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.

We are still going wild, baby! From Ironfur Grizzly, to Silverback Patriarch. We are making sure that beasts are getting somewhat viable 3-drop taunters, right?

Why is it so bad?

Just like the Ironfur Grizzly last week, Patriarch just doesn’t trade well enough to justify inclusion in serious decks. Patriarch dies to a 2/3, and doesn’t even kill it. he trades 1 for 1, against 2/2s, and 3/2s, and 1/4s. Patriarch also cannot trade up at all, so in the surface it seems like a completely useless card. Being a Beast is the only thing that this ape has going for him, but as we saw last week, that isn’t really is a big plus.

Sure, Kill Command is a legit card. Scavenging Hyena and Rhino aren’t really bad, but both suffer from base beasts like the Patriarch not being good. Like our previous entry explained, things like Bloodfen Raptor and River Croc just aren’t going to cut it on today’s meta.

The only positive thing Silverback Patriarch has going for him is that he improves very quickly when buffed. He can be pretty decent if he can protect a Dire Wolf Alpha or a Hobgoblin, but he’s way too weak outside of combos, which makes him a big liability.

Summary of Badness:

• Doesn’t trade well, period.
• There’s no reason to play him.

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.

Right now, you could argue the idea of this card is that is sucks, and that it exists to teach people that cards that don’t trade well are generally bad. I guess that’d be fine by me, but why should you punish beasts by giving them deliberately bad cards? BEAST PRIDE FOREVER!

Possible Improvements

Just give him a situation ability, perhaps +1 or +2 attack if a certain condition is met. The Silverback Patriarch is a liability at 1 attack, so compensating for that would be exactly what this dude needs to excel. So why don’t you outright buff its attack? Well, it’s rather simple. You want diversity, if you make all solid reliable cards, then some are going to be objectively better than the others, you need to have these situational cards that might not be as good, but perhaps can be better in specific decks. So lets try to give our primate friend a nifty ability that makes him super special.

The Results

These two are the pretty straight forward versions, they have a shot at being a 2/4 taunt, which would be solid. The first version is a bit greedier, while the second seems a lot more reliable. This is just a little boost that attempts to bring Silverback Patriarch from absolute garbage, to something that could be playable in a beast deck, should beast synergy ever justify it.

This is the fun version. We already mentioned that Silverback Patriarch scales really well with buffs, so why not give him a way to buff himself? It feels pretty thematic too. The only problem with this banana loving dude, is assessing its impact on game balance. While the two above versions could pretty much be tossed into the game without much thought, but I feel this one would require extensive testing to see the true impact that this new influx of bananas would have on the game.

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!