by JR Cook - 8 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 competition-based mind, every non-joke card should at least be a decent fit in a viable deck. Just ignore the fact that some bad cards do have their purpose design-wise, ok? Still, I believe 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.

League of Explorers is easily the best set ever released in terms of balance and usable cards, so I’ve been having a lot of trouble picking cards to feature here. The Anubisath Sentinel is an interesting case, I like the card, but I haven’t seen it in competitive play. I’ve only used this card in a Tavern Brawl, where it worked great. Lets take a look at this Sentinel and find out what’s keeping the big dude from being top tier.

Why is it so bad?

Much like the Druid of the Fang, our Sentinel is a 5 mana card that can be either a 4/4, or 7/7 worth of stats. Fang requires you to have a beast in the board when you play it, Sentinel requires you to have any minion on the board when you die. The main problem these cards seem to have is that their full effect doesn’t seem to be worth when you consider how hard is it to get them to work at full strength. The card seems a bit inconsistent, and like we saw in our analysis of The Grand Tournament, inconsistency is not something you want to see in a competitive card game.

A 5-mana 4/4 is very weak and can go a long way towards losing you a game, the big problem is that your opponent gets a whole turn to address the board before you get to try and use your card effectively. In fact, your opponent can set a board state where you can’t really make use of your powerful Deathrattle. It looks like you need to be really ahead on the board to get the chance to trigger the Deathrattle on your terms, at first sight it seems a bit like a win-more card.

Summary of Badness:

• Unreliable, hard to trigger
• Too weak when it cant trigger

Finding this Card’s Heart

We don’t want to change this card too much, we want a minion that buffs your other minions when he dies. I’d stick with the 5-mana cost, but look at altering the stats.

Possible Improvements

Like we just said, this needs a stat reshuffle. There’s too much power in the deathrattle ability, and too little on the base form. Maybe rearranging the 7/7 worth of stats could be just what the doctor ordered. The other thing that you see when looking at this card is that you really wish it had taunt. By forcing your opponent to attack this first, you’d go a long way towards ensuring that the deathrattle actually gets to trigger.

The Results

a 5/5 for 5-mana is a much more reasonable card. His deathrattle ability to boost a different minion is still strong at +2/+2, and with a stronger base card you might have more chances to trigger it when you need it.

Don’t call me Sludge Belcher. With Naxxramas rotating out of Standard, we needed a replacement minion. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that this is probably WAY off in terms of balance. The Taunt ability of the base form goes a long way towards ensuring that you’ll actually get to buff something, this time around instead of the incredible power boost, we are super defensive by having another one of our minions be our slime surrogate.

But maybe we just want to stick closer to the original version, trading 1 health on our buff for a solid Taunt on our base will once again up the consistency in this card. Plus, it is way cooler if the minion left behind actually gets to Avenge the trusty sentinel.

Can’t get enough of Mending Mondays? Check out all past editions here! Want to give your Hearthstone Brain a workout? Maybe try these cool puzzles. Also, I’d love for classic to rotate out of Standard, what do you think?