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.

The Green Beam of Life Stealing was one of my favorite Warlock spells in World of Warcraft. Sadly, this card doesn’t do it much justice. A rather tame illustration and a puny effect for its cost make Drain Life a prime candidate for mending.

Why is it so bad?

Put it simple, Drain Life does too little for its cost. An easy way to check this card’s power level is by asking yourself a simple question: How can you do 2 damage for 3 mana?

Besides the 2 damage, all of these cards have way better secondary effects than simply healing 2 damage to your Hero. Sure, Drain Life gives you the flexibility to go directly to the face, won’t hurt your own minions, and doesn’t require to fullfil a condition to get the full effect, but even then it is vastly overwhelming compared to other 3 mana options.

but what if we wanted to get more technical about it? What if we want to go in-depth trying to figure out how much abilities are worth? It is an interesting idea, lets start figuring out what the damage component of this card looks like.

Well, that was pretty easy. Doing 2 Damage to any kind of target is generally worth 1 mana, but what about healing 2 to your hero? Well, Healing 2 to your Hero is basically a worse version of the priest hero power, and Hero Powers have effects that are basically 0 cost cards. Don’t believe me?

So Drain Life is basically an average 1 mana cost card, and a bad 0 cost card put together. This adds up to 1 mana, but we also have to add a cost for having 2 effects instead of just one. So lets look for a 3 mana example of a card that does 2 things.

Ironforge Rifleman can be looked as a 2-mana 2/2 + a moonfire. This means that you can take a bad 2 drop, add up a 0 mana spell, and get a bad 3-drop. In this case the cost of adding abilities together was 1 mana.

With that said, Drain Life seems like it should cost at most 2 mana. You can see how paying 1 extra mana for a card, generally makes it pretty bad.

Summary of Badness:

• Bad Secondary Effect
• Too costly for its Primary Effect

Finding this Card’s Heart

This card is clearly inspired by the World of Warcraft Spell of the same name, it is a pretty accurate representation, so we just need to adjust the numbers to find a perfect balance.

Possible Improvements

There are two basic options to fix this card, we either find the correct mana cost for the original effect, or find an appropriate effect for the 3-mana price tag.

We already establish that 2-mana would be a much more accurate cost for the original effect, so lets look at what we could do with a 3-mana budget.

Perhaps these 2 are better examples than Powershot, Demonwrath, and the Si:7 Agent, as they are sources of damage that can be directed to any target. All three cards deal 3 damage, which is more than a reasonable baseline for a 3-mana card that has an extra ability, but the thing here is that extra abilities in these cards are basically better than what Drain Life offers. If you wanted a good 3 mana Drain Life it would pretty much have to deal 3 damage and have a better secondary ability. In fact, Bash is pretty much Drain Life on steroids.

But lets not waste more time discussing it, lets go straight to my suggestions.

The Results

I feel like all the explaining has already been done. Drain Life is a basic card, so it should be simple. We retained the simplicity of the cards but adjusted its relative power level so it can become a better option for competitive decks. Plus, it looks all nice and symmetrical as the mana cost matches both the damage and the healing. Also, having another good Damage option is probably something that Warlock will really want to, especially when we consider that both Dark Bomb and Imp-losion will be rotated out.

The only takeaway I have from this is that while recovering Health to your Hero isn’t as strong as restoring Health to any target, it can be a bit better in warlock as it helps compensate for your Hero Power. I believe the 3 damage, 3 heal version to be especially attractive for Reno Lock variants, but let me know what you think about these adjustments and what would you choose to balance out this basic Warlock Card.

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. Don’t forget to take a look at my Top 5 ranking of Hearthstone Expansions.