by JR Cook - 9 years ago     show comments

While a lot of people scream for nerfs when cards feel overpowered, I don’t see many people calling for buffs to long forgotten cards. In my mind, every non-joke card should at least be a decent fit in a viable deck. Also, the meta would grow a lot more interesting if a wider array of cards suddenly started seeing play. So without further ado…

Welcome back to Mending Mondays, a weekly feature where I, Dannie “IAmDiR23” Ray will take a look at some of the worst cards in the Hearthstone Classic Set and evaluate why they are deemed to be horrible, and what could be done to fix them.

Oh, Bane of Doom. A little card from back on the day where RNG was limited because it could end up being too game breaking. If this card had come out during GvG it would probably cost less, do more damage, and would probably get to summon ANY random demon. Alas, this old relic is just gathering dust in your collection. Bah, who are we kidding? This is probably arcane dust by now.

Why is it so bad?

2 damage for 5 mana is hilariously bad, so I’m guessing this EPIC card has a huge ability to compensate, right? Well, kinda… If your puny 2 damage actually manages to kill anything, you get to summon a random demon, yay! It’s time to pray to RNGsus so we can get some of those sexy legendary demons, right?

Not quite, you can only summon from a restricted list of 6 demons, the strongest of which is a 6/6 body. Your other options? a 3/5 taunt, a 1/3 taunt, a 4/3, a 3/2, and a silly blood imp. Remember that summon doesn’t trigger Battlecries, so you shouldn’t add or substract that to the value of the card.

You see how this card starts to lose value quick. Even if we consider the 2 extra damage, 5 mana is a heavy cost, so it’s up to us to find out if it’s justified. So, lets play a little game I like to call “Are we better than Stormpike Commando?”

Sure, the bodies on Felguard and Dread Infernal make Bane of Doom definitely stronger than our dwarven gunman, but Succubus is only marginally better, flame imp is marginally worse, while Voidwalker and Blood Imp are big losers. On average we are getting 6 point worth of stats, which make Bane of Doom very similar to Stormpike Commando, of course provided that you actually have a target that can actually be killed by 2 damage.

Oh and lets not forget that nobody actually uses Stormpike Commando on serious constructed play.

To summarize:

• Poor average effect for its mana cost.
• Depends on having a suitable target.
• Misleading card text.
• Not worth its dust.
• Imp-losion is likely better 90% of the time?

What’s the Design Intent?

If you take a look at the pool of Demons that you can summon, you can see that they pretty much represent the pets that the WoW Warlock can summon. Indeed, we are just missing a Fel Hunter and we have two imps instead. But Bane of Doom was actually a WoW Spell on its own, it was previously called Curse of Doom, and it was probably based on the W3 Pit Lord’s Doom Ability.

As Curse of Doom, it dealt a large amount of damage after 60 seconds and had a chance to summon a Doomguard, maybe if we could summon tasty Doomguards this card wouldn’t be as bad.  As Bane of Doom, it did moderate damage every 15 seconds, and each tick had a chance to summon a “Demon Guardian”, which was just an Ebon Imp. Bane of Doom was removed at a certain point in the game, and currently Demonology Warlocks have a the Doom Ability which deals damage over a minute and summons wild imps on criticals. These wild imps probably explain why Hearthstone’s Bane of Doom can summon two different imps, so there’s that.

Now when you look at this card, you can’t help to think that this is wild RNG before wild RNG became a thing. This is a primitive precursor to the Piloted Shredders and Unstable Portals of this world, so we probably want to stick to that.

Possible Improvements

It goes without saying that the first thing they could do was allow this to summon any collectible demon, in fact given Blizzard’s track record with buffing cards can the whole Random Madness that was GvG, this is the most likely scenario.

But if we are not willing to do that, then we have to address the fact that this card just doesn’t do enough for 5 mana, we can’t afford to give the board to the opponent like that. The intuitive option would be to reduce the mana cost, but I’d prefer addressing other points on this card, mainly the requirement for this to actually kill the enemy character. Sure it’s a cool an unique effect, but without it you gain a bit of flexibility by being able to use this card for the summon as a last resort kind of thing. The other option is pumping up the damage, which could also make it competitive with other forms of removal.

The main problem lies within the variance that the pool of demons provide, getting a blood imp out of the deal can outright lose you games, so this card will always be a tad inconsistent, and for it to actually see play it needs to give us a chance to do some really beastly stuff.

The Results

Ok, here’s the first try. We pimped out the damage and now we don’t have to kill our target in order to summon our random Demon Guardian. But wait, what in the world is a Demon Guardian?

See, since Bane of Doom doesn’t just summon any random demon I decided to create a new category for them. Just like Animal Companion summons a “Random Beast Companion”, I’ve decided to give Warlocks their own choice out of three specialty demons that Cannot be Crafted or played otherwise.

Admittedly these guys are on the strong side. You are getting pretty strong cards on top of 3 damage, these become like a little pretty fire elemental. Unlike Fire Elemental though, these are blocked by Spectral Knights and the such. The cards are pretty powerful for the 3 mana cost, which makes them pretty good against Sap and Freezing trap, you could probably take them down a notch or just pump the cost to 4.

Then there’s the chance that the overall effect can be WAY too strong once you add the damage and the summons, if that ends up being the case maybe the damage would have to go back to 2. Once again, it is pretty hard to gauge exact balance without playtesting. Interesting to note that the Felhunter is a pretty good card to get rid of sticky minions like Nerubian Eggs, Haunted Creepers, Harvest Golems and Annoy-o-Trons.

My second option is a complete rework of the card and it’s more closely based on the actual WoW Bane of Doom Spell. I tried to import the damage overtime effect and the imp summoning mechanics and bring them into Hearthstone. The card might look stupid strong at first, but you aren’t likely to get more than one imp out of the deal, especially since worst case scenario your opponent can trade the afflicted card into the summoned imp. This version would feast on Ancient Watchers though and could actually be pretty funny against El Señor del Fuego, Ragnaros.

The reason for the imps being 3/2 is that you can simply use Flame Imps, and just maybe I was just too lazy to do my own token. Though to be fair I’ve made 5 cards this week already, I’m sure the balance is way off with this version of the card as its mechanics are a bit complicated and getting it right would require some more math and playtesting, but you get the overall idea which I think is pretty fun.

Do you think some of the versions above are still too weak? Maybe absurdly overpowered? Messing with cards without the ability to test them is actually pretty challenging, but I try to do my best.

Be sure to check out past editions of Mending Mondays, and if you have any suggestions, be sure to leave them on the comments or hit me up on Twitter.

See you next Monday!