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.

Today we take a look at Gruul the Dragonkiller, Leader of the Gronn and iconic Burning Crusade Boss.  At 8 mana, Gruul is a 7/7, but its ability makes it an 8/8 when your opponent has to deal with it, and if he can’t, you’ll have a 9/9 to punish your opponent and from there it only gets worse.  Still, this hasn’t been enough to make the Dragonkiller a fixture on constructed decks, oh well at least he has definite potential to terrorize arenas.

Why is it so bad?

Sadly Gruul has no immediate impact on the board, and it can prove to be a heavy tempo loss if it falls victim to any form of hard removal. With Big Game Hunter being so popular, losing your entire turn to a 3 mana card it’s going to hurt no matter what. Even if BGH is not present, there’s still Execute, Hex, Polymorph, Equality combos, Shadow Word: Death, and many other ways to render your 8 mana investment null.

It gets worse when you consider the alternatives, Dr. Boom, Ragnaros, Cenarius, Neptulon, Antonidas, Garrosh, and even Baron Geddon are all cards that will net better returns in a worst case scenario where they get removed before they get a chance to attack.

Gruul is a card that might be just too greedy for constructed play. Sure, he might be able to take over games if the opponent doesn’t have the appropriate answer, but if they do you might have put yourself in a hole that you might not be able to crawl out of. We can’t forget that Constructed is a format where many of the top ranked players are looking for consistency, and sadly our friend Gruul does not fit that bill.

To summarize:

• Too Greedy.
• No Immediate Effect on the Board.
• Way better options at its Mana cost.

What’s the Design Intent?

Of course we could just turn Gruul into a second Dr.Boom and then it would become really playable, but that’s not the point of this article. We want to tweak the card slightly so we can make it usable without straying too much from the spirit of the card.

If you played WoW during the Burning Crusade you know what the devs were doing here, WoW’s version of Gruul grew in size and gained 15% damage every 30 seconds, this card almost perfectly mimics that mechanic. As for the card itself, its pretty much the kind of thing that is meant to snowball out of control if left unchecked.

Possible Improvements

Gruul seems like a hard card to tweak without compromising the spirit and flavor of the card, you could probably add a Keyword on top of the current next, in fact if the spell immunity sported by cards such as Fairy Dragon, Spectral Knight, or Arcane Nullifier were a keyword it would look mightly good on our dragon slaying friend, but adding any sort of wordy effect would make this Gronn’s text way too crowded and this means that we are probably restricted to switching its base stats. Now you might think that changing base stats is just too plain and boring, but it is something that can be surprisingly effective when it comes to changing the functionality of a card, just look at Starving Buzzard for the reverse example.

I think that if we are trying to unleash the full potential of our ever growing Gruul, the key lies on reducing its mana cost. Just take a look to Shade of Naxxramas to see an example of a self growing card seeing competitive play.

The Results

The first offering might be a bit radical on its change, as it switches Gruul from the late game into a more of an low-mid range threat; this version of Gruul is basically a Chillwind Yeti that grows in strength every single one of your turns. Mind that unlike the real Gruul, this version only powers up in your turn, as the original power would be wildly overpowered on a low cost creature. This means that for 4 mana your opponent has to deal with a Chillwind Yeti, which is decent, but the kicker is that this beauty makes it back to your turn with the body of a Hungry Dragon. Two turns worth of survival make it into a Boulderfirst Ogre, not a bad deal for a 4-drop. This Gruul might be great at pressuring your opponent and might even force out a form of hard removal that might have instead been reserved for a more expensive creature.

But maybe we want to keep Gruul as more of a mid-late threat. Instead of a growing Yeti, we get give the opponent the equivalent threat of a Boulderfist Ogre. But if this guy survives the initial onslaught he makes it back to your turn as a 7 attack creature, enough to trade into a Dr. Boom, which is one of the most common turn 7 plays these days. The next thing to consider is that we are plagued with very valuable 6-drops, cards such as the Savannah Highmane, Fire Elemental, Piloted Skygolem, and Sylvanas Windrunner are pretty hard to replace, but I think something like this version of Gruul would certainly bear consideration when it comes to crafting a new deck.

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!