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.

Oh Nozdormu, leader of the Bronze Dragonflight and Aspect of time. This Dragon is possibly the greatest Hearthstone card that nobody is playing with. Can the issues surrounding Nozdormu be fixed, or is our scaly friend doomed to either rest in our collections or simply be reduced to Arcane Dust? The time is running out for Season 1 of Mending Mondays, and its only fitting that the Season 1 finale ends with bang by reviewing the card that has been by far the most common request

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Why is it so bad?

At 9 Mana, Nozdormu is likely using up your entire turn. But how is Nozdormu helping you win the game? 8/8 isn’t that impressive of a body considering you could get the same for less  mana out of the Giants, and having what amounts to a neutral effect isn’t helping Nozdormu’s case much. The problem with Nozdormu is that should it be removed, you get absolutely no value out of it. And with its 8 attack value, this Dragon is an easy target for Big Game Hunter.

It is never fun to lose your 9 mana card to something like the 3-mana BGH, or other cheap removal such as Execute and Hex. But it’s even worse when you are leaving nothing behind, at least a dead Onyxia will leave you a few whelps you can try to leverage, or a dead Ysera will have granted you at least a dream card. Nozdormu’s main weakness is that it’s simply way to expensive for what it does, and it’s not THAT hard to remove.

Summary of Badness:

• Target for BGH
• Too expensive
• Not powerful enough
• Needs to survive in order to make an impact

Finding this Card’s Heart

An obvious buff to this card would be to turn it into Alex or Ysera. 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.

Nozdormu is known as the Timeless One, and he’s the Leader of the Bronze Dragonflight. Like his fellow Dragonflight leaders, he has a 9 mana cost and 16 combined Attack and Health. Nozdormu’s signature ability in Hearthstone is making turns only last 15 seconds, and that ability might be just too iconic to replace.

Possible Improvements

Nozdormu seems like really card to improve upon because its very thematically constrained. The basic improvement would be changing his turn timer reducing ability into a battlecry that remains active for the rest of the game. Nozdormu’s stats could also be tweaked, 6/10 seems like a solid improvement over 8/8. Finally you could add a keyword to make it more powerful.

The Results

Our first modification is pretty straight forward. The stats are better distributed to avoid Big Game Hunter, and the two extra Health make this guy more resilient to normal attack and damage spells. The ability is now a battlecry, which ensures it will remain active for the rest of the game.

If we dig into the lore, we’ll find out that Nozdormu knows when and how he will die. Until that time comes, he cannot perish. We can reflect this by giving him the Immune keyword. I decided to make this version a 4/12 because having a 8 attack immune minion would allow you to destroy your opponent pretty quickly, either by repeatedly going face or by removing all of his threats with no opposition. I’m not exactly sure how the Immune keyword works, but as far as I found in the internet an Immune minion is not targetable, which would take care of the obviously broken interaction with Taunt-givers. Perhaps it would be more balanced to give Nozdormu stealth or “Cannot be targeted by Spells and Hero Powers”, but I just felt that outright Immunity is a better fit for the character of Nozdormu.

Hey guys, I hope you’ve enjoyed Season 1 of Mending Mondays. It’s been a blast to be sharing these ideas with you every week and reading your feedback in the comment section and twitter. Mending Mondays will return “Soon(tm)”, but its probably going to be back before the end of August. Meanwhile, be sure to check out past editions of Mending Mondays.

If you miss me too much, you can always hit me up on Twitter @DannieRay23.

See you next month!