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.

OGRE NO STOOPID! But you might feel really stupid if you end up including this in your deck. Ogre Warmaul has been regarded as one of the worst cards in Goblins vs. Gnomes, but why is it so bad? Lets take a close look and see exactly why this card does not see play.

Don’t be afraid to get close, even if that Ogre wants to crush your head for snooping there’s a 50% chance that he misses.

Why is it so bad?

You can only have one weapon equipped at the time, and both of the other early game Warrior weapons are really good. If you have too many weapons on your hand, you won’t be able to play them all at the same time and they might end up clogging your hand.

For Ogre Warmaul to be useful it needs to be at least as good as the two weapons above, but it clearly isn’t. Compare it to Fiery War Axe, for 1 extra mana your only getting one extra attack. But more importantly look at targets, Fiery Waraxe kills most 1 and 2 drops on a single swing. You can often respond to your opponents 1-drop by immediately killing it, and then also threatening their turn 2 play. But how many 4 health minions are played on turn 3 and 4? I guess a 3 mana/4 attack weapon would be good against Mech Mage, taking out Spidertanks, Tinkertowns, and even Blastmages. The big problem is that we have yet to consider the negative ability on it. A 4/2 weapon for 3 mana might make for a decent option, maybe even a very good one, but it isn’t strong enough to warrant such a devastating drawback.

So how bad is the 50% chance to miss?  The most vanilla example we have is the Ogre Brute, a 3-drop boasting a 4/4 statline. Ogre Brute only has one extra attack over the Vanilla Spider Tank, which is probably the reason it doesn’t see serious constructed play. The sad reality is that we don’t have any widely used cards that have this 50% chance to miss mechanic, even if the Dunemaul Shaman and the Ogre Ninja are more generously statted, most players are looking for consistency in constructed decks and 50% miss chance isn’t exactly that.

Summary of Badness:

• Stats don’t justify drawback
• Not consistent
• stoopid!

Finding this Card’s Heart

This week we have it easy, 50% chance to attack the wrong enemy. That was the Ogre theme on GvG, and this is a weapon that apparently turns the wielder IQ to Ogre levels.  Also, we already have warrior weapons at 2, 4, 5, and 7 mana costs. Upgrade also gives you a weapon at 1, so its pretty important that our mana cost remains 3.

Possible Improvements

Increase Attack? Increase Durability? Condition the miss chance somehow?

As you can see, our hands are pretty tied. But we’ll try to do our best, but perhaps the biggest problem is that Fiery War Axe is just too good and this is doomed to live on its shadow.

The Results

Warriors already have a 5/2 weapon, so adding durability made more sense when it came to variety. But it also makes more sense gameplay-wise. I mean, if you are going to miss some attacks, you’d like to at least have more chances at a do-over, right? Perhaps this 12 damage for 3 mana could end up being pretty high in an all face deck, but missing the targets could be very painful to your endeavor. Perhaps a 3/3 statline would be more appropriate, but i’d be inclined to test this out first.

One of the things that warriors can do is armoring up and avoiding damage. By restricting the miss chance to those times where your Hero has damage on him makes this card a little more palatable. Sadly, its not that big of an improvement, perhaps not enough to make this card playable. Still, this is a fun way to tie this up with other prominent Warrior Mechanics.

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!