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 and evaluate why they are deemed to be horrible, and what could be done to fix them.

The Alarm-o-bot is just one of those really fun and interesting cards that just aren’t strong enough to be viable. In order to see serious play this mech needs to power-up with some upgrades, lets pull out the cog-wrenches and fine-tune this bad boy.

Why is it so bad?

Lets say you play this on curve with the benefit of an empty board, how does your opponent get rid of it using 3/4 mana? Well there’s Lightning Bolt, Crackle, Powermace, Rockbiter, Dark Bomb, Frostbolt, Flamecannon, Quick Shot, Kill Command, Eaglehorn Bow, Wolf Rider, Truesilver Champion, Swipe, Wrath, Keeper of the Grove, Ironbeak Owl, Spellbreaker, Fiery War Axe, Backstab + Dagger, Dagger + Deadly Poison, Shadow Word: Pain, etc, etc, etc. The list goes on and on.

But what if the board is not open? Well, then means that you are possibly giving him a free card, and that’s not exactly a winning strategy.

When you think that this small bot could pull out a Battlecry-less Deathwing on turn 4, you could be tempted to think of it as High Risk/High Reward card. The problem with that approach is that in order to guarantee getting a big reward, you need to play mostly high cost minions. But if you are not running many  smaller minions, how are you going to get yourself the open board you need to really make the Alarm-o-bot shine? Early removal via spells won’t net you the initiative, casting a spell and playing the bot on the same turn will have a sizable mana cost.

So what do you do then? Do you keep Alarm-o-bot until the end game and play him as a “win more” card that can give you huge tempo? That might work, but you have given your opponent a lot of time to have an appropriate answer, and its still a kind of greedy play. Alarm-o-Bot really shines when you manage to dump all of your early minions into the board, and then have Alarm-o-Bot fetch a bigger threat,  you can easily see the amount of things that can go wrong with that, you become hugely dependent on getting the right draws and Alarm-o-Bot still dies to a lot of the early removal spells used.

Finally, the Alarm-o-Bot is a super slow card. Not only do you have to wait an entire turn for the ability to even activate, but unless you summoned a charger then you have to wait another turn until your minion is finally able to attack.

Summary of Badness:

• Too easy to counter and super inconsistent.
• Needs a deck tailored to it.
• Too slow.

Finding this Card’s Heart

An obvious buff to this card would be to turn it into Dr. Boom or Emperor T. But that’s not what we are interested on, we want to stay true to the heart of the card and thus we need ask ourselves what is what really defines this card.

There are a few Alarm-o-Bots in WoW. The Hearthstone version is clearly not inspired on the engineering guardian that sometimes detect stealthed minions. Our Alarm-o-Bot most likely is an adaptation of the Mobile Alert System mobs that dwell on the depths of the Gnomeregan instance. When these little bots detect you, they must be killed ASAP, otherwise they will summon Mechanized Guardian’s which can often wipe the party.

Just like the WoW version, we want to keep our Alarm-o-bot as a card that offers a sizable threat if your opponent fails to deal with it on time, and that’s the main mechanic we want to keep around. Also it is important to note that this guy returns to your hand if it is activated; this means that unlike cards like Innervate or certain buff cards,  you aren’t giving up Card Advantage in order to get a big body out early.

Possible Improvements

The typical way to buff a card is to reduce its mana cost and/or improve its stats. a 2 Mana Mobile Alert System would mean that this guy comes off of Shredders, which is a can of worms I don’t really want to open. At one Mana it could completely decide games as a turn 1 play, so that’s a no-go.  A 0/5 Alarm-o-Bot would certainly be more interesting as it goes from “Too Easily Removed”, to “Quite Annoying To Deal With”.

Another option would be to have the ability trigger at the end of your opponent’s turn, this way the minion would be able to immediately attack.

Finally you could go around the having plenty of big minions requirement by having him summon a predetermined minion instead. You could even stay true to the lore and summon a Mechanized Guardian, perhaps this way the Alarm-o-Bot could find a home in aggressive Mech Decks.

The Results

The first one is a flat power boost. This means that getting this on an empty board gives you a pretty good chance at landing your big minion. While still vulnerable to silence, I can’t think of many other 3 or 4 mana answers for this. Fireball would of course be the obvious one, and I guess Flamecannon + ping works too. Maybe something like Eviscerate + Backstab? Shield Block + Shield Slam? Might even draw some harder removal such as Hex, Polymorph, or execute. At 5 health the bot is no easy task to take down and a very big threat, this would supposedly be balanced by the fact that you need to invest into board presence to make sure the Alarm-o-bot is uncontested, and thus you might have some less than desirable targets for this to summon. It is still a pretty slow card also, which might keep it in check. If this version of the Alarm-o-Bot gets too out of hand, then 4 hp might be a more reasonable amount.

This is a way greedier option, this is way easier to remove but gives you a minion that will be immediately ready to attack. This option would certainly turn this card into a real High Risk/High Reward option, it will probably not be as consistent as the first version but has the potential to be absolutely devastating if it gets to fire.

We’ve said time and time again that Alarm-o-Bot is way better when uncontested, and that aggressive decks are usually the ones that manage to have that early board control. The problem is that the normal vresion of Alarm-o-Bot is just too slow for Aggro decks, and you aren’t going to be getting much value out of it if you summon your 1 and 2 drops. This solves all its problems, although it might just be overtuned.

Since you don’t have to draw the minion from your hand, this both gives card advantage and doesn’t put you behind on fatigue, it would also go a long way towards preventing aggro decks from running out of steam. It is probably too hard to kill, the minion that it summons is a tad strong, and since you are getting an extra card could probably make this version a bit broken.

I could’ve gone back and changed it, but I think it’s a good example of how things can go wrong when creating a card. The effect on this card as is is pretty similar to a 3 mana, 3/4 mech that draws you a card, compared with Gnomish Inventor and Spider Tank you can see the sheer power of it. Of course it has the drawback that weapons and minions can remove it almost for free during its first turn out, but that drawback might not be enough to offset the power.

If we look at Gnomish Inventor and Novice Engineer, we can extrapolate that a 3 mana cost minion that draws you a card would be most likely a 2/2. The charge is there to offset the fact that you have to wait a whole turn for Alarm-o-Bot to actually summon your guardian. Now is the extra 1/1 worth the fact that it’s actually a 0 attack minion for a turn? is the 2 extra HP on its Alarm Bot form enough to make sure the 0 attack isn’t a big issue? These are things that should actually be given a lot of thought and playtest.

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 @DannieRay23.

See you next Monday!