Rejoice fellow cardslingers! The Druid combo is dead! For far too long players have suffered at the hand of the dreaded 14 damage from an empty board, but the angry trees are about to be thrown into a wood chipper. The Healing effect remains powerful and needed in many situations, and with the removal of Antique Healbot from the format, Druid doesn’t have many great alternatives outside of awful cards like Healing Touch and Tree of Life. In a vacuum, Ancient of Lore is still just about playable. If those players hope to continue with that strategy, they’ll need to find a new source of card draw. When the board state was closely contested, Ancient of Lore often tipped the balance in the Druid player’s favour by allowing them to out-resource you in the late-game.Įven today, Druid decks often run additional card draw effects like Azure Drake in order to support the inclusion of low Mana cards like Living Roots. With this change, Druids will find drawing more difficult-so if you can overcome their fast starts, starving them out of the game becomes a more viable strategy. The issue with Druid decks is that they often dump their hand to get a criminally unfair advantage thanks to playing Innervate and Wild Growth early on, and then use Ancient of Lore to refill too effectively. Ancient of Lore is objectively one of the highest value cards in the game.

To the surprise of precisely nobody, we start with Druid. In this gallery I'll take a look at the likely impact of each of the changes, and try and expand on Blizzard’s thinking as to why these cards (and not others) had to feel the sweet kiss of the nerfhammer. Today the wait is over, and the juicy info is at our fingertips. The launch of Whispers of the Old Gods, and with it the introduction of the Standard format, however, has almost been overshadowed by the promise of numerous nerfs that will be made to cards from the Classic and Basic sets in order to prevent them from dominating the game in perpetuity, or limiting future design space.Īnd so, over the past month, almost every single Hearthstone player will have said something along the lines of: “Man, I hope this nonsense gets nerfed in Standard”. Normally, the excitement surrounding a Hearthstone expansion comes from seeing what crazy new effects the designers have come up with and theorycrafting innovative decks to play once the cards arrive.

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