Blizzard have announced more nerfs today to ready the game for the Hearthstone World Championship tour. These nerfs will go into effect before the last call event of the Hearthstone World Tournament Tour. The following cards have been nerfed:

• Rockbiter Weapon now costs 2 mana (Up from 1)
• Tuskarr Totemic can now only summon Basic totems (the same ones from your hero power)
• Call of the Wild now costs 9 mana (Up from 8)
• Execute now costs 2 mana (Up from 1)
• Charge's mana cost has been lowered to 1 (Down from 3) but the minion it is applied to cannot attack a hero that turn.
• Abusive Sergeant's now has 1 attack (Down from 2)
• Yogg-Saron, Hope's End will now stop casting spells if he is destroyed, silenced, transformed, or returned to the owner's hand.

Yogg was getting a little out of control so that makes sense. The Charge nerf also gets rid of the most recent warrior OTK so that's pretty great too.

No, not Lord Yogg! I must double my praising!

But yea, pretty good changes mainly to prevent some one turn high burst and tempo swings.

Damn... Yogg almost always gets destroyed or put back in hand. Definitely makes that card way less fun/worth it.

I actually reeled back in my seat when I read the Call of the Wild nerf. For some reason I felt like that card was going to fly under the radar with all the Yogg/Tuskarr nerf discussion, lately. Glad it got hit, it was way too insane. By far the card that tilted me the hardest on ladder.

Oh wow, actual nerfs to something other than Basic/Classic cards. That's basically unheard of other than for Undertaker. Where were these nerfs when Dr. Boom was in like 80% of decks for the entire year and a half it was around, and half of Goblins vs Gnomes was OP as fuck?

• Rockbiter Weapon was always crazy value, when everything else that deals 3 damage in some way costs 2 mana, not 1.
• Tuskarr Totemic got extra OP when Vitality Totem rotated out of Standard, because now there's a 3/7 chance you get either Totem Golem, Flametongue Totem, or Manatide Totem, all of which are insanely better than the regular totems. It seemed fun when it came out, but it's such an insane advantage that it's pretty unfair to the other player when it happens that you're getting 4 or 5 mana of value from a 3 mana card. Glad to see it obliterated by the nerf hammer.
• Call of the Wild nerf seems the least necessary? It's the only card keeping Hunter relevant when otherwise Hunter has a bunch of other unimpressive, middle of the road cards from the past couple adventures and expansions. I guess it's still fair that now it's exactly the cost of 3 Animal Companions, but bundled into one card. I almost wonder if this will make King Krush more attractive, since they both cost 9 now? Probably not, since King Krush is only 8/8 of stats, while Call of the Wild is 10/10 (with a bonus +2 attack, or more if you had existing minions on the board).
• Execute costing 2 mana is a nice change, though frankly I'd also like to see Shield Slam cost 2, since that card regularly does anywhere from 5-12 damage to a minion. Glad some of the basic toolkit of Warrior is getting nerfed, though, because it's been ridiculous for pretty much the entire lifetime of Hearthstone.
• Charge getting nerfed makes sense, since hey, this whole game basically isn't balanced for Charge/Haste minions! They only make sense in MtG because the defending player always has the option to "chump" block and throw a very small minion in front of a very big one, protecting their life total. Since Hearthstone doesn't have that mechanic, any good Charge minon/Charge combo requires no board presence, does a bunch of guaranteed damage, AND leaves a threat on the board. At this rate, within a couple years they'll have removed Charge from Hearthstone entirely.
• Abusive Sergeant should've got hit by the last round of nerfs, when they nerfed Leper Gnome. Inexplicably it didn't, which meant Leper Gnome disappeared from all aggro decks, and any aggro deck that wasn't already playing 2 Abusive Sergeants now had really no choice but to play 2 Abusive Sergeants. Maybe now we'll see an upswing in Worgen Infiltrator, as people keep searching for the most broken possible 1-mana 2/1 to put in their decks? Perhaps every 1-mana 2/1 with any kind of ability will eventually get nerfed to a 1/1, leaving only Murloc Raider remaining as a 2/1.
• Yogg-Saron change seems fine, like half the time you get off most of your Yogg spells before he destroys himself anyway, and the odds of silence/transform/returned to hand are generally very low to begin with.

Sadly, so many Basic cards in there that there isn't a lot to get sweet dust refunds on. I guess Tuskarr Totemic and Abusive Sergeant are the easiest to dust.

Hey, these actually all sound great.

Cheap removal has always been a problem in Hearthstone because due to the attacker determining combat, it's very difficult to make cheap defensive removal that's also not easily abused by aggressive decks.

It's sad to see Charge go but I understand their decision because the card probably limited design space a lot. Although they seem to have pussied out again; why the new Charge doesn't also read 'draw a card' is beyond me. You could even leave the mana cost at 2. Cantrips have classically been a staple tool of control decks in card games because they encourage squeezing value out of your mana and making small but meaningul choices. It's really a shame that they seem to have entirely abandoned on ever making new ones.

I agree with everything but the Charge change. Just nerf the 2 or 3 charge cards that are the reason they are doing it rather than make the entire mechanic useless.

Rockbiter is still good though no longer the most efficient removal spell in the game and just a damage tool now. Tuskarr Totemic is pretty dead. Call of the Wild is still good, but Hunter's probably pretty fucked in the Shaman/Tempo Mage matchup now. Execute is still good. Charge is dead, combos are dead. Abusive Sergeant is still good. Yogg probably still sees tournament play.

Overall Aggro/Tempo still the best. Tempo Mage is even more facerolley than Aggro Shaman and is potentially better than it now.

People still won't be particularly interested in tournaments because of the muffinman conundrum:

Patiently waiting for Shadowverse PC release.

@imsh_pl said:

For reasons I don't understand, they're terrified of making bad spell cards slightly more attractive by throwing "draw a card" somewhere on the card text. It's definitely the only reason stuff like Commanding Shout is even remotely playable. I guess Blizzard would rather that those cards never see the light of day.

@imsh_pl: If charge drew a card for 1 mana it would be very good, the typical blizzard nerf is just to shit all over whichever card (though most of these are reasonable-ish for once). The notable exception in the past is the Unleash the Hounds change back in the beta which just made it a totally different card, then they fiddled with the mana cost a lot.

This really doesn't happen as often as people think it does. For instance in the recent Summer Preliminaries, Yogg was played 20 times and only killed/removed/silenced himself 5 of those times. Besides, even if Yogg does kill himself, the chances of getting good value out of the play is still very good.

I think the even bigger change here is that they are finally fixing the Yogg Overload bug.

@mike: Can't speak for others, but anecdotally he is destroyed or sent back to my hand at least 50% of matches I play him. It might be my deck, but by the time I play Yogg I've ideally already cast 12+ spells for a free Arcane Giant. Being a spell heavy deck, I rarely have minions to absorb the friendly fire that ensues.

@bisonhero: @fredchuckdave: It really is quite unfathomable to me why they seem to be afraid of cantrips so much. They are one of the simplest and surefire ways to encourage a control playstyle. Aggro decks don't care for them because they aren't tempo efficient, but they're great if you're the reactive player because you get to fill your mana without losing value, which happens more often if you have a heavy curve and is really dangerous in a game where you have fixed mana that you shouldn't be wasting.

If you look at all the cantrip spells: PW Shield, Slam, Mortal Coil, Shiv, Farsight, Commanding Shout; they've never seen play in aggro decks because they are too slow, but all have at some point seen play in control or combo decks because they're great at using your mana efficiently while looking for answers. There's a ton of great small effect you could slap on them that would be easy to keep in check, like healing yourself, taunting up a minion, freezing their stuff, giving you a free hero power, etc.

But I guess your opponent drawing more options to answer your turn four 7/7 isn't really fun or interactive.

This is probably the first set of nerfs done right. Usually they go too far and nuke the card out of existence. Except for charge all of these cards will still be useful.

All pretty good changes, although I don't think its really going to affect much currently. Midrange shaman is still going to be an unstoppable powerhouse, yogg will be slightly less reliable in malygos druid, hunter will still stomp control and be weak to faster decks.

I like these changes though. Should be good in the long run.

All the changes seem pretty good and I like that they're tackling some of the basic cards that have been problematic for a long time. Also much more reasonable nerfs compared to the Blade Flurry and Molten Giant obliteration last time.

The one thing I'm worried about is Tempo Mage not getting hit (unless they run Yogg), although I haven't actually seen too many mages on ladder, most played class I encountered was hunter followed by shaman and warrior. They'll probably just wait until Flame Waker leaves standard and hope the deck doesn't get too oppressive.

So the nerf has happened, and it seems fine.

The one weird thing I encountered was a guy still using the Warrior charge deck, with your Charge Arcane Giant Wild Pyromancer Commanding Shout Grim Patron sort of stuff in it. I don't think that deck does anything when the Arcane Golems can't appear out of nowhere and immediately attack you in the face. I Aldor Peacekeeper'd or Humility'd his Arcane Giants, and Equality made short work of his Grim Patrons. I can't really imagine what other outcome he expected now that 16-32 damage from charging Arcane Giants can't suddenly hit me in the face anymore.

@bisonhero: I bet many people just skipped right through the message they give you and don't know of the patch.

@internetdotcom: They really went the extra mile this time! The game client literally highlights what part of the card is different now. You don't even have to go read some patch notes on the Blizzard site! Some people, I guess.

@bisonhero: Yeah it was pretty good. The Yogg messaging on that thing was good though. Can't stop people from clicking through everything without reading