs and it was their game to lose.)
Capping would be an elegant solution for Shockspitter as well, but Team 5 has a passionate hatred for caps, we must infer, because they are rejected at every turn.
Without scaling Pufferquil doesn't do much even when supported. It gets popped by the Divine Shield minion its set against and/or ends up overhwlemed by recursion, poison or no. It probably needs a Heatlh boost when it gets spellcrafted or blood gem'd.
The nerfs can be described with the word “obviously” typed over and over, but one notes that Wildpaw Gnoll is so egregiously Blizzard’s own fault that it’s not even funny. As for buffs:
Battlefield Necromancer and Boneguard Commander are both burdened with the same problem: Blizzard was too afraid of Unholy being strong (which seems foolish — board-based build-up decks are always weaker than other concepts in modern Hearthstone — but maybe I missed something) so their summoned minions don’t contribute Corpses. This is even more hilariously bad because Blood has Soulstealer which, alongside normal play, often gives it better Corpse generation than Unholy.
In that vein, Unholy Frenzy getting a buff sounds very good indeed. If you pair a cheaper Unholy Frenzy with a rush minion you’re getting some pretty good early board control.
Vengeful Walloper will not save minion-based DH. The nerfs might. Here’s hoping.
I rarely give Blizzard praise — I rarely have cause to — but the list of buffs looks very good. I especially like how they’re hitting multiple cards in a package. Priest Undead is getting a shot in the arm spread over three cards and Dar'Khan Drathir is getting its inevitable teammate Infantry Reanimator buffed. That’s far, far better than their previous trend of doing few buffs and usually for single cards in an archetype. That’s a really good sign.
I question whether or not minion DH and Dragon Pally are getting enough bennies for exactly that reason, though. Still, good trend.
I’m hoping that nu-Asvedon, the Grandshield gives you a copy of the spell that costs zero and that leaves your hand at the end of the turn. It won’t, but I’m wishing it.
Start of Game effects check before the 15 get added. Sometimes.
I think there may be multiple Start of Game proc points.
Hasn't Bru'kan suffered enough? Maybe give him some paint instead.
Mana Burn and Illidari Studies as a cheeky lark ran into its only hard counter, Counterfeit Coin and Murloc Holmes. Note that the latter is absolute garbage and would auto-lose to all [Hearthstone Card (Patches) Not Found] decks and only just barely keep up with many others, and it lucked into the only deck it could soundly beat.
After that noise, we employ Renew and Shard of the Naaru, a go-to in this Brawl, and face Boar Shaman opening with Boars and Hero Power Totems. Entombed the first Boar. Before I could Drown the second, Shaman conceded and their second card was never revealed.
It absolutely had to be Earth Shock. I played no minions and both of us skipped a turn or two, suggesting that he physically couldn't play the card until I played something. This would mean that the first boar I copied or stole would be silenced and destroyed, but it also meant that he could never get the Sword of a Thousand Truths: I would simply silence his 6th+ boar once I'd allowed them to be destroyed and he can't destroy his own because this always silences the Boar.
So that deck has some challenges.
Here's a lifesteal Demon Hunter deck, mentioned because there isn't one above. I haven't refined it because I won a pack and have stopped trying to play the Brawl right now (no time and/or bored by it) so note that it can definitely be improved.
### Brawl Deck
# Class: Demon Hunter
# Format: Wild
#
# 2x (1) Double Jump
# 2x (1) Felscream Blast
# 1x (1) Final Showdown
# 2x (1) Sigil of Alacrity
# 2x (1) Unleash Fel
# 2x (2) Mo'arg Artificer
# 1x (3) Brann Bronzebeard
# 1x (3) Coldlight Oracle
# 2x (3) Stiltstepper
# 2x (4) Glide
# 2x (4) Guild Trader
# 1x (4) Il'gynoth
# 1x (4) Prosecutor Mel'tranix
# 2x (4) Sightless Magistrate
# 2x (5) Azure Drake
# 1x (9) Alexstrasza the Life-Binder
# 1x (9) Malygos
# 1x (9) Malygos the Spellweaver
# 1x (9) Sathrovarr
# 1x (10) Sire Denathrius
#
AAEBAZvoAwq0A/gH/bYD0N0D9/YDsIoEtYoE6dAEmNQE7u0ECum+A9bRA/nVA8fdA8/dA4r3A8X5A6TUBL3tBIuSBQA=
#
# To use this deck, copy it to your clipboard and create a new deck in Hearthstone
Notes:
Any Battlecry that draws a card is amazing in this Brawl, such that your real gold standard is play-one-draw-two cards.
This deck probably needs a Wayward Sage.
A Gorloc Ravager is justified as it can draw both Coldlight Oracles.
Unleash Fel looks like a win condition but you will likely lose if you wait until turn 6. It works better as a board clear until you do the more traditional Felscream Blast finish on 5 or before.
Mutanus is probably better than Sathrovarr. Dirty Rat is probably huge here, too.
Loatheb is probably utterly busted in this busted format. You could probably build a package around Sathrovarr, Zola the Gorgon, and Brewmasters just replaying Mutanus and Sathrovarr and Rats and maybe Prosecutor Mel'tranix. I'd replace Alexstrasza the Life-Binder and Sire Denathrius when trying this sort of thing because you don't need stall/stabilization tools if your denial game is on-point.
Switcheroo is banned in this Brawl. Of all the classes to be concerned with, the reliable turn-5 winning-with-everything Rogue wasn't touched to the best of my knowledge, but Priest was.
My understanding is that Bwonsamdi, the Dead doesn't work. Your cards are full price in the deck, not 1 drops, so he pulls nothing.
I can't get into Hearthstone to check these for a few minutes so I don't know if Switcheroo's status was change, but it's likely too slow in this Brawl anyway. As mentioned, you generally want to win by turn 5 and eating up turn 3 (unless you're regenerating that mana) with one spell seems like a bad plan.
I saw that too.
I had an elaborate plan to run Bwonsamdi but decided to not even try because I realized that it probably wouldn't work.
But Taelyn and Vandar probably still could.
Lifesteal Demon Hunter worked.
Note that the game ends on Turn 5 or sooner against tuned or lucky decks, so you can't use any of the high-cost spells that reduce costs.
Instead, recall that every minion that draws a card costs only 1, so that makes all draw-plus-upside minions insanely good. Stiltstepper plus Brann can draw multiple ards and give you big swings, for example. Azure Drake is spell damage plus draw.
Rogue is the deck to beat here as basically every mana-cheating minion-support Rogue deck that has ever been invented works. Like, old-school Auctioneer works here.
I was going to make a counter-deck to punish the bullshit mana-cheaters by trying to abuse Mutanus, but I realized that I'd have to craft some things to really attack the opponents' hands and got bored and already won my pack so I didn't do it.
This Brawl is meant to be fun. Brawliseum isn't about fun. :-/
Accidentally queing into ranked with a jank "Oops! All Lifesteal" lifegain-and-defense absolutely-not-serious casual deck and finding out, for the very first time, that the entire meta was burn decks and getting a pocket of 4 players in a row utterly tilted that they were at least two damage from winning the game by burning me down from full life, all while I'm saying "why is this trash winning?"
The random assortment of cards I put together in 25 seconds and didn't play with any care was more successful than the grand plans I had for clever and interesting decks.
But, as sad as that is, playing the Unexpected Reno against someone working way harder than me for the win was sublime. Stupid, but sublime.
I don't have Evolve, but I did have access to all the other evolve-style effects. Putting in all of them -- save for Devolve effects (like Primordial Wave) which can remove your opponent's gifts which hurts you -- and Crazed Alchemist led to a game where I had hand advantage at every point and board advantage most of the time.
I didn't fit in Master of Evolution, but Muck Pools and Convincing Disguise worked well.
There are several turns between gift appearances; note that your evolve effects are rather dead in this interval.
I didn't, but you likely should play with weapon recursion with Boggspine Knuckles.
Blizz has a hardcore bias for the new and it will remove the less-recent card for the sake of the newest. Witness the tragedy of Caria Felsoul.
Note that, in this very set, Tome Tampering was hit -- but Wild players had that card before now. Meanwhile, Soul Barrage is wrecking face in Wild and the devs don't even mention the card in their writeup.
Their goal isn't to fix the problem but to quiet it. The newest set must be kept as attractive as possible.
Ironically enough, this is yet another reason not to play full Unholy. The boost to a Blood card is a bigger deal than the boosts to a number of Unholy cards.
One of the signs that your design is bad is that you have to absolutely destroy other cards that, alongside 99% of the card base, present no problem to preserve the problematic card.
Shadowstep was specifically built in a world where the Battlecries of today and the Rush keyword would have been rejected or toned down due to power level. Cheap bounce is out of place and limits the crap out of design space.
And that's what the devs have been building towards all along!
Remember when Wild Growth was nerfed, not because Wild Growth was broken, but implicitly so it could make room for more cards that did the same thing as it but better? That was Team 5 saying "we have this bad idea to take a good thing (ramp to reasonable value) and turn it into a bad thing (ramp into meta-warping value) and we need to crush the infrastuctre that makes the good stuff happen."
You can't easily isolate Guff because Guff is part of an overall plan where the outcome is exactly what we're experiencing now. This is what peak performance looks like. And the only way to get that changed would be for the design motifs to have a) existed a year ago, b) have been a problem a year ago such that c) people on social media lose their shit over them all. That's how Discover got dialed back -- a little. And it has to be a year because the sets are made a year in advance and changes after set design are pulling teeth.
Druid has bad bones.
Worse, the kind of changes it takes to fix it are changes to Hearthstone itself because the balance is built around its power level. The absolute most you can hope for are a series of neutral cards that gain in power if the opponent has more mana crystals than you, with an increasing benefit as the difference rises. And you will never get those, or nerfs, or anything else for the same reason they never fixed Nozdormu's turn-eating: it's not a bug, it's a feature.
The best part about all this:
Every single problem Druid creates with high-value cards -- every single one -- was predicted and predictable. Even the Denatrius nerf was floated in forums within days of his release. Team 5 has enthusiastically driven Druid into its present direction with unbridled enthusiasm. This isn't a symptom of a greater goal, this is the goal.
Druid (from our perspective) ruining the meta, card quality, and experience isn't a bug, it's a feature.
We simply have different goals from the devs.
If Guff is changed again, it will only be well-after maximum damage is done.
Bit of really, really minor trivia: you can get an effect similar to Patron in the unlikely event that both Hydralodon and Glugg the Gulper are in play on your side.
I had that happen just today when my opponent played a corpse explosion. Hydralodon's Hydralodon Heads fed Glugg to the point that it was a one-card-lethal over the course of a long animation. (And since the opponent relied upon a single minion with Taunt to protect him from said lethal and a Nagaling I created that following turn rolled Asphyxiate, that didn't work.)
(If that seems lucky, know and understand that my deck and hand had been stripped of every win condition due to random effects from my opponent such that I was dying to fatigue and several copies of Alexandros Mograine 's effect at the start of the next turn, so the luck was theirs and it was their game to lose.)
Capping would be an elegant solution for Shockspitter as well, but Team 5 has a passionate hatred for caps, we must infer, because they are rejected at every turn.
Demon Seed, Invoke Shaman, release Demon Hunter . . .