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.

Shaman is such a combo tease man, from things to Windfury, Reincarnate, and Ancestral Spirit. To cool little things like Ancestor’s Call, Shaman has a lot of tools that would make a lot of sense on Combo decks, sadly Shaman doesn’t seem to have the card draw, sustain, and AoE clear that make a combo deck competitive.

Why is it so bad?

Ancestor’s Call is the classic example of a card that should be good, but really isn’t. Ancestor’s Call has a few problems that keep it from being a solid alternative. Let’s analyze them separately.

Is Best on Bad Decks:

You get maximum value from Ancestor’s call when you can get a really beefy minion out, the problem is that having a lot of big minions doesn’t really make for a good deck. What happens if you get all 7+ mana minions but no Ancestor’s Call to get them out? Having that kind of a slow deck is very unreliable, as you depend on getting enough answers early to allow the game to get into the latter turns. Shaman’s lack of reliable AoE makes sure that you can suddenly stabilize a slow hand like a big Shadowflame or a Equality+Consecration can do for other decks

Your opponent can attack first:

On paper, Ancestor’s Call might look like your typical neutral effect, where both players benefit the same from it. But in reality, it is nothing but Neutral. Obviously, both players will get a different quality minion depending on their hands and favor with RNGsus. Maybe more importantly, unless your minion has charge, it has to wait and survive an entire turn before it can attack, while theirs can attack as soon as you end your turn. If the board is empty, it’s likely that your opponent will not only get the first strike, but also have full mana to answer whatever Ancestor’s Call gave you.

Bad Synergies:

When you play Ancestor’s call, you aren’t likely to have a lot of mana to answer whatever comes down for your opponent. If you had the mana to play both Ancestor’s Call and an answer, you were probably better off playing the big threat by itself.

But what if you had a board before you casted Ancestor’s call? Then you could use your board to take care of whatever your opponent got, right? Sure, but if you want to reliably have an early board, you’ll need a lot of earlier minions in your deck. Of course this decreases the odds that you are actually get a decent minion out of Ancestor’s Call.

Other cards do this better:

Ancestor’s Call does two things, it lets you get a minion earlier on the board, and it allows you to bypass negative battlecries. There aren’t many minions with negative battlecries, and definately not enough expensive ones to warrant Ancestor’s Call.

Basically, you are giving up card advantage to get the tempo advantage of having a more expensive minion out earlier. This is very much like something like Preparation, or Innervate. Both Innervate and Preparation are great cards, but how do they compare with Ancestor’s Call? Well, Ancestor’s Call costs 4 mana, and doesn’t let you select the minion you are ramping out. For Ancestor’s Call to be worth it, I think you’d need to get at least 3 mana worth of tempo advantage out of it. This means that you’d need to pull out a 7+ mana minion, but that doesn’t even count the fact that your opponent will get a minion aswell. So for this to be truly worth it, the minion you pull out needs to be about 7 mana more valuable than your opponent’s.

It is VERY hard for Ancestor’s Call to be more valuable than something Innervate. This is infinitely less flexible and has the chance of screwing you over, so…really, not the best card.

Summary of Badness:

• Hard to get value from it
• Unreliable
• Decks where Ancestor’s Call is decent, are bad.

Finding this Card’s Heart

An obvious buff to this card would be to turn it into Innervate or Preparation. 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.

Ancestor’s are a prominent theme among Warcraft Shaman lore, but I didn’t find anything specific on Ancestor’s Call specifically. I guess you are “calling” a minion, and that’s the core mechanic of the card. We want to keep that untouched, but I guess I’m willing to experiment with not giving your opponent a minion.

Possible Improvements

The best thing this card does, is allowing you to play with more than 10 mana. Playing this on turn 10 to get out a 8-9 mana minion like Malygos or Kelhuzad would effectively put you at 14-15 total mana, which opens for very cool combos. Ancestor Call enables cool stuff like Malygos + multiple spells, or Kelthuzad + Ancestors Call + Reincarnate. While this is certainly not a reliable strategy, it is a very powerful effect. While you could improve Ancestor’s Call by making it more reliable, the combo potential of Ancestor’s Call is bound to go up as new cards are released.

Ancestor’s Call is a very dangerous card to balance, as it’s potential for 16 mana turns “breaks” the game. If we make this card reliably better, then it might end up being to good if Blizzard ever releases strong cards that have good synergy with it.

Sure, you can make this card cost more and give your minion charge, we can change when the minions are summoned, we can change the mana cost, or we could make it that only you get a minion. But the more I think about it, the more I think the proper way to “fix” Ancestor’s call is by giving it a better supporting cast. And to improve the quality of combo Shaman Decks by giving them a reliable board clear (Earthquake, maybe?), a better card draw engine, or perhaps a better way to stay alive and extend the game.

Improving other cards like Alarm-o-Bot, Nozdormu, and other late game minions that see no play would probably help Ancestor’s Call decks a lot.

The Results

I think that for the first time in Mending Monday’s History, I’m suggesting to keep our card as is, and hope that it will improve as more and more sets are released.

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!