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.

Feugen and Stalagg are the rewards from completing the Construct Quarter Wing of Curse of Naxxramas. The cards have a very cool concept, but they haven’t been used to great effect in Hearthstone yet. Why are these two Wights and their Master not making enough of an impact?

Why is it so bad?

The first problem with Feugen and Stalagg resides on their statline, they are basically Vanilla minions. While Vanilla minions can pretty much hold their own in the early stages of the game, a 5-drop is expected to be a more impactful card. Lets take a quick look at the popular neutral five drops used today in Hearthstone.

3 out of 4 have Battlecries that immediately impact the game, Belcher protects your board with not only 1 but two taunting creatures. But what about some other less common but still usable 5-drops? Bomb Lobber, Leeroy Jenkins, and Harrison Jones all can have immediate impact, the Spectral Knight stands alone as a more passive minion, but being immune to spells prevents him from being a tempo liablity against cards like Sap or Hex.

Vanilla Minions at 5 mana are just too slow, especially if they have average stats. The real value of these Legendary Duo comes with summoning Thaddius, but that isn’t an easy task. First you need to draw into these two specific cards, but they are too slow and not good enough to be kept in your starting hand. Even if you get them, you have to cope with having to play these two sub-par drops, and finally you are giving your opponent all the time in the world to react to this strategy.

From the very first moment that you play Feugen or Stalagg, your opponent knows that you are likely to have the other. This means that he can start saving up a silence to take care of your second minion and single handedly turning 2 cards in your deck into Vanilla Minions which are comparable to subpar common cards. He could also keep an answer to Thaddius on his hand.

Can you afford to keep these in your hand until you have both of them to play in tandem? Can you manage to stay alive long enough to pull this off? And even if you do, is it worth it?

Summary of Badness:

• Subpar stats
• Easy to counter
• Too reliant on RNG draw

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.

In World of Warcraft, Thaddius is a boss encounter inside the Naxxramas Raid. But before you can engage Thaddius, you need to have killed both Stalagg and Feugen. But if these two wights are not killed within 5 seconds of each other, they will resurrect each other with full health. In Hearthstone they won’t resurrect, but you still need to kill both before you get to face Thaddius.

Thaddius was a encounter about positive and negative charges, opposites. It makes sense that Stalagg and Feugen have their statlines reversed from each other.

Mechanically the card is a decent representation of the lore behind these monsters, the main problem seems to be their stats and cost.

Possible Improvements

There are two main ways to look at this card, we either preserve its mechanics and re-tool their stat lines, or we look to completely remake them based in other properties of their WoW encounter. Lets look at both options!

Feugen and Stalagg are almost bound to be Vanilla Minions, their Thaddius deathrattle occupies most of the text box. This means that the mana cost, attack, and health values are the most important parts of it.

The first thing we have to ask each other is whether a 5 mana combo-based minion can be viable. Grim Patron would seem to agree, but a Swarm of Patrons is really hard to remove, and Warsong Commander can make it an immediate threat. Also, Grim Patron and Warsong Commander are cards you can have 2 of each on your deck, and you only need one of each. Plus Warsong Commander isn’t really a dead draw by itself, and Grim Patron plus triggering Death’s Bite  or Inner Rage might not be the best play on its own, but it can even be good in some situations.

Perhaps Feugen and Stalagg would be better suited to the early game, where there might still be time to trade them away into your opponents minions. Also having a lesser mana cost would allow them to get better combos with things such as Echo of Medivh, Ancestral Spirit/Reincarnate, etc.

But there’s also the option that reducing the cost too much would make the Wight Duo a bit too strong in conjunction to other cards. Stalagg, Feugen, and Poison Seeds on the same turn looks like something that could be super fun. Maybe beefier 5 drops could actually make them good enough to add on certain decks where you can really exploit their Summon ability. Finally you could add cards in the future that make the combo more accessible.

The other option would be remaking the card based on their revive mechanic, the big problem is that it would take Thaddius out of the equation, unless you add him as a collectible card that synergizes with Feugen and Stalagg. That answer seems a bit convoluted and not really viable, but since this is mostly theorycraft anyway, we will have some fun with it.

The Results

This is the outright strong version. On top of the powerful deathrattles, you have a better Chillwind Yeti and a better Lost Tallstrider. The 4 mana cost allows you to weave in this minions at a time where they can still have a strong impact. The statlines would make Feugen and Stalagg much more reliable, and if they are deemed too strong, I’d advise nerfing Thaddius to compensate. You could also go for 3/6 and 6/3, I guess that would still be ok.

I quickly figured out the ability I wanted to give this version, but I spent way too much time thinking about the statlines. They are quite sticky, so having them out early could be too problematic. Plus, you are getting both of them on the board after you play any of them. You could include both on your deck too, so that’s a factor to be considered.

Also, HS needs some strong 7 drops to complete with Dr.Boom. The 3/5 + 5/3 seems solid, specially considering he needs to handle both of them or they’ll resurrect. The added Thaddius is a bit meh, but what can you do right?

I don’t really like this version that much. It is a bit clunky and doesn’t have Thaddius synergy, you would have to make a collectible version of Thaddius. The original version is just a fun mechanic that has some cool synergies with resurrection and cloning mechanics.  Plus, I’m sure there has to be another WoW boss that shares this “kill both at the same time or they pop back up” mechanic. Romulo and Julianne in Karazhan come to mind.

So I guess this version is just an exercise on trying to import WoW mechanics into Hearthstone. Let me know if you have some better ideas, I’m very curious on knowing what you can come up with.

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!