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.

2/2 Treants have been known to win many games for the Druid. But that doesn’t mean that Soul of the Forest is a great card, in fact the game winning Treants come from another source, the powerful Force of Nature/Savage Roar Combo. So why isn’t Soul of the Forest helping Druids win games? Lets find out!

Why is it so bad?

The big problem with Soul of the Forest is that it does nothing on an empty board.  Even if you have a minion down, almost any 4 drop would be better. If have 2 minions on the board Soul of the Forest starts to compete, but the card’s real power is only achieved when you have 3+ minions on the board. As a Druid, that’s not easy feat.

This card doesn’t fit the current Druid Archetypes, who rely on Bigger Minions, and Burst Combos. Even if you were to build a Token Druid Deck, this card is just not reliable enough. The 4-mana cost is extremely prohibitively, as it will most of the times prevent you from playing alongside cards that would offer synergy.

Perhaps the best deals that you can get out of Soul of the Forest is something like Violet Teacher + Innervate + Soul of the Forest for 6 mana and 3 deathrattle effects. Tidehunter+Innervate+Soul of the Forest could be a strong turn 4 play, especially if you are ahead on board. Dark Wispers + Soul of the Forest is something that your opponent will be hard pressed to clear, but Druid has better late game combos.

Basically for an unreliable card that relies too much in combos, its power level is not high enough for the mana cost that it demands.

Summary of Badness:

• Unreliable, requires you to be ahead on board
• Doesn’t fit the strongest class, archetype
• Not strong enough to create a new archetype

Finding this Card’s Heart

An obvious buff to this card would be to turn it into Force of Nature or Savage Roar. 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 Soul of the Forest is a Druid Talent, but it has nothing to do with Treants. In Hearthstone the treants are key to this card as they are prominently featured in the card’s artwork and flavor text. Basically we want to summon treants, I guess the Deathrattle mechanic is something we could also try keeping intact.

Possible Improvements

The obvious thing would be to reduce its mana cost, at 3 mana this becomes significantly stronger and perhaps good enough to justify a Token Druid build. The other option is to try and make this card more reliable, instead of a greedy, high scaling, win-more card. You could make this give Deathrattle to a single minion, and have the Deathrattle spawn a set number of treants. Perhaps you could put a cap on the number of minion it can affect, giving you a reason to increase its power or reduce its cost further.

The Results

Like we discussed before, the reduced mana cost make this a better combo card, and gives some direly needed boost to its average value. Is it enough to make it competitive? I’m not sure, but it would be a good start for players to try and experiment with different Druid builds.

This is the reliable version. It only requires a single minion on board, and gives you great value for its cost. It also has decent synergy with the current Druid builds as it will force your opponent to leave your minion up or invest lots of resources clearing everything. This gives you ample opportunity to burst your opponent with an extra powerful finishing combo. While this is very week to silence, at first glance this version looks like it might be a bit too good for its cost.  Perhaps 5 mana cost would be more reasonable? Let me know on the comment section below.

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!