Game Breaker / Hearthstone Heroes Of Warcraft Nerfed Cards

By definition, any card that has ever been nerfed was probably too strong for its own good. If you need a benchmark to compare the power of certain cards, look here.

For game-breakers that were never changed, game-breakers that eventually had their nerfs reverted for one reason or another, game-breakers that were so strong they were either put in the Hall of Fame or banned from Wild, and examples from non-constructed gamemodes, check here.

Pre-Standard Nerfs

Also see Leeroy Jenkins in the Hall of Fame section.

• Unleash the Hounds was a 2 mana (initially 4) Hunter spell that summoned a 1/1 Hound with Charge for every enemy minion. The idea was to give Hunters a different style of board clear than other classes, but in practice it just meant that face really was the place. Indeed, playing too many minions against a Hunter could spell death, as Unleash combo-ed very well with most of Hunter's arsenal to increase the damage even further (Timber Wolf, Leokk from Animal Companion), or draw so many cards that winning would be effortless (Starving Buzzard). It was later nerfed to 3 mana.
• Warsong Commander is a card with a complex history regarding balance, always being a 3 mana 2/3 Warrior minion with some effect pertaining to Charge or Rush:
  • In the original launch of the game, Warsong Commander gave all friendly minions Charge, period. This iteration is a strong candidate for the best card ever made; even in the low-power environment of Vanilla, it was easy to set-up an OTK with Molten Giants and Youthful Brewmasters, dealing a minimum of 38 damage in a format where Druid's 14 damage combo was considered obscene. As a result, Commander received a nerf to only grant Charge to minions with 3 or less attack.
  • This new effect was balanced up until the release of Blackrock Mountain, which Patron Warrior on the world. With the holy quartet of Commander, Frothing Berserker, Grim Patron, and Emperor Thaurissan, Warriors had access to a deck with excellent draw, strong board clear and swarming, and an amazingly consistent OTK that beat everything else in the format. This deck was so oppressive that Blizzard decided to nuke Warsong Commander from orbit, erasing her original function and replacing it with the infamous "Charge minions have +1 attack" effect. After an experimental buff that gave Commander a Rush-giving aura to friendly minions, she was finally restored to her former glory in the 2023 rotation, with the higher power of Wild meant to keep her in check. Even in this environment, Warsong Commander is still a valuable and scary OTK enabler, with more tools than ever to do her thing. And yes, this still includes the occasional Patron Warrior.
• Gadgetzan Auctioneer, a 5 mana 4/4 that draws a card whenever the owner casts a spell. It was (and still is, post-nerf) a key piece of Miracle Rogue, a deck based on drawing their deck in one turn with cheap spells to unleash a hellscape of pain on their opponent using Leeroy Jenkins, Questing Adventurer, Edwin VanCleef, or just about anything they could get their hands on. Auctioneer was changed to 6 mana in the Goblins Vs. Gnomes update, which neutered him right up until League of Explorers came along, when the addition of Tomb Pillager brought Miracle Rogue and him back in a much more balanced state.

Year of the Kraken

Whispers of the Old Gods Nerfs

• On their own, Force of Nature and Savage Roar were pretty reasonable Druid cards. The former was a 6 mana spell that summoned three 2/2 Treants with Charge that die at the end of the turn, the latter is a 3 mana spell that grants all friendly characters +2 attack. Combined, however, you had an absurdly powerful 14 damage, 2 card combo that was run in every single Druid deck. The main problem with the combo was that even though it was no worse than say a double Fireball from a Mage or Cruel Taskmaster+Grommash combo from Warrior, this combo actually scaled with the Druid's board state, as every minion on the board added an additional 2 damage. Adding to this, the combo was highly flexible, i.e. you could use it in case you needed to kill a big minion or multiple smaller minions. Finally, there's the Double Combo, which is the previous combo with Innervate and another Savage Roar added in, bringing up the minimum damage to 22. The Standard update removed this combo from the game, by changing Force of Nature to a 5-mana spell that simply summons three 2/2 Treants.
• Blade Flurry was a 2 mana Rogue spell that destroyed their weapon and dealt its damage to all enemies. Combined with weapon buffing cards like Tinker's Sharpsword Oil, Blade Flurry was one of the most powerful sources of burst damage in the entire game that doubled as an incredible board clearing effect, and there didn't exist a single Rogue deck that wasn't completely based around how busted this card was. It later became a 4 mana spell that dealt its damage only to enemy minions, a change which made the spell too impractical to use until Rogue received some stronger weapons (namely, Kingsbane). Later on it was partially reverted to 2 mana, but still tellingly no longer damages the opponent's face
• Master of Disguise was a 4 mana 4/4 Rogue minion that gave permanent Stealth to a friendly minion, which was never actually played. Due to design space reasons and some wacky, out of nowhere gameplay moments caused by randomness (ever give a Mal'Ganis perma-Stealth? It's pretty awesome), her Stealth-giving effect was limited to only last until the start of the turn.
• Big Game Hunter was a 4/2 for 3 mana with the Battlecry effect to instantly kill a target minion with 7 or more Attack. It was designed to kill giants, but with the rise of Dr. Boom, Big Game Hunter made it in nearly every deck to counter him. This itself was not the problem- it's the fact that it was neutral, meaning that classes with crap for removal options suddenly had access to Shadow Word: Death lite, with a 4/2 attached to boot. BGH alone was responsible for helping Combo Druid and Handlock at the top of the metagame, as they effectively became decks without counters, and gave the already removal heavy Control Warrior another piece of efficient removal. It had gotten so bad that the community would shoot down any high cost legendary minion with 7+ attack, because it died to BGH. To give an idea how broken this card was, even when Big Game Hunter was severely nerfed to 5 mana, he still saw play.
• As noted in the General section, Silence was initially underpriced. As such, Blizzard nuked two of the worst offenders - Ironbeak Owl and Keeper of the Grove. Ironbeak Owl was a neutral 2/1 for 2 that Silenced a minion. It was insanely efficient, and in basically every deck. It had its mana bumped to 3, making it significantly worse than Spellbreaker^note Ironically, this ended up being a huge buff years later since it's the only Silence available for Baku decks. Keeper was a 4 mana 2/4 for Druid that either dealt two damage or Silenced a minion. Likewise, it was in every Druid deck because of its flexibility. It was changed to a 2/2, obliterating its stats-to-cost ratio. Keeper would eventually be reverted to no impact, but tellingly Owl was not.

One Night in Karazhan Nerfs

• Rockbiter Weapon was 1 mana Shaman spell that gave a friendly character +3 attack for that turn. A completely reasonable removal card that was unfortunately given to the same class with Doomhammer, a 2/8 weapon with Windfury, and Al'Akir the Windlord, then a 3/5 with Windfury and Charge. 2 Rockbiter weapons plus a Doomhammer equaled half of your opponent's health, throwing them onto Al'Akir resulted in 18 from an empty board, and given how much burn damage Shaman has access to, it wasn't difficult to deal with the rest of it. It was nerfed to 2 mana later, making it less effective as a damage spell and preventing Shamans from casting two of them on Al'Akir.
• Tuskarr Totemic from The Grand Tournament was a 3 mana 3/2 Shaman minion that could summon any random totem. Any of them, including the overstatted Totem Golem, a card draw engine in Mana Tide Totem, and a major damage booster in Flametongue Totem. Tuskarr Totemic could effortlessly snowball games to the point he could decide games the instant he was played. As this video demonstrates, landing on a non-basic totem was such a high roll that it increased your odds of winning by as high as 30%. He was nerfed to only summon the basic hero power totems, leaving the card out in the dust.
• Abusive Sergeant, a 1 mana 2/1 that granted a minion +2 attack until the end of the turn. Sergeant was probably one of the best aggro cards ever printed, potentially allowing friendly minions to trade up with minions several points of mana more expensive than them or granting more face damage in case you need to pick up the pace, and had an aggressive statline that allows it to continue getting good trades or peck at your opponents health. Abusive Sergeant was changed to a 1/1, successfully curbing its influence.

Mean Streets of Gadgetzan Nerfs

• Small-Time Buccaneer from Mean Streets of Gadgetzan was a 1 mana 1/2 Pirate that gained +2 attack while his owner had a weapon equipped. It almost seemed balanced, right up until you notice that the three classes with cheap, potent weapons (Shaman, Rogue, and Warrior) were also pretty gross aggro classes. With that in mind, Small-Time became a Flame Imp without a downside that also activated Pirate synergies, and could threaten loads of face damage just for the price of 1 mana, especially in conjunction with Patches the Pirate (see below). Small-Time eventually received a cutting nerf that reduced his health to 1, making him significantly less potent and more easily answered going second.

Year of the Mammoth

Knights of the Frozen Throne Nerfs

• Innervate, a 0 mana Druid spell that formerly gave the owner 2 mana crystals for that turn only. This card could do some insane stuff very early, such as: a turn 8 Ultimate Infestation, a turn 7 Ysera, 5 mana worth of tokens ready to be buffed, and an extra set of mana to use for combos when already at ten mana (such as Malygos shenanigans). Even in the vanilla game, a turn 1 Chillwind Yeti was enough to make anybody concede on the spot. Innervate was singlehandedly responsible for making sure Druid stayed in the meta-game, dodging nerf after nerf, until Knights of the Frozen Throne finally knocked it down to size by reducing the amount of mana it gave to 1, making it on par with the Rogue card Counterfeit Coin. Even at its halved state, it's still a key card that sees lots of competitive play.
• Spreading Plague, from Knights of the Frozen Throne, was a 5 mana Druid spell that summoned a 1/5 minion with Taunt, and repeated until you possessed as many minions as your opponent. It's comparable to Frost Nova in that it stalls the game until you can get your bigger, better plays, which is a big deal for a class with poor early-game. Additionally, the 1/5 tokens can be buffed by Mark of the Lotus and similar cards to build a massive board from just a few resources, while protecting higher priority targets like Fandral Staghelm and Vicious Fledgling. Even without any synergy cards, Spreading Plague on its own stops aggro in its tracks, and if they have 7 minions on the board, it may as well be a death sentence. Spreading Plague was announced to receive a nerf to 6 mana roughly 3 weeks after Knights was launched, making it the fastest nerf in the entire game up to that point, and it retained that title up until the emergency Descent of Dragons nerfs. For the record, even at 6 mana, it remains on many players' most hated list and is used in just about every Druid deck in Wild to this day.
• Murloc Warleader, a 3 mana 3/3 Murloc that originally gave friendly Murlocs +2/+1, stood strong as the key enabler of Murloc decks, due to granting massive stat bonuses for little mana, but because Murlocs kind of, well, sucked, he never thrived up until League of Explorers and Journey to Un'Goro. League introduced Anyfin Can Happen, a spell that allowed Murlocs to be usable as an OTK package, while Un'Goro brought forth Gentle Megasaur, Rockpool Hunter, and Sunkeeper Tarim, a set of minions that allowed Murlocs to stay on the board, ready for those juicy buffs. Warleader's influence was enough that Knights of the Frozen Throne removed the health bonus from his effect, ostensibly to make the effect "less confusing", but also making large Murloc boards much less sturdy.

Kobolds and Catacombs Nerfs

• Patches the Pirate. He was a humble 1 mana 1/1 Pirate with Charge, but after you play any pirate, he blasts himself out of your deck onto the battlefield ready to fight. What should be a simple effect to give Pirate decks a small boost ended up being one of the strongest Aggro cards ever, and a mandatory card for any deck that even casually ran Pirates. He's a reverse Mad Scientist in that he gave all of your pirates a one-time Battlecry of "Draw and summon a Stonetusk Boar". When used with N'Zoth's First Mate, you essentially get a cheaper Muster for Battle, an already undercosted card. Even just getting him off of Swashburglar or Southsea Deckhand is already better than Alleycat. While a meager 1/1 doesn't seem like much, it's a 1/1 that you got for free, meaning free face damage, a free ping, a free activator for Bloodsail Cultist, or a free target for buffs like Cold Blood. Even classes that didn't have any Pirate synergies ran Bloodsail Corsair and South Sea Captain just for Patches' effect. He was that good. In the nerfs, he lost Charge, removing his instant damage. Even still, he's one of the best aggro cards ever printed and continues to see constant play in Wild.
• Corridor Creeper was a 7 mana 5/5 neutral minion that got cheaper for every minion, ally or enemy, that died while it was in your hand. Many reviewers didn't rate it very highly during previews, dismissing it as bad topdeck. As it turned out, this card was so strong that you kept in any opening hand. Just playing the game normally and making three even trades discounted it to a 1 mana 5/5. By January 2018, Corridor Creeper became insanely popular — aggro decks used it as a cheap giant body when they inevitably have their minions beaten back or to recover from an AoE, and control decks used it as a counter-pressure follow-up to their own boardwipe. It's also a Beast to boot, opening up easy Beast synergies using a 0-cost Creeper. It was nerfed to a 2/5, greatly reducing how swing-y the minion is; this resulted in Corridor Creeper being removed from just about every deck other than Evolve Shaman, though it found new life in Odd Paladin after the rotation.

Year of the Raven

The Witchwood Nerfs

• Dark Pact, from Kobolds & Catacombs, was a 1 mana Warlock spell that destroyed a friendly minion and restored 8 health to your hero. Warlocks hit the jackpot with this card - it provided monstrous healing, which was otherwise scarce for the class, and it allowed you to blow up your own minions on demand, which is fantastic when used for Carnivorous Cube shenanigans and nuking Possessed Lackey. Pact had its healing cut down to 4, making it in line with the similar Sacrificial Pact but not hurting the utility.
• Possessed Lackey, from Kobolds & Catacombs, was a 5 mana 2/2 that, on death, Recruited a Demon. Unlike Skull of the Man'ari, which is similar but possesses clear counterplay, Lackey could be killed the second it hit the board to pull powerful stuff early like Voidlord, which stops aggro in their tracks, and Doomguard, which can be duped for a series of powerful Chargers to end the game fast. Lackey had his mana cost increased to 6 to curb his power.
• Naga Sea Witch, from League of Explorers, a 5 mana 5/5 with the effect of changing the cost of all cards in your hand to 5, became a Game Breaker in Wild after a buff allowed her effect to apply before any discount effects. This means that the Giants, which are normally so expensive one needs to build a deck around them to be used, can now cost 0 with Naga Sea Witch on the board with only very minimal condition requirement, allowing for a field full of 8/8s as early as turn 5. In response, Sea Witch was changed to 8 mana, to give players more time to prepare for the parade of Giants.

The Boomsday Project Nerfs

• A game-breaking combo was avoided before this set even launched. Shadowboxer was an unassuming Priest Mech from the Goblins vs Gnomes set that dealt 1 damage to a random enemy after a character was healed. It didn't see much play, but came to attention in Kobolds & Catacombs after an interaction with Unidentified Elixir potentially granted the Shadowboxer Lifesteal, creating a loop where its ability caused healing and thus triggered itself, eventually dealing as much damage as your Hero was missing health. In general, this was gimmicky and unreliable due to the Elixir only having a 1 in 4 chance of giving Lifesteal. However, The Boomsday Project introduced Zilliax, a neutral Legendary that could give any Mech Lifesteal. People quickly figured out a fast, reliable OTK deck even before the expansion launched, so Blizzard issued an emergency nerf to Shadowboxer, causing its effect to only trigger from minions being healed.
• Aviana was a 9 mana 5/5 Druid Legendary from The Grand Tournament that made all your minions cost 1. While it began life as a meme-tastic Awesome, but Impractical card, it found a niche when Kun the Forgotten King was printed. With Kun's mana refresh, Aviana let the player unleash insane combos with cards like C'thun, King Togwaggle, Malygos, and so on. These decks were popular in Wild but still fairly inconsistent. This changed when Juicy Psychmelon (mentioned in The Boomsday Project) was printed. With the melon, Druid could draw and play all of its combo so reliably, Druid became the only real deck in the format. To cut down on combos and reduce how reliably Kun + Aviana could be drawn, she was nerfed to 10 mana.
• Mana Wyrm was a 1 mana 1/3 Mage minion that gained +1 Attack each time you cast a spell. It was one of the most powerful one drops in the game, being quite sticky and quickly ramping its damage up. It was a crutch card for any aggro or tempo mage, nearly doubling their winrate so long as it was in their opening hand. Mana Wyrm combined perfectly with those decks, since they spam low mana damage spells, letting the wyrm snowball out of control. It was changed to two mana, greatly slowing the card down and giving it a lot of new competition in the 2 slot. It was later burfed to a 1 mana 1/2, making it less survivable but much easier to play.
• Giggling Inventor was a 5 mana 2/1 that summoned two Annoy-o-trons, 1/2 Divine Shield and Taunt minions. It was easily one of the most stat-efficient cards ever printed, creating a 3 body spread with two separate instances of Divine Shield to get through. It was seen in numerous decks: the three sticky bodies made it ideal for decks looking to go wide and spam buffs, the efficient taunts made it desirable for any Control or Combo deck, and the Annoy-o-trons being stubborn Mechs made them prime candidates for Magnetic buffs. For the cherry on top, it was Odd, giving it free reign in Odd Rogue. It was so unanimous, people began running Blood Knight just to counter the thing. Despite The Boomsday Project not having many popular cards, Giggling Inventor singlehandedly forced the meta to be dominated by Zoolock, Deathrattle Hunter, and Odd Rogue. It was brutally gutted to 7 mana in response, seriously limiting its viability. For a good measure of how ridiculous this card was: when a handful of cards had their nerfs reverted in the Year of the Phoenix, Giggling Inventor was instead only lowered to 6 mana.

Rastakhan's Rumble Nerfs

• Druidstone had been in full swing for nearly two years, and showed no signs of slowing down. The culprits? Wild Growth and Nourish. The combination of those two cards let Druid ramp their mana much faster than other classes, executing combos with Hadronox, Aviana, Malygos, and others, or just powering out big cards like Ultimate Infestation and Spreading Plague before other classes could react. In order to solve this and hopefully prevent this going forward, the ramp cards had their cost bumped by one mana each. Nourish would later be reverted to 5 mana since the game had become much faster and Druid numerous comparable ramp options, but Wild Growth tellingly remained at 3 mana until it was rotated out of the Core set.
• Leeching Poison was originally a 2 mana Rogue spell from Knights of the Frozen Throne that gave your weapon Lifesteal. Pretty bad on its own, it was completely busted with Kingsbane, which turned the weapon into an infinite and massive source of healing. In order to nullify its effect without changing how it's used with most other weapons, it was changed to a 1 mana spell that gave Lifesteal for a single turn only.
• Hunter's Mark, once a simple 0-mana Hunter spell that reduced a single minion's health to 1, was easily the best removal spell in the game. With the trivial requirement of a single damage, Hunter could flexibly remove any minion it wanted to. Originally this was balanced by the class being a heavy aggro base, but as Hunter received more and more solid Midrange and Control cards, Hunter's Mark slowly got out of hand. It was cautiously nerfed to 1 mana during Whispers of the Old Gods even before it could become broken, but still became a breakout card, especially after the release of Candleshot. Since it was far too efficient, it was bumped again to 2 mana.
• Cold Blood was a dreaded finisher for Aggro Rogue, providing +4 Attack on any minion for 1 mana as long as it was Combo'd. While not that strong compared to Paladin's Blessing of Might, it became truly problematic with Baku the Mooneater. Odd Rogue's high damage output, snowball potential, and sticky board meant finding a target was simple, and the buff was often the killing blow. Cold Blood was raised to 2 mana, barring it from Odd Rogue.

Year of the Dragon

Rise of Shadows Nerfs

• Preparation, a Classic 0-mana Rogue spell that reduced the cost of your next spell that turn by 3. Prep was the biggest mana cheat in the entire game, cutting the cost of any card by an absurd amount. On top of that, it has massive synergy with Rogues, working with Combos, Edwin VanCleef, and the multitude of inexpensive cards that their disposal. Prep was so strong, Blizzard was afraid to print powerful Rogue spells, meaning that very few non-Classic Rogue spells outside of Raiding Party and Tinker's Sharpsword Oil ever saw serious play. Because of this, it was nerfed to only reduce the cost by 2.
• EVIL Miscreant seems innocent enough on paper; a 1/5 at 3 mana isn't very impressive, plus requiring a Combo to generate some 1/1 Lackeys isn't all that, is it? You'd be wrong. Turns out Lackeys are very useful for their variety of effects, from card generation, removal, or board value, and in the case of Witchy Lackey, likely negating the Miscreants poor stats. Not only that, Lackeys make for great Combo activators, compared to most other token generators in the past being held back by being too weak or requiring too much of a tempo sacrifice to generate. The Lackeys only helped empower the Rogue's already good Classic card set, and so EVIL Miscreant was the other key card that elevated Tempo Rogue to the top of the meta. It was nerfed to a 1/4, weakening the card, although not by much.

Saviors of Uldum Nerfs

• Barnes was initially an interesting card that saw a lot of experimentation, but quickly spiraled downwards to Public Enemy #1 in Wild. The addition of many new resurrect mechanics for Priest made him completely broken. His effect could be used to pull any number of huge minions as a 1/1, then that minion could be returned via Eternal Servitude, Lesser Diamond Spellstone, Resurrect, ect. And then it could returned again. And again. And again... Another combo was to use him in a Spell Hunter deck, playing him on turn 4 to summon Y'Shaarj and put out 14/15 in stats. His insane highroll potential got him bumped to 5 mana, an eternity in Wild terms.
• The Rise of the Mech event was for the most part well-liked by players, but was a very experimental patch. As such, a few of its balance buffs ended up becoming problems, and were reverted.
  • Extra Arms was a Priest card that gave a minion +2/+2 for 3 mana and added More Arms! to your hand, another spell with the +2/+2 effect (in essence, it was a beta Twinspell). Blizzard lowered the spells to only two mana, looking to push a Zoo Priest. While this was initially unsuccessful, Saviors of Uldum added plenty of new tools, and a snowball zoo deck was born. The entire point was to land a 1-drop (Northshire Cleric or Lightwarden) then give it +2/+2 and continue from there. Extra Arms had its cost reverted to 3 mana to solve this powerhouse deck.
  • Luna's Pocket Galaxy was very Awesome, but Impractical in its original release. Its buff to 5 mana however ended up to be one of the most impactful changes in the entire game, since the Mage player could comfortably play it without falling too far behind. With the Coin, you could use its effect as early as turn 4. The card wouldn't be that bad if it was just used to set up combos, but it was instead used as a gross highroll. Cards like King Phaoris, Archmage Antonidas, Kalecgos, Alexstrasza, and many more are already pretty good in control Mage, but became utterly disgusting when reduced to 1 mana.^note In particular, Alexstrasza and Antonidas very frequently allowed the Mage to deal 30+ damage in a single turn Not to mention, Luna's Pocket Galaxy had crazy synergy with Conjurer's Calling, a card that certainly did not need help breaking the game. The spell was returned to 7 mana.

Descent of Dragons Nerfs

• Out the gate, the worst offender of the set was Faceless Corruptor. On the minuscule condition of having any minion on the board, Faceless Corruptor created two 5/4 bodies with Rush for only 5 mana. It was a no-brainer slot in any deck, clearing one major or two medium threats while also usually placing a tonne of stats on the board. It could then turn around and deal ten damage to the face next turn if not dealt with - something very hard to do, considering it probably just cleared the board. The real crime is just how flexible it was: it could deal 5 to two minions, 10 to one minion, 5 to one and summon a 5/4, give a token +4/+3 and summon a 5/4, or even just be a 5/4 Rush - which is still really good! It was nerfed to a 4/4 - still strong, but not anywhere near as overwhelming.
• Mogu Fleshshaper is a 3/4 Rush that gets reduced by 1 mana for each other minion in play. All of them, not just enemy ones. This was a source of board control and board flooding that severely punished your opponent for counter-flooding. The broken thing though is its synergy with Mutate or Witchy Lackey, converting its tiny body into a massive minion usually after it already dealt its three damage. Initially 7 mana, it was nerfed to 9 which both slowed it down and worsened the pool of minions it could be evolved into.
• Ancharrr, a Legendary weapon for Warrior, has the effect of drawing a Pirate from your deck after attacking with it. This is a card that provided Pirate Warrior - an infamous all-in archetype - with an efficient way of refueling the hand while still dealing damage. If the Warrior drew this on three, it was almost always game over. Not only were they dealing 6 damage and drawing 3 cards, they activated all of their weapon synergies. The weapon was also gross with Hoard Pillager, who reequipped it and could be drawn by the initial cast. The value and synergy proved to be too much of a game-winning highroll when played on curve. The durability was reduced from 3 to 2, lowering both the damage over time as well as number cards it could draw.

Year of the Phoenix

Ashes of Outland Nerfs

• How good were Demon Hunters on launch? So good, they were pushing 80% winrate, toppling even prenerf Galakrond Shaman. So good, the winrate of all nine other classes were in the red. So good, they were above 50% in Wild, with only 45 cards to their name. Whatever weaknesses Demon Hunter had (namely, board clear and hard removal), they completely ignored with insane aggressive tempo and recovery. They were so good, four of their cards were nerfed one day after the launch of this set. It eventually culminated in the largest batch of nerfs ever. Of the forty-five demon hunter cards added, thirteen were nerfed or reworked in just this block. Players often joke that Ashes of Outland was less of an expansion and more of an open beta to fine tune the class.
  • Aldrachi Warblades, a 3 mana 2/3 weapon with Lifesteal. This seemingly humble weapon was, in truth, a potent healing engine that made it extremely hard for any deck to race Demon Hunter, forcing virtually everyone to play on the defensive for the entire match. The class has so many options for boosting their hero's attack that they could easily heal for 6 health every turn while controlling the board. Even without any other cards, simply using your Hero Power can offer that little bit of extra healing and damage that makes or breaks a game. Warblades had its durability reduced to 2, dramatically reducing both its healing potential and its board controlling abilities.
  • Eye Beam, a 3 mana spell that starts out pretty good - it has Lifesteal and deals 3 damage to a minion. With the Outcast bonus, its cost became zero, allowing you to easily weave it into any turn you wanted. True, its effect on the game is somewhat minute, but the fact that it offers an advantage in both board and health for nothing at all makes it very, very useful. The Outcast bonus was changed so that it costs 1 mana instead of zero, making it significantly harder to use efficiently.
  • Skull of Gul'dan, a piece of card draw strong enough to make the actual Gul'dan jealous. For 5 mana, you could draw three cards, which is already good and in-line with Demon Hunter's class identity. However, if you Outcasted it, it would reduce the cost of the cards by 3. This thing cheats out so much mana that it essentially pays for itself twice over, and you can play it in anything - Aggro can use it for reload, while Control can use it to reduce the cost of their bigger minions. Even among all the other broken things, this card was so strong that DH mirrors usually came down to whoever cast their Skull first. It was increased to 6 mana in the emergency nerfs, which delays its effect on the game by an extra turn.
  • Glaivebound Adept was a 5 mana 7/4 that dealt 4 damage if your hero had attacked that turn. The effect was very easy to accomplish, simply by having a weapon equipped or waiting until turn 6 and using it with the hero power. The combination of ridiculous stats and an aggressive effect were too much for a Basic card, and it was nerfed to 6 attack.
  • Battlefiend was a 1 mana 2/2 Demon Hunter minion with the upside of gaining +1 attack after your hero attacked. In essence, it was a Flame Imp with no downsides that also snowballed, since it's extremely easy to attack as Demon Hunter. It was even more disgusting if they played it on turn 1, then played another with a hero power on turn 2, establishing two growing 3/2s. It was lowered to the much more reasonable 1/2 statline.
  • Crimson Sigil Runner was a 1-mana 2/1 for Demon Hunter whose Outcast bonus draws a card. As proven by things like Leper Gnome and Abusive Sergeant, 1-mana 2/1 is a superb aggressive statline if combined with another bonus, and drawing a card to replace itself in your hand is about as good as bonuses get for aggro. It's also a superb topdeck, as the Runner can easily be thrown down on the board for an easy cycle and another body for your opponent to deal with at a trivial 1 mana. To make it less of a no-brainer auto-include and weaken its trading potential, Crimson Sigil Runner was cut down to 1/1.
  • Altruis the Outcast is one of two Legendaries from the Demon Hunter Initiate set, and by far the more powerful. His effect deals 1 damage to all enemies whenever you play your left-most or right-most card, which can both deal with wide boards and deal tonnes of face damage. Thanks to Demon Hunters' insane card draw, he can do this even if your hand wasn't that big to start, chaining off of cycling cards. He was raised to 4 mana, slowing him down and reducing the number of cards that can be played on the same turn as him.^note His attack was also increased to 4, but this is pretty inconsequential since he rarely lives long enough to attack.
    • This ended up not being enough of a nerf, so Twin Slice was later burfed to 1 mana but +2 Attack. This prevents Altruis from dealing potentially 4 damage to all enemies for 0 mana. This change also ended up enabling Odd Demon Hunter in Wild, which is still generally a lesser evil than the alternative.
  • Metamorphosis is a Legendary Demon Hunter spell that replaces the hero power with Demonic Blast for two uses. Originally, Demonic Blast dealt 5 damage for 1 mana, meaning that a small tempo sacrifice let the Demon Hunter later deal 10 damage for only two mana over two turns. It was also perfect for whatever board control DH had to do and was readily Discovered by Vulpera Scoundrel thanks to their small card pool. Combined with Demon Hunter's all around high burst, it was too much damage. It was lowered to 4 damage per hero power.
  • Warglaives of Azzinoth was a 3/4 weapon for 5 - already solid as seen on Assassin's Blade - that let your hero attack again if you attacked a minion. What this meant was the demon hunter could carry one attack buff through an entire board of minions, plowing through a taunt wall and still delivering one final blow to the face. It was a monster of a card that gave the class far too much board control, especially for something tempo-based. What really pushed this over the top, though, was Odd Demon Hunter in Wild - with their 2-damage Hero Power and their new 1-mana Twin Slice, Warglaives gave Odd Demon Hunter an obscene amount of clearing and burst damage, and that's before getting into what happens when you get a Battlefiend or Hench-Clan Thug to stick on the board. It was bumped to 6 mana, bringing it into line in most Demon Hunter builds and barring it from Odd Demon Hunter. It was then burfed to a 5 mana 3/3 weapon for its inclusion in the Core set.
• Sacrificial Pact is a Basic Warlock spell that had the effect of destroying a Demon and restoring 5 health to your hero for 0 mana. Any demon, not just one of yours. While a 0 mana nuke + heal is obviously insane, it was balanced by the fact that only Warlocks had demons, meaning it was useless in 8/9 matchups and might not even have a target against other Warlocks. Neutral demons slowly became more common over the years, although none were common enough to justify playing this. This changed in Ashes of Outland. Not only did almost every class have demons now, Demon Hunters were very demon-focused, even more so than Warlocks. Add in the popularity of Frenzied Felwing and the fact that Galakrond could generate endless tokens to sacrifice for health in the occasional matchup without demons, and the card's full power could be seen. This led to Blizzard nerfing it to only target friendly demons, nuking it for the greater good.
• Open the Waygate is the Mage Quest from Un'Goro, with the reward of a 5-mana spell that lets you take an Extra Turn. If extra turns are strong in Magic: The Gathering, imagine how strong they are in a game with extremely limited counters to your opponent's actions. The quest required you to cast 6 spells that didn't start in your deck, which is trivially easy in Wild as Mages continue to get more and more powerful spell generation effects. The deck dominated the Wild ladder, stalling the game out until the Mage can draw whatever infinite damage win condition they have and sealing the game with the quest. The requirement was increased to 8 spells, which slows it down a bit and makes it more susceptible to bad draws. Even nerfed, it's still a high-tier deck in Wild.
• Bloodbloom, also from Un'Goro, was a 2 mana Warlock spell that made your next spell cost health instead of mana. Considered a gimmick card for years, it came back in full force in Rise of Shadows with Darkest Hour, a card that destroys all friendly minions to summon a random minion from your deck for each destroyed. This created an effective cheese strategy where the Warlock would stuff their deck with half token-generating cards and half massive Charge and Taunt cards, and use Darkest Hour with Bloodbloom to fill their board with huge stuff as early as turn 5. The deck usually either ended games early without any possible counterplay or bricked and lost - but the swings were fast and numerous enough that the deck had a very positive winrate. In response, Bloodbloom was upped to 4 mana, killing the deck.
• Shadowjeweler Hanar is a Rogue minion which lets you Discover a Secret from another class every time you play a Secret. This creates the so-called 'Hanar cycle', where the Rogue can endlessly play Secrets from Hanar to fuel his own effect. Despite this insane effect, Hanar was infuriatingly sticky on the board as a 2 mana 1/5.^{salty details}Hit him physically? Noble Sacrifice. Use a spell to remove him? Counterspell, and now he's even harder to kill from Never Surrender. Oh, you actually killed him? He's back thanks to Redemption. It's bad enough that people would immediately try and remove him as soon as possible, even if that means sinking a disproportionate amount of resource to do so.^note Coin + 5-mana weapon + 3 out of 4 weapon charges, just to remove a 2-mana minion. Eventually Blizzard lowered him to a 1/4, making most spells or minions able to kill him in one hit - meaning you need to dunk far less resources into disabling his traps before you can finish him off.
• Fungal Fortunes was a Druid spell that drew three cards for 2 mana, but discarded any minions drawn. It was meant to be a mirror to Mage's Book of Specters, but Blizzard miscalculated how much better spells were than minions. Druids were running the card for cheap and easy spell draw, taking some risk on minions but cashing in on three card highrolls. To encourage more deck variety going forward, it was increased to 3 mana.

Scholomance Academy Nerfs

• Mindrender Illucia is a Priest legendary that swaps hands and decks with the opponent for one turn. Designed to be a combo disruptor, Illucia proved to be a little too versatile at her original price of 2 mana. Against aggressive decks, she could be played in the early game for board presence and to fill the opponent's hand with literally unplayable cards, destroying their tempo. Against control decks, she gave the Priest 8 mana to play with to waste the opponent's removal and value cards, while giving the opponent an empty hand if possible. As such, she was quickly nerfed to 3 mana to lessen her impact.
• Secret Passage is a 1 mana Rogue spell that sent your hand to another dimension for the turn and replaced it with 5 cards from your deck. For all intents and purposes it was 1 mana to draw five. While you couldn't keep the five you drew, you did keep any cards you drew afterwards or generated. Plus, you obviously keep anything you play. It was an absurd amount of fuel for every Rogue deck, and as such was reduced to only draw 4 instead, where it's still monstrously powerful.
• Darkglare from Ashes of Outland was a 3 mana 3/4 Warlock Demon that refreshed 2 mana crystals after the player took damage on their turn. It allowed Zoolocks to easily fuel themselves with constant mana refreshes on their turn - even Life Tap became free to cast. However, it got really nutty in this set with Flesh Giant, which could be reduced to 0 mana and played as early as turn three with a good hand (especially in Wild). Add Raise Dead to possibly recur Flesh Giant, and you had a disgusting highroll card. In response, Darkglare was reworked to a 2 mana 2/3 that only restores a single mana crystal.
• Tortollan Pilgrim from Saviors of Uldum is an 8 mana 5/5 Mage minion that Discovers a spell in your deck and casts it. Initially it only cast a copy, meaning you got to keep whatever it pulled. That already makes it pretty good, but it became a serious problem in this set. With the introduction of Potion of Illusion, Tortollan Pilgrim could be played to add a 1 mana copy of itself to your hand, recast to Freeze the opponent's board with Frost Nova, then followed with by endless Tortollan Pilgrims and Freezes on future turns. This could be used to endlessly recycle another Battlecry minion, killing the opponent over several turns without a chance for them to respond. To cull any RNG from this, Sphere of Sapience could send the Potion or Nova to the bottom of the deck if they happened to be drawn. In response, Tortollan Pilgrim now removes the spell from your deck when played.

Madness at the Darkmoon Faire Nerfs

• Blade Dance is a Demon Hunter spell from the Initiate set that deals damage to three random enemy minion equal to your hero's attack. This was fine until Demon Hunter got the Soul Fragment package in Scholomance and a few more hero-attack cards in Darkmoon Faire, giving them an archetype that can reliably get 4 or more Attack on key turns (and easily getting up to 10 in late turns), turning their burn damage into board control while still dealing just as much burst. This could let them safely plow through up to three Taunt minions and smack the face for however much, not including whatever minions they had. It was raised from 2 to 3 mana, slowing it down and making it harder to combine with lots of attack boosts at once.
• Jeeves is an iconic aggro card from Goblins vs. Gnomes which is a 4 mana 1/4 that lets each player draw until they have three cards in hand at the end of their turn. Scholomance Academy decided to recall the card with Voracious Reader, a 2 mana 1/3 with a non-symmetrical version of that effect. For half the cost, the only disadvantage Voracious Reader had was one less health. Needless to say, this card alone fueled aggro decks by a ridiculous amount. Not only did it pump up serial offenders Hunter, Demon Hunter, and Warlock, but encouraged crazy-fast aggro Rogues, Mages, and even Priests. If you can reliably dump your hand, an engine that draws three cards every turn is simply too good to pass up. As such, Voracious Reader was bumped to 3 mana, making it a little harder to dump your hand after you play it, and making it a death sentence if you happen to draw both.
• Hysteria is a Priest/Warlock spell from Darkmoon Races that forces a minion to attack random minions until it dies or there are no other targets. In Standard, it's a solid but unremarkable removal spell. In Wild however, it was the center of the most detested combo deck in years. When used on a Wretched Tiller which was given Immune by Deathspeaker, its effect of dealing 2 damage to the enemy hero when attacking would trigger up to 30 times^note Repeating effects are hard capped at 30 to prevent infinite loops, allowing for 60 direct damage as early as turn 7. You could also throw in a second Deathspeaker or Shrinkmeister to do the combo without needing 15 health of minions on the board. To make matters worse, if the opponent somehow survived this, the extraordinarily long animation would skip their next turn, giving you another shot at killing them. Within hours of the mini-set's launch, Wild became dominated by Priests running this all-too-consistent combo, prompting Blizzard to limit the spell to only target enemy minions.
  • Eventually, it was determined that Hysteria was actually an extremely efficient board clear card, able to wipe many boards for only three mana. It was bumped to 4 mana in May of 2021.

Year of the Gryphon

Forged in the Barrens Nerfs

• Pen Flinger was a 1-mana 1/1 neutral minion from Scholomance Academy that dealt one damage to any target, additionally having a Spellburst effect that returned him to your hand. Although seemingly innocuous at first glance, in practice it was a nightmare for anyone facing a player with him in their deck. Pen Flinger's cheap cost, Spellburst effect, and the fact that the one damage could go anywhere- an enemy minion, one of your minions, and especially either you or your opponent's face- made him extremely flexible, and this led to him being included in decks that liked to spam cheap spells, like Libram-centric Paladin decks. He also saw play in Darkglare Warlock in Wild, which managed to return to dominance following the nerf to Darkglare itself in part because the Warlock could deal damage to their face, progressing its gameplan for effectively zero mana. After roughly two expansion cycles of players continuously being called a loser, Pen Flinger's Battlecry effect was nerfed, restricting his targeting options to just minions.
• Remember Mysterious Challenger from The Grand Tournament? Blizzard apparently didn't, because they introduced Sword of the Fallen, a 2-mana 1/3 Paladin weapon from the Forged in the Barrens set that casted a Secret from your deck whenever you attacked with it. This meant that you could potentially cheat out three mana's worth of secrets by turn 4 or 5 for just two mana and three attacks, on top of playing other secrets, thinning your deck of three bad draws, dealing damage, and playing minions and other spells to keep the pressure coming. Combined with new cards that synergized with Secrets, in addition to two new, powerful Secrets on top of the already-good ones Paladin retained going into the expansion, the Secret package became an auto-include in just about every Paladin deck. Two weeks later, Sword of the Fallen's durability was nerfed from 3 to 2 in an effort to control its power. Even at 66% effectiveness, this card's still an auto-include.
• Two neutral minions by the names of Far Watch Post and Mor'shan Watch Post were key factors in creating a very weird meta. Both act similarly, being minions that can't attack and have effects that trigger when your opponent did something: the former was a 2-mana 2/4 that increased the cost of any card drawn by your opponent by 1 (with a cap of 10), and the latter was a 3-mana 3/5 that summoned a 2/2 Grunt whenever your opponent played a minion. These effects, combined with their decently-high health for their cost and a capstone Legendary in Kargal Battlescar, turned what were clearly meant to be tech cards into annoying, overstatted minions that were difficult to deal with on curve and big reasons why the resulting meta discouraged board interaction. Not even Arena was safe, with Mor'shan Watch Post in particular being the subject of much rage. As such, Far Watch Post and Mor'shan Watch Post each had their health reduced by 1 to make them easier to deal with on curve.^note There is also a third watch post, Crossroads Watch Post, but its higher cost and less impactful effect makes it a non-issue.
• Refreshing Spring Water was a Mage spell from Forged in the Barrens that drew two cards for 4 mana, and refreshed two mana crystals for each spell drawn. Intended to be a risk-reward version of Arcane Intellect, this spell instead fueled absolutely degenerate combo and burn decks that ran no or very few minions, allowing them to draw through their deck at no mana cost. Even after Deck of Lunacy was nerfed, this card proved that Spell Mage didn't even need their highroll to win games, opting to just use Mage's burn cards. In Wild, Refreshing Spring Water allowed for disgusting OTK decks with Mozaki or Flamewaker that could be performed as early as turn 5. The card got really, really powerful with Incanter's Flow or Sorcerer's Apprentice, turning it from 0 mana into +1 mana or more. The card was way too efficient, and was nerfed to 5 mana. For the record, it's still very powerful at that cost
• First Day of School was a 0 mana Paladin spell from Scholomance Academy that added two random 1-drops to your hand. It was essentially a way to get immediate board presence and value on a later turn, and could be played for free at literally any time. It was a huge offender in Paladin's consistent early game domination, and only got better post-rotation as most garbage 1-drops disappeared. The card was changed to a 1 mana spell that added three 1-drops to the hand, which is technically a burf although for all intents and purposes is a huge nerf to the function of the card.
  • While this burf had some effect on Paladin's performance, in the end the class was able to keep running First Day of School with minimal changes to their decks and still use it effectively, and a couple weeks later Blizzard decided the card was still too strong, so it was again changed, this time by meeting both versions of the card halfway: it's still a 1-mana spell, like the burfed version, but now it only adds two 1-drops to your hand, like the original version.
• Mankrik is a 3 mana 3/4 neutral Legendary that shuffles the dead body of his wife into your deck. When the wife is drawn, it summons Mankrik, Consumed by Hatred who attacks the enemy hero. The summoned token was originally an excessive 3/10, putting an extremely high-health minion into play. This became a problem when Mankrik was played on three and his wife was topdecked shortly after, highrolling a huge threat for no mana, with a little extra face damage on the side. Combined with Mankrik's solid stats and total splashability, he was the most played Legendary in Standard. As such, Mankrik, Consumed by Hatred had his health lowered to a more manageable 7.
• Hand of A'dal was a 2-mana Paladin Holy spell from the Ashes of Outland set that gave a minion +2/+2 and drew a card. Put simply, this was a strong buff card, essentially being a Blessing of Kings that provided half the stats for half the cost and cycled through your deck. It was really annoying for the opponent when it was played on-curve with cheap early-game minions, including Paladin's decent 1-drop suite of Aldor Attendant, Righteous Protector, and Knight of Anointment, the latter of which could also potentially draw the spell for you. Hand of A'dal was eventually nerfed to only give the minion +2/+1, making removing the buffed minion an easier prospect.
• Gibberling was a 1 mana Druid minion from Scholomance Academy with the Spellburst effect to summon another Gibberling, which in turn summons another Gibberling, which summons another... essentially making it a 1 mana Violet Teacher as far as Token Druid is concerned. In combination with Lightning Bloom, Innervate, Nature Studies, and Power of the Wild, the Druid could potentially end turn 1 on a board of seven 2/2s. Even without the ridiculous highroll potential, Gibberling was a free board reload on any other turn. It was raised to 2 mana to slow it down.

United in Stormwind Nerfs

• Overall, the first round of Stormwind nerfs were designed to target one aspect of the early post-launch metagame: the rapid pace at which a few classes were capable of closing out games, causing slower strategies to fall to the wayside. While each card listed under this bullet had other reasons for being nerfed or altered, this was the general line of reasoning, and as such we're putting this disclaimer here to avoid repeating ourselves too much. Now, with that being said...
  • Incanter's Flow was a 2-mana Mage Arcane spell from Ashes of Outland that reduced the cost of all spells in your deck by 1. This effect is nuts, and while it didn't have much of an impact in the Year of the Phoenix, the launch of the Year of the Gryphon made it an auto-include in just about every Mage deck. Spell Mage and its derivatives in particular were incredibly effective due in large part to this card, especially before the nerfs to Deck of Lunacy and Refreshing Spring Water, and even then one or two casts of Incanter's Flow could effectively "un-nerf" them. Although Blizzard had been dancing around nerfing this card for a while, its effectiveness in a spell-only deck that utilized the newly-added Questline Sorcerer's Gambit for insanely high, insanely fast burst damage finally forced their hand, and Incanter's Flow was nerfed to 3 mana.
  • Nearly a year after its initial nerf, Darkglare once again found itself facing the nerf bat. Although the Scholomance-era nerf successfully curbed the card's usage in Standard (for a while, which we'll get to), in Wild it was the exact opposite story- Darkglare-centric combo decks that utilized Flesh Giant and Molten Giant found their feet again surprisingly fast, and proceeded to dominate the Wild ladder to an absolutely disgusting degree, to the point that even nerfing one of its self-damage tools (Pen Flinger) had no effect on the deck's standing. While these decks were tricky to pilot, anyone finding themselves facing someone who could do so effectively were in for a steep uphill battle they had slim chances of winning. As if that weren't enough, Standard players would find themselves facing a similar threat once Warlocks got ahold of their Stormwind Questline, The Demon Seed, which requires self-damage to complete, making including Darkglare and a few of its Standard-legal Wild friends a no-brainer. Sure enough, Questline decks that ran Darkglare began to cause problems in Standard, and this proved to be the straw that finally broke Darkglare's back. It was given a burf by way of reverting its cost and statline back to what they were originally, going from a 2-mana 2/3 back to a 3-mana 3/4.
  • Flesh Giant, an 8-mana 8/8 Priest/Warlock minion from Scholomance Academy. While slower Priest and Warlock decks in Standard had been running the card for a while, in Wild, Flesh Giant was basically a Warlock-only card. Thanks to Darkglare and Warlock's array of self-damage tools, Flesh Giants could come down way earlier than intended, which, alongside Molten Giants, made facing Darkglare Warlock a potential nightmare. Like Darkglare, Flesh Giant again became a problem in Standard following the launch of United in Stormwind and the addition of The Demon Seed, making the Darkglare/Flesh Giant combo an easy inclusion. As such, in addition to burfing Darkglare, Flesh Giant had its cost upped to 9 mana to make it slightly harder to play. Blizzard quickly admitted that this was way too soft, and bumped it up to 10 a few weeks later.
  • Battleground Battlemaster was a 5-mana 5/5 Neutral minion from United in Stormwind that gave adjacent minions Windfury while it was on the board. Unsurprisingly, this minion was totally busted - if you had any attacking minions, simply playing Battlemaster would double it, potentially leading to crazy fast kills. Guaranteeing that said burst damage would be available wasn't too hard either, depending on the class: Paladins had Divine Shields, Warlock had access to the broken Darkglare/Flesh Giant combo, and all classes could take advantage of Stealth or Charge minions. To help curb its burst potential, Battlemaster had its cost bumped to 6 mana. Even at 6 mana, Battlemaster continues to see play as both an OTK enabler and midrange finisher.
  • Kolkar Pack Runner was a 2-mana 2/3 Hunter minion from Forged in the Barrens that summoned a 1/1 Hyena with Rush after you casted a spell. This effect is innocuous at first glance, but given that Face Hunter in particular loves dumping cheap spells from its hand, it can easily become a problem if not put in check. One Pack Runner and a handful of cheap spells can easily clear any potential early-game threats, and the Hyenas can also act as cheap and easy face damage if any happen to stick around. This potential reached its echelon following the launch of United in Stormwind, where Face Hunter became a top-tier deck, and as such Blizzard decided to burf Pack Runner to curb the deck's speed. Its cost was upped from 2 to 3 mana to reduce its clearing potential, and in exchange, its statline was buffed from 2/3 to 3/4.
  • Granite Forgeborn was a 4-mana 4/5 Shaman Elemental from United in Stormwind with a Battlecry that reduced the cost of all Elementals in your hand and deck by 1. For the recently-reborn Elemental Shaman, this card was an auto-include. Not only was it an Elemental itself, but it was essentially an Incanter's Flow for your minions with a Chillwind Yeti attached. The fact that you could run two copies of the card, run Bolner Hammerbeak alongside it to copy the battlecry effect, and potentially generate more copies through Menacing Nimbus could also be considered problematic. To avoid Elemental Shaman potentially going unchecked following the nerfs to other powerful class archetypes, Forgeborn's health was nerfed to 4 to balance its stats out.
  • Conviction (Rank 1) was a 1-mana Paladin Holy spell that gave a random friendly minion +3 Attack and ranked up upon reaching 5 and 10 mana, buffing two then three minions respectively. Although the baseline effect is just a worse Blessing of Might, the higher ranks essentially gave Paladin's fairly sticky board a 1-mana permanent Bloodlust. In addition, being a Holy spell meant it could easily be drawn by Knight of Anointment and then reduced to 0 mana with Cariel Roame's effect. The Divine Shield-oriented handbuff package introduced with United in Stormwind, along with the aforementioned Battleground Battlemaster, only served to make this card even more problematic, and as such its cost was bumped to 2 mana to reduce its combo potential.
• Mindrender Illucia's back, and this time her controversial Battlecry did not leave unscathed. While the increase to 3 mana had helped at the time, by the time the third round of Stormwind balance changes was made, Illucia had become a problem in one deck in particular: "Cute" Shadow Priest. This version of the archetype, at the time the most powerful and most refined, ran a lot of super-cheap minions to further leverage the effect of Voidtouched Attendant, and Illucia was included in this deck effectively as an early-game "skip my opponent's turn" card, since a hand that's either mostly empty or filled with useless 0-costs or 1-costs isn't of much use to most other archetypes. As such, Blizzard finally came down on Illucia's Battlecry and came down hard, making it so that it instead replaces your hand with a copy of your opponent's until end of turn. This change, while still keeping the same flavor, effectively murdered the card, turning Illucia into, effectively, a worse Azalina Soulthief.
• Perpetual Flame was a 1-mana Shaman Fire spell from the Wailing Caverns miniset that dealt 3 damage to a random enemy minion and recasted if that minion died, with each cast of the spell also Overloading for 1. In the early-to-mid-game, Perpetual Flame was an insanely good removal tool. Not only was it really efficient for a 1-mana card, its status as a 1-mana card also meant it could be generated through Wandmaker, making Shaman's odds of finding good removal much higher, and the fact that it Overloaded meant it was a shoe-in for Questline Shaman. With all this in mind, Blizzard decided to increase Perpetual Flame's cost to 2 mana.
• On the subject of Questline Shaman, Tame the Flames was the third and final step of Shaman's United in Stormwind Questline, Command the Elements. This step required you to play two cards with Overload to receive the Questline's final reward: Stormcaller Bru'kan, a 5-mana 7/7 that made all spells you play cast twice for the rest of the game. Given Shaman's vast array of Overload cards, most of which help the Shaman survive until the Questline is completed, and one of which is the ridiculously powerful Lightning Bloom, it was very much possible to complete the whole Questline insanely fast, leading to a lack of counterplay from slower decks. Tame the Flames in particular was odd in that its completion requirement was actually smaller than those of the first two steps, which demanded you play three cards with Overload. As such, this step had its completion requirement increased to 3 to both slow the Questline down and match the first two steps.
• Runed Mithril Rod was a 3-mana 0/2 Warlock weapon from United in Stormwind that, at the cost of 1 durability, reduced the cost of all cards in your hand by 1 after you drew 4 cards with the weapon active. Thanks to the many, many ways Warlock can draw cards, Rod's ability was not only easy to trigger, but severely outperformed other classes' methods of mana generation. In particular, coining Rod out on turn 2 and then playing Backfire the following turn was a very popular, very effective strategy, especially in more fatigue-oriented builds of Questline Warlock, which were beginning to see incredibly positive results near the time of the third Stormwind balance patch. As such, Rod's cost was increased to 4 to bring it in line with other mana generation tools. Later, following the launch of Fractured in Alterac Valley, Rod wound up being particularly strong again, mainly in discounting an OTK combo using Humongous Owl's Deathrattle, Tamsin's Phylactery, and tokens to deal RIDICULOUS amounts of damage to the enemy hero's face. While cards like Rustrot Viper existed to counter Rod, Blizzard opted to increase its cost again, this time to 5 mana, to hopefully encourage healthier play patterns.
• Razormane Battleguard was a 2-mana 2/3 Druid Quilboar from Forged in the Barrens that, as long as it was on the board, caused the first Taunt minion you played each turn to cost 2 less. Battleguard effectively created an entire archetype in and of itself, Taunt Druid, an aggressive deck akin to Token Druid, but with Taunt minions instead of tokens. It only got even more busted once United in Stormwind arrived and brought with it Oracle of Elune, which synergized extremely well with Battleguard: with one or more Battleguards already on the board, Oracle causes any Taunts discounted to 2 or less to be summoned twice, and you can even summon two Battleguards at once and cheat out Taunt Druid's key Taunts, Greybough and Teacher's Pet, way faster. To help knock Taunt Druid down a peg, Battleguard's health was lowered to 2 to make it easier to kill.
• Arcanist Dawngrasp is the final reward of Mage's United in Stormwind Questline, Sorcerer's Gambit. Pre-nerf, Dawngrasp was a 5-mana 7/7 that gave your Hero +3 Spell Damage for the rest of the game. While Questline Mage in and of itself wasn't that good of a deck, it was still very popular and very polarizing. Given that the Questline itself could be completed fairly quickly and the only real way to counter the massive boost in Spell Damage was to pressure board and kill the Mage faster than they could kill you, this made slower decks effectively non-viable, leading a pure aggro or combo meta. As such, to try and lower the popularity of Questline Mages and alleviate the deck's polarization, Arcanist Dawngrasp's Spell Damage boost was lowered from +3 to +2.
• Garrote was a 2-mana Rogue spell from United in Stormwind that dealt 2 damage to the enemy Hero, then shuffled 3 Bleed spells into your deck. When drawn, each Bleed also dealt 2 damage to the enemy Hero. Garrote became the central card for an OTK deck centered around drawing through your deck to (near-)fatigue, putting as much Spell Damage on the board as possible, and killing your opponent with your Garrotes and Bleeds. It was a deck that required a lot of skill to play and was really only effective in higher ranks, but in the hands of the right player, it was incredibly strong. It was eventually decided that Garrote was too powerful, and so the amount of Bleeds shuffled into the deck was lowered from 3 to 2, forcing players still keen on playing the deck to find more Spell Damage to complete the OTK.

Fractured in Alterac Valley Nerfs

• Celestial Alignment was a 7-mana Druid Arcane spell from Forged in the Barrens that reset both players to 0 mana and reduced the costs of all of their cards to 1. The comparisons to Astral Communion were immediate, and for a while cheeky Druid players were looking to find ways to make this card work- and they did, thanks to the Wailing Caverns miniset bringing with it Lady Anacondra, whose effect would now cause the already-heavily discounted Nature spells in your hand to be free, leading to plenty of possible shenanigans. While decent, later sets would make Celestial Druid surprisingly powerful, especially with Alterac Valley adding Wildheart Guff, who's all about mana ramping. Blizzard took notice of how Alignment was causing a lot of crazy turns to happen earlier than they felt was healthy, and increased its cost to 8 mana to allow for more pre-Alignment counterplay. Blizzard later saw fit to nerf Alignment again after Ramp-centric Druid decks caused some ruckus after the launch of Castle Nathria, with Druid gaining access to the strong combo of Topior the Shrubbagazzor and Sire Denathrius, pairing oppressive board building with a win condition reliant on having your own minions die — and Alignment could reduce both cards to 1 mana and disrupt the opponent on top of that! With this, Alignment was nerfed to only affect the Druid, bringing it in line with cards like Astral Communion and freeing the opponent up to more properly counter them.
• Efficient Octo-Bot was a 2-mana 1/4 Rogue Mech from Forged in the Barrens with a Frenzy effect that reduces the cost of all cards in your hand by 1. Octo-Bot was always a good card, thanks to its low cost, the fact that it had such high health for said cost, and its highly-beneficial and easy-to-trigger Frenzy effect, but at higher levels of play, where the likes of Garrote Rogue thrived, it was really good, especially given that Rogue has a couple ways to bounce Octo-Bot back to its hand and trigger its discount again. As such, its cost was increased to 3 to slow down combo-centric decks.
• Snowfall Guardian was a 5-mana 3/3 Shaman Elemental from Fractured in Alterac Valley that Froze all other minions, then gained +1/+1 for each Frozen minion on the board. Intended as a powerful tool for Alterac Valley's resurrection of Freeze Shaman, Guardian wound up being too powerful, particularly when it came to locking down the board. The combination of Freezing an entire board and putting a massive threat into play was frustrating for board-based decks to play around. Combine that with Brilliant Macaw to have 4 of them in your deck, and it was simply too much. Guardian's cost was therefore increased to 6 to soften its power. Even at 6, however, it was still the best card in Shaman and even saw Wild format play, and with Shaman seeing positive results after the launch of Castle Nathria, Guardian recieved a notable burf: its statline was increased to 5/5, but in exchange, the stat gain effect was completely removed from its Battlecry, essentially turning it into a two-sided Frost Nova.
• Touch of the Nathrezim was a 1-mana Warlock Shadow spell that dealt 2 damage to a minion, then healed you for 4 health if it died. While always intended to be a solid removal option for slower Warlock decks, this spell wound up causing Warlock to have too much overall health restoration- it could be found through Wandmaker, like all other 1-cost spells, Forged in the Barrens' version of Tamsin Roame could add an additional 0-cost copy to your hand, and minions that amplified spell damage made triggering the healing effect way easier. As such, the amount of health Touch of the Nathrezim healed was reduced to 3 to bring things back in line.
• Bloodsail Deckhand was a 1-mana 2/2 Warrior Pirate from the Year of the Gryphon incarnation of the Core set that reduced the cost of your next weapon by 1. This nerf is actually a de-buff, as Deckhand had been given a buff to its health in an effort to give Standard Questline Warrior a boost. By the time of Fractured in Alterac Valley, the deck had become a bit stronger than intended, and as such Deckhand's health was reverted back to 1 to make the deck's strength more reasonable.
• Irondeep Trogg was a 1-mana 1/2 neutral minion from Fractured in Alterac Valley that summoned a copy of itself after your opponent casted a spell. Paired with buff spells like Noble Mount and Doggie Biscuit, Trogg could very easily win games on its own. A buffed Trogg would frequently snag opponents in a catch-22; it was a threat that needed multiple spells to get it off the board, but casting spells would only create another equally-dangerous threat. To reduce Trogg's power but also keep its position as an early-game counter to spells intact, its effect was changed to simply summon another 1/2 Irondeep Trogg.
• Shadowcrafter Scabbs was a 7-mana Rogue Hero Card that returned all minions to their owners' hands, summoned two 4/2 Shadows with Stealth, and replaced your Hero Power with the 0-cost Sleight of Hand, which causes the next card you play that turn to cost 2 less. As you might be able to tell, this was a LOADED Hero Card, being a Vanish that summons two Jungle Panthers, gives you Armor, and effectively makes your Hero Power a Preparation that discounts any card, not just spells, and since Sleight of Hand costed nothing to use, a Rogue playing Scabbs on-curve can still play a cheap card alongside him to potentially further their new-found advantage. Combined with Rogue's other tools, such as the next card on this list, Scabbs helped make Rogue an incredibly dominant class, and thus he was bumped to 8 mana.
• Cloak of Shadows was a 3-mana Rogue Shadow spell from Madness at the Darkmoon Faire that gave your Hero Stealth for a turn. Essentially, it acted as a get-out-jail-free card and stalling tool for Poison Rogue, a deck that builds a huge weapon. The general game-plan was to build up your weapon, deal a massive amount of burst damage, then hide away to safely deliver a lethal round two. Blizzard was initially fine with the deck as it was, but then Shadowcrafter Scabbs and the Maestra/Gnoll combo were added to the game, leading to Poison Rogue becoming way stronger than was comfortable. Cloak was therefore bumped to 4 mana to reduce the combo potential.
• Originally, the Warrior questline Raid the Docks was middle tier at best, hence the aforementioned buff to Bloodsail Deckhand. This changed when the Deadmines miniset launched, bringing a slew of new Pirates (particularly Defias Cannoneer and Mr. Smite) that greatly increased the deck's reach and consistency. While not an outlier in the top meta, Questline Warrior was a terror in lower levels of play, even after Deckhand's health buff was reverted, and Blizzard wanted to encourage more deck diversity in this area. As such, the amount of pirates required to finish the second step, Create a Distraction, was increased from 2 to 3. With the launch of Voyage to the Sunken City and Year of the Hydra rotation, Pirate Warrior again emerged as a dominant deck thanks to losing literally nothing in the rotation as well as receiving even more cheap, powerful Pirates. As such, the third and final step, Secure the Supplies, was also nerfed, going from needing 2 Pirates to be completed to 3.
• Rapid Fire was an unremarkable 1-mana Hunter spell from Rise of Shadows that dealt 1 damage to any target and had Twinspell. It would've sat collecting dust for years, if not for the Hunter questline Defend the Dwarven District. Each step of the questline requires you to play two spells that deal damage, which meant that Rapid Fire by itself could complete one step of the questline for only two mana. Plus, once the quest was done it could be used to deal a total of eight damage by itself with the Odd Hunter hero power. Rapid Fire was reworked into a 2-mana spell that deals 2 damage, making it more generically useful but slowing it down and also preventing it from being played in Odd Hunter decks.
• Despite already being nerfed from 2 to 3 mana, Incanter's Flow proved that such a massive amount of cost reductions was extremely dangerous. After the rise of Mozaki Mage in Standard and its continued dominance in Wild, Flow was bumped again to 4 mana, hopefully to keep it down for good this time.
• Sorcerer's Apprentice is possibly the strongest mana cheat minion ever printed, with its unrestricted -1 cost to your spells fueling more combo Mage decks than can even reasonably be listed. Plus, its vanilla stats made it an auto-include in tempo Mage lists as well. With all of Mage's card draw and mana reduction compounding over the years, Sorcerer's Apprentice finally received a brutal nerf from 2 mana all the way to 4.
• Kazakusan is a rather divisive subject, whether he's a fun win condition for the ailing control archetype or a boring slog that turns the game into a race to draw him first. However, one thing everyone can agree on is that including LOCUUUUSTS!!! in his pool was a massive mistake. LOCUUUUSTS!!! was an 8-mana Twinspell that filled the board with 2/2 Locusts that attack a target enemy. This could include face. Not only was this 14 burst damage, it left 14/14 in stats on the board. If your opponent cleared it, the Twinspell meant another 14 damage was incoming. If they couldn't, guess what? Another 14 damage incoming. Highrolling LOCUUUUSTS!!! off Kazakusan made an already strong card nearly unbeatable, so Blizzard wisely removed the card from his treasure pool less than a month after his release.

Year of the Hydra

Voyage to the Sunken City Nerfs

• Once again, a card adjustment was made to preemptively prevent something potentially game-breaking... and it's not Priest this time! Unstable Evolution was a 1-mana Shaman Nature spell from Kobolds and Catacombs that evolved a friendly minion into one that costed 1 more. In addition, the spell could be replayed infinitely that turn, without actually using the Echo keyword as the effect predated it. There's been some goofy interactions that've resulted from this, but it was Voyage to the Sunken City that finally prompted a change. One of Radiance of Azshara's effects makes your Nature spells cost 1 less, and since Unstable Evolution didn't actually have Echo, it could be reduced to 0 mana for possible shenanigans.^note This did previously occur when it evolved minions into Radiant Elemental or Sorcerer's Apprentice, but it was heavily reliant on RNG to give you one of those two minions, so it was just considered a funny highroll rather than something consistently game-breaking. To prevent this from happening, it was announced ahead of the set's launch that the "Repeatable this turn" text was being replaced with the Echo keyword, which doesn't inherently change Unstable Evolution's function, but keeps this cheeky, potentially unfair interaction from happening.
• Another Obvious Rule Patch type nerf was issued for Pandaren Importer before launch. Originally, she was a 2 mana 1/3 whose Battlecry Discovered a spell that wasn't in your starting deck. It was considered solid, but nothing too outstanding. However, once rotation hit and Brann Bronzebeard rotated into Core, things got broken. It turned out that Rogue had a shallow enough spell pool in Standard that a deck stuffed full of spells was 100% guaranteed to get Shadowstep every time. This, combined with a 2 or less mana damage dealing Battlecry (usually Fogsail Freebooter), was a ludicrously easy one turn kill. Pandaren Importer was changed to a 3 mana 2/4 to prevent this from happening.
• Switcheroo was a 3-mana Priest spell that drew two minions and swapped their stats. Designed as a unique tutor effect, players very quickly discovered a new way to break the game. By running a single small minion and a single huge minion, it became unbelievably easy to get an absurd amount of stats in play very early in the game. Standard used Twin-fin Fin Twin and Deathwing the Destroyer to generate 24/24 in stats with Rush as early as turn 3, highrolling a board with very few answers. The deck's consistency was massively boosted by Illuminate, since even if it fails to find Switcheroo it can still ensure that the next card drawn will not be a minion. Wild had even worse combo in the form of combining a Charge minion (most often Stonetusk Boar), switching its stats with The Darkness and copying the Charge minion with Vivid Nightmare for 40 damage from a three-card combo that can be triggered as early as turn 4 that has practically no counter play, which warranted the card getting outright banned in that format, as the nerf could easily be worked around with Topsy Turvy, Bless or Divine Spirit Switcheroo was nerfed to only swap the minions' health totals instead of all their stats.
• Pufferfist was a 3 mana 3/4 neutral Pirate that dealt 1 damage to all enemies after your hero attacked. This was the absolute jackpot of aggro minions - it had premium stats, a useful and synergy-heavy minion type, and a really strong effect that could deal with annoying boards and still pressure face. It was lowered to 3 health to put it in range of more board clear and removal effects.
• Miracle Growth was a 7 mana Druid spell that drew 3 cards then summoned a plant with Taunt and stats equal to the number of cards in your hand. This was pretty much the perfect card to follow up Druid's ramping, as it let them stabilize with a decent-sized Taunt and made up for the cards they'd spent to cheat their mana. Later on, it could be used as a lethal threat and free reload, usually summoning an 8/8 or bigger while giving them more to spend their mana on. Miracle Growth was nerfed to 8 mana to slow it down by a turn, opening up an even bigger weakness to aggro for Ramp Druid. It would be reverted when it was rotated to Wild in the Year of the Pegasus, which coincided with most of Druid's ramp tools being taken out of Standard.
• Kazakusan, as mentioned above, is an 8 mana 8/8 Dragon from Onyxia's Lair that originally let you construct a 10-card deck of Purposefully Overpowered treasure cards so long as your deck only had Dragon-type minions. Unfortunately, that condition would also trigger if your deck had no minions, making him an absurd finisher for Control decks and, most infamously, a win condition in his own right for Ramp Druid. He was actually better in these cheese decks, as his condition meant Dragon decks couldn't run non-Dragon support minions. Prior to the Year of the Hydra, Ramp Druids played a deck with 28 spells, Guff, and Kazakusan and turbo'd him out. Post rotation, the deck instead threw him in for one last volley of threats at the end of the game. Either way, this was monstrously powerful and egregiously Not the Intended Use, so Blizzard changed his condition entirely to instead require you to have played 4 other Dragons this game. This worked twofold, to kill the cheese decks and make him actually playable in dedicated Dragon builds.
• Kael'thas Sunstrider was the free Legendary given out for Ashes of Outland, and his effect was utterly nuts. It made every third spell cast cost 0 mana. With careful deck building, he let the player spam cards with impunity, giving access to high-damage combos or huge card draw. In Wild, Druids can literally draw their entire deck in one turn thanks to all their cheap/free spells and mana refreshing. Initially, Kael was raised from 6 to 7 mana to slow him down, then finally neutered to only reduce the cost to 1 instead of 0, which is how he remained for most of his life in Standard. With the Year of the Hydra reverts, Kael was returned to his launch status... which instantly proved to be a huge mistake, as he conquered the Wild meta for a few weeks, forcing Blizzard to revert his effect to its nerfed state but leave him at 6 mana.
• Drek'Thar was a 4-mana 4/4 neutral Legendary from Alterac Valley that summoned two minions from your deck if all the minions in deck cost less than him (3 mana or less, in other words). Drek'Thar was basically a slightly-adjusted neutral Call to Arms with a 4/4 body attached, and while Wild players — Flamewaker Mages especially — were able to figure out how to abuse him not long after his release, it was the Year of the Hydra rotation that made him infamous. In Standard, he was a massive power spike for both Aggro Demon Hunter and Questline Hunter, summoning annoying and/or powerful minions like Vicious Slitherspear, Treasure Guard, and both of the classes' newly-added legendary Nagas, Lady S'theno or Raj Naz'jan. Highrolling this out on turn three or four essentially required a board clear from your opponent to prevent you from snowballing. In response, Drek'Thar was nerfed to only summon a single minion.
• Multi-Strike was a 1-mana Demon Hunter spell that gave your hero +2 Attack that turn and let them attack an additional time so long as one of the targets is a minion. Similar to fellow Game-Breaker Blade Dance, Multi-Strike let Demon Hunters convert all of their temporary attack bonuses into Taunt removal and face damage simultaneously. Additionally, it had the flexibility of activating cards like Battlefiend and Battleworn Vanguard an extra time that turn, and could be used to hit two minions or the same minion twice in a pinch. Plus, it didn't even need combo cards to be strong; with the DH hero power, it was essentially a Corrosive Breath with no deckbuilding restrictions. After the first round of nerfs, Aggro Demon Hunter quickly found itself on the top of the Sunken City meta off the back of this powerhouse card. In response, Multi-Strike was nerfed to 2 mana.
• Dragonbane Shot was a 2-mana Hunter spell from Onyxia's Lair that dealt 2 damage to any target and had the Honorable Kill effect to add another Dragonbane Shot to your hand. This card was a no-brainer auto-include in Questline Hunter, potentially granting infinite Quest progress with a single card. Dragonbane Shot punished players for establishing a board even harder than Questline Hunter already did, with the looming threat of their quest on every turn. Once the Quest was completed, Hunters could turn each cast of Dragonbane Shot into 2 more damage to the opponent for their infamous OTKs, and even turn the Shot face for another 4 damage once it ran out of targets. Dragonbane Shot was nerfed to 3 mana to prevent Hunters from chaining a whole bunch of them in one turn.
• With the previous round of nerfs, it was soon apparent that the new king of the meta was Control Warrior and its OTK Combo variant. Naturally, Warrior got hit hard with the next set of nerfs.
  • While many Colossals proved to be worth their high price, Nellie, the Great Thresher went way beyond that. Originally, she was a 7 mana 5/5 that summoned a 2/6 body with Taunt and Discovered three Pirates. When the body died, it would add the Pirates to your hand and reduce their cost to 1. This was overall a pretty disgusting combo of effects — the 5/5 was just big enough to be a threat, the Taunt would slow down lethal pushes from the enemy, and the Pirates would provide a huge amount of value or even a burst finisher if Mr. Smite was among the offered Pirates. Nellie only got filthier with From the Depths, which would reduce her cost to 4 mana to be played on curve. In response, her effect was severely nerfed to only reduce the Pirates by 1 mana instead of to 1 mana.
  • From the Depths was a 3-mana Warrior spell that reduced the cost of the bottom 5 cards of your deck by 3 and Dredged. By itself, this card cheats 15 whole mana, and even gets you one of those reduced cards for your next draw. This would let you cheat out Rokara, the Valorous or the aforementioned Nellie on curve next turn. While you theoretically don't get the majority of the discounts until you Dredge more, this is pretty much a non-issue thanks to Sir Finley, Sea Guide pulling them all to your hand. Even if you only hit a bunch of small cards, them being 0 mana let you play them all in one turn and restock with Forged in Flame. This was card was way too effective, and was nerfed to 4 mana to mess with its on-curve cheating.
• When Xhilag of the Abyss first came out, he was probably the worst Colossal. His buff from 1 to 2 damage helped, but didn't make him broken. However, it did make Caria Felsoul pretty broken. She was a 6 mana 6/6 Demon Hunter legendary from Fractured in Alterac Valley that became a 6/6 copy of a random Demon in your deck. Although she was pretty underwhelming for her intended use, midrange DH players soon discovered that you could run her in a deck with Xhilag as the only target, and use her to cheat out a 6 mana 6/6 copy. The increased stats and cheaper cost pushed Xhilag from good to broken, as Caria would deal up to 8 damage to the face and/or clear the enemy board and demand immediate removal and a board clear. Caria was burfed to a 7 mana 7/7 to prevent her from cheating Xhilag out a turn early.
• Spitelash Siren was a 4 mana 2/5 Mage Naga that refreshed two mana after you played a Naga, then switched to refreshing two mana after you played a spell, and back and forth like that. This card was the heart of Naga Mage, a deck dedicated to drawing tonnes of cards until it had a critical mass, then dropping Siren and pretty much dumping their entire hand in a single turn, frequently as early as turn 5. In case it wasn't obvious from Darkglare, repeatable mana cheating effects are very broken. Mage players would typically end their turn with a full board of Nagas and a hand full of newly-generated spells — typically the spree only stopped because they ran out of turn time. In order to slow down how fast this combo can happen, Siren was burfed to a 5 mana 2/6.
• Wildpaw Gnoll is a card with an incredibly tumultuous history:
  • Initially it was a 5-mana 4/5 Rogue minion with Rush that costed 1 less for each time a card from another class was added to your hand. Intended as a strong tool for decks that ran Burgle synergies, Gnoll wound up overperforming to the extreme thanks to its interaction with Maestra of the Masquerade - since Maestra's effect actually changes your base class, your Rogue cards, including Gnoll itself, now count as "cards from another class". Combine that with Tradable cards and Secret Passage, and Rogue could slam what's effectively a 0-cost Chillwind Yeti with Rush onto the board potentially as early as turn 1 if they wind up highrolling. It was such a strong synergy that even non-Burgle Rogues began running the two, further making Rogue in general a problem class. As a result, Blizzard hit Gnoll with a heavy nerf, increasing his cost to 6 mana and reducing his attack to 3.
  • When Secret Passage rotated out, Blizzard figured this was safe to revert to help give Burgle Rogue some much-needed love. This ended up being a little too powerful still, so they hit it with a middle ground nerf that lowered its attack to 3 but kept it at 5 mana. This left the combination with Maestra strong, but not overwhelming.
  • This changed again with March of the Lich King, which added Potion Belt, a spell that Discovered two Concoctions, which are a cycle of Rogue spells that can be mixed together to form more powerful spells. This would add two Rogue cards to your hand which then fused into a third Rogue card. Because this all happened while the spell was still resolving, if this was the first Rogue spell you cast then Maestra's effect to turn you back into a Rogue wouldn't trigger until all the steps were complete, reducing Gnoll by 3 mana with one card possibly as early as turn 1, without the hoops and highrolls that Secret Passage could require. Ultimately, the way Gnoll's discount worked was changed to require non-Rogue cards rather than cards from another class, removing the unintended synergy with Maestra once and for all.
• Lightforged Cariel, the Paladin hero card from Fractured in Alterac Valley, is the mother of all stalling cards, packing value, burst options, survivability, board clears, and a lot of flexibility into a single play. Her Battlecry deals 2 damage to all enemies and equips a 2/5 weapon, letting her readily deal with small threats and one medium one for free. But that's not all; the weapon she equips never loses durability and has a second effect where it halves all incoming damage she takes. This means that unless the weapon is destroyed by an effect or she equips a different one, she has a permanent +2 Attack on her turn and doubles her health total. Her hero power gives a random minion in your hand +4/+4, which can churn out an army of threats for the opponent to deal with each turn or can be stacked on a single minion — say, Mr. Smite — for a massive finisher. The combination of godlike stalling, constant pressure, and the threat of an OTK brought Midrange and Control Paladin back into the limelight from the brink of obscurity. In order to lower her impact on the game, she was nerfed from 7 to 8 mana.
• Mr. Smite from The Deadmines was a 6 mana 6/5 neutral legendary Pirate that gave all of your Pirates Charge, including himself. Smite is quite possibly the most hated card ever printed. He was a charge minion with good stats and no downside, making him an automatic include in every aggro deck as a finisher. In actual Pirate decks, he was an even grosser finisher that turned every little Pirate into another source of damage. With handbuffs, Smite quickly got out of hand as one of the only Charge minions still in Standard, providing upwards of 40 unavoidable damage in the right list. To help curb this overloaded card, he was nerfed to 7 mana.
• School Teacher was a neutral 4 mana 5/4 Naga that added a 1/1 Nagaling to your hand and Discovered a spell that cost 3 or less to teach to it, giving it the Battlecry to cast the chosen spell. While not the type of card that would make someone rage, School Teacher was the single most played minion in the entire set due to its massive efficiency and highroll potential. As such, it was nerfed to a 4/3 to ensure that its premium Battlecry no longer came with premium stats. In September of 2022, this nerf was lessened to 4/4 instead.
• Earthen Scales from Journey to Un'goro was a 1 mana Druid spell that gave a minion +1/+1 and granted Armor equal to the minion's attack to your hero. While this card wasn't special when it first came out and only gained infamy in the Linecracker meme combo, its inclusion in the 2022 Core set proved that it was a very powerful card in the right meta. Alongside Miracle Growth and Naga Giant, a double Earthen Scales let Ramp Druids recover around 20 health in a single turn while establishing a huge threat, pretty much instantly swinging the game back with a single, easily-drawn highroll. In response, Earthen Scales was nerfed to 2 mana.
• Lightning Bloom was a 0 mana Shaman/Druid spell from Scholomance Academy that gave the caster 2 mana crystals that turn, but had 2 Overload. Effectively it was a pre-nerf Innervate... and goes to show how broken Innervate was. While it does have a downside (taking away as much mana as it adds), it's negligible compared to the disgusting tempo plays it gave you. Despite being such a contentious card for Druid the whole time it was in Standard, it was actually a wild Shaman deck that finally got it nerfed. This deck would highroll out an Ancestor's Call on the first or second turn to pull out a Colossal minion and win the game very quickly after. In order to finally cull the game-swinging effect of this card, it was changed to only refresh mana instead.

Murder at Castle Nathria Nerfs

• The first wave of Castle Nathria balance changes wasn't focused mainly on nerfs, but rather a substantial number of buffs, since the classes that were performing well were strong, but largely balanced, while the rest of the field was either fairly weak or pathetic to the point of total irrelevance. That's not to say there weren't nerfs, but they were — for the most part — fairly light:
  • Vile Library was a 2 mana Warlock Location with 2 uses that gave a minion +1/+1, and repeated for each Imp you controlled. Imp-centric Warlock decks were a clear front-runner after Nathria launched, with this card helping to push Warlock's wide board even further, especially in tandem with Sea Giant to take advantage of the board flooding Imps bring with them. To tone down the amount of stats Warlock could dump on the board, the base +1/+1 Vile Library gave was removed, lowering the total buff by 1/1 and forcing Warlock to have at least one Imp on board to utilize its effect.
  • Hunter's new set of Wildseeds, introduced with Castle Nathria, were all fairly good, but the largest of the bunch wound up being perhaps just a bit too good — Stag Spirit Wildseed was a 5/4 Hunter Beast that, after being summoned by one of a select few Hunter cards, went Dormant for 3 turns. After awakening, it gave your Hero a 4/2 Stagpoint Wildbow. While there is that slow windup period, putting a 5/4 on board and gaining a decently strong weapon on top of that is pretty great, and paired with the rest of the Wildseed package and Hunter's other tools, even a fast-paced deck like Face Hunter was willing to ease off the gas (if only slightly) to put a Stag Spirit in play — face damage is still face damage, after all. To tone down both Hunter and the Wildseed package as a whole, the Stagpoint Wildbow's statline was nerfed to 3/2, helping balance out the amount of attack Stag Spirit puts in play. When Hunter was still overperforming following this change, Stag Spirit was lowered to a 4/3 and Bear Spirit Wildseed was bumped from a 2/5 to a 2/4 in October of 2022.
  • Kobold Illusionist was a 4 mana 3/3 Rogue minion from Kobolds and Catacombs with a Deathrattle that summoned a 1/1 copy of a minion in your hand. While generally a cheeky and fun card, Kobold Illusionist sadly had to die for the sins of Neptulon the Tidehunter, since this pairing allowed the Rogue to summon a 1/1 copy of him — generally more, when played alongside cards that triggered or copied Illusionist's Deathrattle, which had notably grown in number since Kobolds— all told putting 9/5 in stats on the board that could immediately eliminate one or more of the opponent's threats and deal upwards of 16 damage to the enemy face the following turn if it wasn't dealt with. As such, Illusionist's cost was bumped to 5 mana.
• Wildheart Guff was a 5-mana Hero Card for Druid that set your maximum Mana to 20, gained a Mana Crystal, and drew a card. At first reveal, he was seen as slow and gimmicky. In practice, he was anything but slow. Thanks to support cards like Wild Growth and Lightning Bloom, getting Guff into play early is a breeze. From there, he quickly escalated Ramp Druid to heights never before possible, turning their once-useless lategame Ramp cards into more value as he approaches that incredible 20 mana limit. His brokenness reached his peak once Murder at Castle Nathria came out, with Prince Renathal providing extra deck space for more payoff cards, Topior the Shrubagazzor to allow tons of bodies on board, and most infamously, Sire Denathrius to deal tons of damage in a single blow. To prevent Guff from getting too out of hand, he was nerfed to only give empty Mana crystals, which slowed him down quite a bit.
• Edwin, Defias Kingpin was originally a 4-mana 4/4 minion that drew a card, repeating that effect and gaining +2/+2 of you played said card. In order to boost Rogue's win rate, he was, to the bafflement of many in the playerbase, burfed to a 3-mana 3/3 early in Murder in Castle Nathria's life time… and as those players had predicted, this burf almost instantly proved to be a huge mistake, as the Miracle support Rogue got during that expansion allowed Edwin to boost his stats through the roof for a small amount of Mana. Because of this, the burf was reverted.
• Magister Dawngrasp is a 7-mana Hero Card for Mage that casts a spell from each Spell School you've played that game. While there was nothing wrong with this, there absolutely was an issue with the Hero Power they gave you. Arcane Burst was originally 2-mana and dealt 2 damage… which got boosted by 2 every time it Honorably Killed a minion. Just triggering it once allowed you to deal 4 damage for 2 mana every turn, hitting it twice allowed you to cast Fireball at half the cost every turn, and it just keeps getting crazier from there, made even worse by Reckless Apprentice allowing Dawngrasp to One-Hit Polykill the entire enemy board and deal extra damage to face. Because of this, it was nerfed to only gain +1 damage every time.
• Nightcloak Sanctum was a 3-mana Mage Location with 3 uses that freezes a minion and summons a Volatile Skeleton, a 2/2 minion that deals 2 damage to a random enemy when it dies. While it sounds only okay on paper, in practice it can get absurd, especially if you use multiple at once, allowing you to get 6 freezes and 12/12 worth of stats over the course of 3 turns, simultaneously boosting both Infuse cards and the Skeleton package's capstone legendary, Kel'thuzad, the Inevitable. Because of this, it was nerfed to 2 uses.
• Defend the Dwarven District was Hunter's Questline from United in Stormwind. Each of the three steps required you to deal damage using two spells, with all three rewards being buffs to your Hero Power: the first allowed it to target minions, the second reduced its cost to 0, and the Battlecry of the final reward, the 5 mana 7/7 minion Tavish, Master Marksman, made it refresh after you casted a spell. Ever since Stormwind's nerfs knocked Warlock down a peg, Questline Hunter had hung around as, at worst, a consistent, decent deck, even temporarily shaking off the nerf to the Odd variant in Wild. At the same time, it had also been frustrating for a number of decks to fight, forcing a less board-centric "kill them fast before they kill you fast" playstyle similarly to Questline Mage. For this reason, as well as an anticipated rise in power given the other nerfs dealt out the same patch, the completion requirement for first step of the Questline was increased to 3 spells to slow the deck down.
• Kael'thas Sinstrider was a 6 mana 4/7 minion that makes the third minion you play each turn cost (0). While not as busted as his living counterpart, Sinstrider gained infamy with a simple 3 card combo that can easily one-shot the opponent: play him, then Brann Bronzebeard, and then Sire Denathrius. With this combo, you only need at minimum 10 minions to die beforehand if your opponent has an empty board, which is easy as pie with certain classes and strategies, and even if you don't kill the opponent, you still more often than not clear the entire opponent's board and heal back to full, allowing you to continue the onslaught. In order to combat this, Sinstrider was nerfed to cost 8 mana, preventing the combo from working without a coin outside of Druid.
• Smothering Starfish was a 3 mana 2/4 neutral minion from Voyage to the Sunken City that Silenced all other minions on the board. While Starfish was clearly meant to function as a tech card — a function that, at the time, it was serving very well, effectively countering the then-recent rise in Aggro Druid and freeze-happy Mage decks, among others — its cost stood in opposition to that. Being a 3 mana minion with a decent body that Silences every single minion on the board was simply too good, and likewise made Starfish way too easy to just generically slot into more-or-less any deck, especially compared to the other 3-mana neutral Silence minion, Ironbeak Owl, who only Silences a single minion and dies in a single hit. With Starfish's prominence in the meta additionally locking out underrepresented decks, Blizzard took action by bumping it up to 4 mana, helping to make it less of a generic include. The nerf would be reverted when Sunken City rotated out.
• Harpoon Gun is a 3 mana 3/2 Hunter weapon from Voyage to the Sunken City that Dredges after your hero attacks and reduces the card's cost by 2 mana if it was a Beast. Despite the high power of this card, Hunter was underperforming in early Sunken City meta. In order to make the class more competitive, Harpoon Gun's mana cost reduction was buffed to 3. This let Hunters potentially highroll a Hydralodon that could be played on curve next turn. Even outside of that game-winning play, it was the best way to fetch Azsharan/Sunken Sabre, or get a dirt-cheap Rat King. In the absolute worst case scenario, Dredging twice on a cheap, well-statted weapon is still a huge boost to deck consistency. With the introduction of the overpowered Wildseed package in Murder at Castle Nathria, Hunter was now too good, and Harpoon Gun's buff was reverted to try and bring it in line.
• Theotar, the Mad Duke was a neutral 4 mana 3/3 Legendary that Discovered a card in each players' hand and swapped them. While this is technically a symmetrical effect, the key is the incredible amount of choice you get. Being able to Discover both swaps gives a huge chance to snipe the best card out of the opponent's hand while also guaranteeing you can pass something weak or even useless in exchange. Sniping a Sire Denathrius or Wildheart Guff is not only incredibly frustrating, it could fully dismantle the opponent's win condition for only 4 mana. For comparison, Mutanus the Devourer was seeing play for similar reasons at 7 mana with a worse effect. Even if they don't concede on the spot, you then also get to make full use of the powerful card you stole. This was consistent enough that at his peak, Theotar was nearing 60% playrate across all Standard ranks. He was nerfed to 5 mana, although Blizzard noted that they're keeping a close eye on him as they don't want him dominating the entire next year. Turns out he was still seeing too much play, and Blizzard nerfed him even further by bumping him up from a 5-mana 3/3 to a 6-mana 4/4.
• The third Obvious Rule Patch nerf of the year struck Ice Revenant. Ice Revenant was a 4 mana 4/5 neutral Elemental from Fractured in Alterac Valley that gained +2/+2 whenever you casted a Frost spell, which altogether proved... rather mediocre, to say the least. However, with the upcoming Death Knight class having a number of cheap Frost spells, namely Horn of Winter, which refreshes 2 Mana crystals for zero mana, this change was absolutely necessary. As noticed during internal playtests, a Death Knight could plop down an Ice Revenant and play two Horns of Winter to put a 0-mana 8/9 on board on turn 4 and create an oppressive tempo swing — and keep in mind, the Death Knight just got all their mana back, so they can then play more Frost spells to jack up Revenant's stats even further. As a result, Ice Revenant was nerfed to only gain +1/+1 when a Frost spell is played, which would make the initial buff turn Revenant into a more manageable 6/7.

March of the Lich King Nerfs

• Sire Denathrius, the centerpiece card of Murder at Castle Nathria, was a 10 mana 10/10 neutral legendary with Lifesteal that would deal 5 damage split amongst all enemies, and could be Infused by 1 endlessly to increase the damage dealt by 1 each time^note in layman's terms, each time a friendly minion died while Denathrius was in your hand increased the damage of his Battlecry. This card proved to be a must-play for just about any non-aggro deck. If it was drawn early, it was frequently enough to finish off an opponent on the spot right on turn 10. Even if it wasn't used as an OTK, it was a ridiculously versatile card, which could wipe the opponent's board, heal your hero for a bunch, and leave a 10/10 threat in play. Control matches were dominated by either who drew their Denathrius first, or alternatively who could Mutanus/Theotar/Patchwerk the Denathrius out of their opponent's hand. Players cried for this card to be nerfed since its release and Blizzard finally listened, increasing the Infuse requirement to 2, literally halving its damage output.
• Shockspitter was a sleeper card from March of the Lich King that quickly exceeded all expectations. It was a 2 mana 2/2 Hunter Beast that dealt 1 damage to any target and had this damage increased by 1 for each time your hero attacked this game. Despite getting no support in the set itself, it turns out that Hunter had a solid selection of weapons in Standard, including Bloodseeker, Candleshot, and Harpoon Gun, the lattermost being able to reduce Shockspitter to 0 mana on a highroll. This let the Hunter maintain chip damage and pressure while also growing their win condition. It was very easy to deal between 6 and 10 damage with a single Shockspitter, which quickly became either an OTK with Brann Bronzebeard or massive burn damage by copying and bouncing it. Within days of the expansion's launch, the ladder was dominated by Shockspitter decks. Shockspitter was nerfed to 3 mana, making it much clunkier to combo with Brann and harder to weave into turns. Even with this change, the card was still pretty strong, and with other top-tier performers getting the nerf bat in a later patch, Shockspitter was appropriately burfed into a 4 mana 3/3 so it couldn't instantly start dominating the game again.
• Anub'Rekhan was an 8-mana 7/7 Undead Druid Legendary from March of the Lich King that granted you 8 Armor and also made your minions cost Armor instead of mana this turn. Surprise surprise, a mass mana cheat like this became kind of broken. In particular, Anub'Rekhan was very broken with Astalor Bloodsworn, or more specifically Astalor, the Protector, who could be played for free thanks to his effect, and Astalor, the Flamebringer. With Brann Bronzebeard in play, you got two Flamebringers who each dealt 32 damage to the opponent. With Druid's trademark survivability, card draw, and mana ramp, it was no issue getting to this combo early. In response, Anub'Rekhan only makes your next three minions cost Armor, severely limiting the crazy chains you can pull off.
• Early in the meta, it became apparent that Rogue had not one, but two overperforming decks. Both were hit hard in the pre-holiday nerfs.
  • Necrolord Draka and Sinstone Graveyard were a pair of cards from Murder at Castle Nathria designed to reignite the classic Miracle Rogue archetype, and needless to say they succeeded. The former was a 4 mana 3/4 that equipped a 1/3 Dagger that had +1 Attack for each other card you played this turn. The latter is a 2-mana, 2-durability Location that summons a 1/1 Ghost with Stealth that is +1/+1 bigger for each card played this turn. Thanks to Rogue's Miracle popoff, they could equip and immediately attack with a Dagger that has on average 15 attack while also summoning one or two 16/16 Stealthed ghosts, although it could go as high as 30+ with the right roles. Assuming this wasn't immediately lethal, the opponent then had to deal with a massive weapon and two Stealthed gigantic minions — not impossible, but keep in mind this was sometimes going off by turn four. To cull the combo potential of Draka and increase the setup time for Sinstone Graveyard, each had their cost increased by 1. This wasn't quite enough to keep Miracle Rogue down at high levels of play, though, so Sinstone Graveyard was later nerfed again, this time removing the Ghost's Stealth.
  • Deathrattle Rogue had been an existing archetype since Fractured in Alterac Valley, however it reached a zenith of good targets and unfair cheating in this expansion. Thanks to the new card Scourge Illusionist, Rogue could easily cheat out any Deathrattle they so desired, and the targets of choice were Burning Blade Acolyte to summon 5/8s with Taunt and Infectious Ghoul to make an unkillable board of 5/4s. This let the Rogue cheat out boards with lethal damage on turn 4, often with more damage hidden underneath Deathrattles to make the board incredibly sticky. As such, two of the deck's enabling cards, Forsaken Lieutenant and Sketchy Information, each had their cost increased by 1 mana to slow the deck down.
• Relic Demon Hunter was a deck that took many players by surprise, with its unimpressive-seeming Magikarp Power playstyle being rated very poorly initially. However, this deck turned out to have a lot of flexibility that let Demon Hunters slowly build the power of their Relics for a game-ending push. One Relic was overstepping the bounds however — Relic of Dimensions. This 5-mana spell drew two cards and reduced their cost by 1, with the cost reduction increasing for each other Relic you've played this game. Alongside Relic Vault, this card could draw 4 cards and reduce them all usually to 0 mana by that point. This essentially became Rogue's old Wondrous Wand into Galakrond, the Nightmare combo but with less hoops to jump through. This is too much constancy and mana cheat for an already great archetype. In order to slow down the deck, Relic of Dimensions was increased to 6 mana.
• Unleash Fel was a 1 mana Demon Hunter spell that dealt 1 damage to all enemies and had a Manathirst 4 effect to gain Lifesteal. Unimpressive on its own, this turned out to be a dream combo with Silvermoon Arcanist, which boosted the damage to 3 and came down right on curve with the Manathirst activating. This instantly shut down aggro decks, clearing the board while also healing the Demon Hunter to full. In order to make this a bit less of a perfect play, the Manathirst was bumped to 6.
• Naga Priest was a high-skill deck that overperformed in high ranks but was barely visible in lower ones. Still, its domination at a few tournaments clearly showed a problem. The deck worked by building a massive minion with cheap buff spells, and plentiful mana from Radiant Elemental and Priestess Valishj. It was then topped off with a Boon of the Ascended to basically double the stats that were put into play. The deck was hit two-fold — first, Valishj was nerfed from 0 to 1 mana so she couldn't be used on an empty tank after a chain of 0-mana spells. Secondly, Boon of the Ascended was nerfed to 5 mana to put a cap on the big finisher.
• Odds are, if you weren't facing a Rogue at the higher levels of the Standard ladder before the January 2023 balance patch, it was a Demon Hunter. Thus, two of its cards were nerfed to bring it down a notch:
  • Final Showdown is Demon Hunter's Questline from United in Stormwind, which initially required you to draw 4 cards in a single turn to complete the first step then 5 cards to complete the second and third, with the initial two rewards being a 1-mana cost reduction on all the cards you drew. Thanks to Demon Hunter's surprising amount of card draw, a decent amount of which could be played early in the game, completing this quest quickly for cost reductions was a more common sight than it really should have been. In fact, this card was frequently used against its own design, being a 1-cost discount of effectively 9 mana that started in your opening hand — the actual quest reward^note Demonslayer Kurtrus, a 5 mana 7/7 that makes every card you draw cost 2 less for the rest of the game was rarely even played. As such, Final Showdown's first step had its requirement increased to a whopping 6 cards in one turn, slowing it down significantly.
  • Sinful Brand was a 1-mana spell from Castle Nathria that branded an enemy minion, causing the enemy hero to take 2 damage each time the minion was damaged. Originally overshadowed on release, it found new life in March of the Lich King with its synergy with Fel'dorei Warband for crazy burst. It was bumped to 2 mana, and Blizzard's remarks on why Brand was chosen for a nerf sum it up about as well as can be said:
    Sinful Brand was chosen as a card to target because it punishes opponents for simply playing the game, a play pattern that we don't like being too powerful or prevalent.
• Glacial Advance was a 3 mana, 1 Frost Rune Death Knight Frost spell that dealt 4 damage and made your next spell cost 2 less. Frost was easily the best-performing of the three major Death Knight archetypes, and Glacial Advance, while not necessarily a massive outlier on its own, did still feel a bit overtuned. As such, to keep Frost Death Knight in line alongside the other big hits doled out the same patch, Glacial Advance's cost reduction was reduced to 1.
• Inarguably the biggest hit of the January 2023 balance patch was Astalor Bloodsworn. He was a 2 mana 2/2 with a Manathirst 4 effect that dealt 2 damage. However, his Battlecry also added his second form to your hand; Astalor, the Protector, a 5 mana 5/5 with a Manathirst 7 effect that granted 5 armor, and his Battlecry likewise added Astalor's third and final form to your hand; Astalor, the Flamebringer, an 8 mana 8/8 that dealt 8 damage split between all enemies — 16 if you met the Manathirst 10 requirement. This card already had crazy potential in Druid before Anub'Rekhan was nerfed, but all three Astalors combined created a strong and, more importantly, incredibly flexible toolkit that proliferated throughout just about every single deck that mattered in the metagame, to the point where Astalor became the most played card by number in decks of all time. As a result, all three forms were nerfed: Bloodsworn's Manathirst was increased to 5, Protector's Manathirst was similarly upped to 8, and Flamebringer's damage was reduced to 7 and 14. And even after the nerfs, he still sees a ton of play in both Standard and Wild because the value he gives is just that insane.

Year of the Wolf

TITANS Nerfs

• Lab Constructor was Rogue's class Forge card, and proved to be the first major balance oversight of the year after the relatively balanced Festival of Legends. The majority of Rogue's TITANS cards were designed around Mechs, with both their Titan Keeper and Titan (or T1T4N) being Mech support. Part of their newfound Mech package was Lab Constructor, a Mech that summoned a copy of itself at the end of the turn. Constructor was already absurd by itself, being a 6/4 for 4 spread across two bodies that needed to be immediately dealt to prevent them from exponentially multiplying each turn, but what made the card utterly busted was the return of the Magnetic keyword. Not only could you give Magnetic effects to Constructor itself, giving it any number of extra keywords and stats that would be multiplied at the end of the turn, but Constructor could also be Forged to become Magnetic itself, giving any Mech you already controlled the same effect and thus the same kind of exponentially multiplying threat. This quickly proved to be far too powerful, giving Rogue access to massive, unstoppable boards as early as turn 4 that required either a board clear that most classes wouldn't have the mana for at that point, or at least two separate pieces of removal to kill both copies. Constructor was so overbearing on the meta it took a mere 7 days for it to get emergency nerfed to 5 mana in hopes that would make it less overwhelming to deal with.
• Yogg-Saron, Unleashed, the centerpiece of the Fall of Ulduar mini-set, was a 15 mana Legendary neutral Titan whose cost decreased by 1 for each spell cast that game. Being a Titan, Yogg had three powerful activated abilities: the first two, Induce Insanity (essentially a one-sided Mass Hysteria that only affects the opponent) and Reign of Chaos (straight-up just Mind Control) were plenty good, but the real kicker was his third ability, Tentacle Swarm. This ability fills your hand with Chaotic Tendrils, 1 mana 1/1 minions that cast a random 1-cost spell, with that spell's cost improving with each Tendril you play. As the original Yogg-Saron wound up proving, even when dealing with purely random spells, things tend to turn out in your favor more often than not. Unlike O.G. Yogg, however, even if the Tendril you play winds up being silenced or killed, you still wind up with a beneficial outcome thanks to the next Tendril's spell being a higher-cost (and generally better) one. What all of this means is that Yogg-Saron, Unleashed wound up being stuck in decks that amounted to piles of spells (and maybe a few beneficial minions, particularly those that let you generate a second Yogg) so as to rapidly decrease his cost and quickly slam him down to win the game; Ramp Druid in particular wound up reaching insane heights purely off the back of Yogg. Yogg-Saron, Unleashed eventually wound up being heavily reworked: now, he's a 9 mana minion with the much more flavorful and in-character effect of casting 2 random spells after one of his abilities is used, which successfully killed the spell-spamming decks and lowered him to a more reasonable power level.
• Bioluminescence was a 3-mana Shaman Nature spell from Voyage to the Sunken City that gives all of your minions Spell Damage +1. Already capable of generating an obscene burst of damage on its own when paired with cheap burn spells like Lightning Bolt, TITANS really amped its power up to eleven with the new Nature spell package including Flash of Lightning (2-mana Nature spell that draws a card and makes all your Nature spells cost 1 less next turn), Crash of Thunder (deals 3 to all enemies, including the enemy hero, and its cost is reduced by 1 for each Nature spell you cast this turn), and Lightning Reflexes (1-mana Nature spell that Discovers a Nature spell, then Discovers another one if you cast the first that turn). To bring the deck down to a sane level after Nature Shamans started frying enemies left and right with massive face burn, Bioluminescence was bumped up from 3 mana to 4, slowing down potential burn combos.
• Hollow Hound was a 6-mana 3/6 Undead Beast for Death Knight and Hunter from Festival of Legends with Rush, Lifesteal, and when attacking, it dealt attack damage to the minions next to the target as well. This is an absurd combination of abilities, making it a powerful sweeper that could also give a huge chunk of healing, plus even more healing if the opponent had to kill the Hound by trading into it. This also made it an extremely good target for all sorts of buffs, which got rather crazy in the hands of Hunters due to Always a Bigger Jormungar (which basically gives a minion the Trample effect from Magic: The Gathering) also triggering off the cleave damage and obliterating anyone unfortunate enough to have three small minions on board at any time. Hollow Hound was first given a reduced chance to appear in Arena drafts because of how strong its abilities were in that format, and then nerfed to 3/4 to make it less efficient at trading.
• Thaddius, Monstrosity was a 10-mana 11/11 Undead from the Return to Naxxramas mini-set that shifts between making your odd-cost cards cost 1 and making your even-cost cards cost 1 every turn. It should go without saying that this amount of mana cheating led to some very silly shenanigans, especially in the hands off Warlock, who could cheat out Thaddius himself with the likes of Amorphous Slime and then start duplicating Thaddius or use him as a Forge of Wills target, all while spamming out almost anything else they please. To put a cap on Thaddius's mana-cheating, he was changed to reduce costs by 4 instead of setting them to 1.
• Sanitize was a 4-mana Warrior spell from the Fall of Ulduar mini-set that dealt damage to all minions equal to the caster's armor, and if Forged, gave you 3 armor first. With all of Warrior's armor gain, this basically amounted to a 4-mana boardwipe, and control decks had no problem Forging it on turn 2 in lieu of pressing their hero power. Because Warrior was in a very good spot after the mini-set's release, Sanitize was nerfed to 5 mana, bringing it in line with other board clears like Brawl.
• Craftsman's Hammer started out as a 4-mana 3/3 Warrior Weapon that gave your hero 4 armor after attacking and killing a minion. This was not particularly impressive, so it was later buffed to simply give you 4 armor when your hero attacks... which instantly shot it up to being one of the best weapons in the game. In addition to basically having a better version of Lifesteal, the Hammer also synergized phenomenally well with Odyn, Prime Designate (see Whizbang's Workshop Nerfs below for how Odyn became broken in his own right) to let you swing for 7 if used to attack after playing Odyn. Because Control Warrior became an extremely strong contender after Fall of Ulduar, Craftsman's Hammer was lightly nerfed to give 3 armor.
• Symphony of Sins is Warlock's signature song from Festival of Legends; for 5 mana, it lets you Discover and cast one of its six Movements and shuffle the others into your deck. While mostly not problematic, Movement of Pride proved to be horrifically abusable with its ability to tutor the most expensive minion from your deck and give it a 6-mana discount, which meant that Warlocks could easily drop Sargeras, the Destroyer on turn 6 and then snowball out of control from there with his devastating effects and endless demon army. As such, Movement of Pride was nerfed to fetch a random minion instead of your most expensive one.
• Kabal Lackey was a 1-mana 2/1 Mage minion from Mean Streets of Gadgetzan with the Battlecry of making your next Secret that turn cost 0. While not a huge issue initially, Secret Mage only became more and more powerful in Wild with all of the strong Secret synergy and better Secrets that have been released over the years, making it an extremely annoying and oppressive aggro presence. Kabal Lackey was the gold standard for their 1-drops, allowing a Secret to come down on turn 1 and immediately set up a brutal guessing game for the opponent; if they tripped your Secret, they'd be on the back foot for the rest of the game. When Blizzard chose to take a look at Wild in the wake of Caverns of Time, Kabal Lackey was nerfed to reduce the Secret's cost to 1 instead of 0, preventing the insane turn 1 value.
• Shadow Essence was a 6-mana Priest Shadow spell from 'Knights of the Frozen Throne that summons a 5/5 copy of a minion in your deck. One of the staples of Resurrect Priest for cheating out resurrection targets from the deck, it was mostly fine even in Wild due to the high cost... and then Illuminate came along, allowing Priests to Dredge it up and then cast it for 3 mana. Even for a Wild deck that lives and dies on its highroll potential, this was far too much of a highroll; even pre-nerf Barnes at least came down on turn 4 and a 5/5 Obsidian Statue on turn 3 was more than even Wild aggro decks could handle. As such, Shadow Essence was nerfed to 7 mana to give opponents an extra turn of breathing room.

Showdown in the Badlands Nerfs

• Showdown's headline mechanic was Excavate, a keyword that would generate a random treasure of scaling cost, power, and rarity for each time you Excavated, with Death Knights, Mages, Rogues, Warlocks, and Warriors additionally being able to generate a class-specific Legendary every fourth Excavate. For the most part these rewards were powerful but fair for the work you had to put in... except for Warlock's treasure, The Azerite Snake. It was a 4 mana 5/5 Elemental Beast with the Battlecry effect of stealing 10 Health from the enemy hero and giving it your hero. This means that your hero's maximum health became 40 while the enemy's became 20, in addition to both dealing and healing 10 damage on the spot. The Warlock could then bounce/copy the snake to keep reusing its effect, automatically winning after playing it 3 times (4 if Prince Renathal was in play). Also, because it stole health directly, this got around armor, Ice Block, Bulwark of Azzinoth, or any other anti-burst tool. The snake had a nerf announced the day of launch, that being an emergency cost increase to 6 mana just three days later. However, this was only a temporary band-aid nerf intended to tone Snake down before the first proper balance wave; when that arrived roughly a week and a half later, by which time the meta had properly adjusted to Excavate Warlock and its gameplan, Snake's cost was reverted and the amount of health it stole was reduced to 7, bringing it back in line with the other Legendary Excavate treasures while also making lethal require five procs rather than three.
• Blindeye Sharpshooter was a 3 mana 1/5 Demon Hunter Naga that dealt 2 damage to a random enemy and drew a spell after you played a Naga, then dealt 2 damage and drew a Naga after you played a spell, and back and forth like that. Players intimately familiar with Spitelash Siren immediately knew Sharpshooter was going to be very strong when it was revealed, as they were basically identical, with the only differences being that Sharpshooter doesn't refresh Mana, but instead draws a card that (ideally) continues the chain. Even with the lack of a Mana refresh putting a cap on the Demon Hunter's blowout turn, there were plenty of Mana cheating options (Frequency Oscillator into Mistake, Predation, Wayward Sage's Outcast effect, and Momentum, just to name a few) that extended the chain and dealt more damage on top of that, leading to quick lethals as early as turn 4 or 5. Blindeye Sharpshooter was nerfed to a 1/3 with the first balance patch to make doing an early blowout turn riskier. This still wasn't quite enough to stop it from wrecking face if it wasn't answered, so a second patch burfed it to a 4-mana 3/3, delaying it by a whole turn.
• Warlock had a very strong showing in Showdown due to their new gimmick, the Barrel of Sludge, a spell that deals 4 to the lowest health enemy (after its buff) when discarded, played, or destroyed and can be generated by a number of cards. This proved to be an absurd burn and removal package that led to Warlocks running amok until several of their cards had to be nerfed:
  • Waste Remover was a Warlock Demon that had the infamous 4-mana 7/7 statline and an effect that mills the bottom 3 cards of your deck at the end of your turn. Not only was this "downside" ignorable, it was outright beneficial a lot of the time due to several of their cards putting Barrels of Sludge on the bottom of their deck for Waste Remover to destroy. What this amounted to was a brutally-overstatted beatstick that also burned the hell out of the opponent's face and board, making it an absurd tempo card, and if you're really unlucky the Warlock can even copy its stats with Forge of Wills to put a 7/7 Rush on board. Waste Remover was duly nerfed to 5/7, making it more manageable.
  • Sludge on Wheels was a 3-mana 2/5 Rush that put a Barrel of Sludge in both your hand and on the bottom of your deck when it took damage. As you can imagine, the value you got from this was insane: immediate board control with the minion itself, more damage for later with the Barrel in your hand, and the Barrel on the bottom of your deck was prime fodder for Waste Remover. It was lowered to 2/4 to curb the amount of value it could give and make it less effective at trading.
  • Chaos Creation was a 6-mana Mage/Warlock spell that dealt 6 damage and summoned a random 5-cost minion at the cost of milling your bottom 5 cards. What this amounted to was basically a Greater Arcane Missiles taped onto a Firelands Portal because by the time you cast this, you'd almost certainly have stacked the bottom of your deck with Barrels of Sludge, making it an extremely deadly finisher. At the very worst, it was basically a Firelands Portal for 1 less mana. It was nerfed to deal 5 damage to make it less efficient for removal and burn.
• Thaddius, Monstrosity continued to cause problems even after being nerfed once (see TITANS nerfs above). Festival of Legends introduced Pyrotechnician, whose effect adds a Fire spell to your hand every time you cast a spell... and as you'd expect, most Fire spells were some sort of burn, and Thaddius would usually reduce them to 0 cost. Remember the Mage OTK combo involving Archmage Antonidas and four copies of Sorcerer's Apprentice? Thaddius and Pyrotechnician basically did that with only two cards, and both of them were Neutral so any class could do it (but in practice it was mostly Druid because of their mana-based effects and cheap spells for Pyrotechnician fodder). This got so bad that Pyrotechnician had to be emergency banned from Standard as a band-aid fix, and it was only allowed back after they settled on nerfing Thaddius's cost reduction from 4 to 2.

Year of the Pegasus

Whizbang's Workshop nerfs

• Odyn, Prime Designate was an 8-mana 8/8 Warrior Legendary whose Battlecry makes it so that whenever your hero gains Armor, you also gain that much Attack until the end of the turn. Warrior has a lot of relatively cheap Armor gain, from Heavy Plate to Shield Block to Verse Riff, and Odyn effectively converts them into disgustingly cheap burn spells since all of that Attack is going straight to the opponent's face. A control deck with Odyn effectively puts the opponent on the clock to kill them ASAP because if Odyn comes down and they don't win the game quickly, the Warrior will kill them in one or two big hits, and since the damage came from the Hero, they could easily do this from an empty board. If the Warrior got a Windfury weapon off Ignis, the Eternal Flame, an OTK was almost guaranteed, especially if that weapon also received Light of Tyr (which gives the wielder Armor after attacking, so the second swing would be deadlier than the first). Because of how easily Warrior could OTK off Odyn's effect, he was nerfed from 8 mana to 9, making him slower to come down.
• Aftershocks was a 4-mana dual Warrior/Shaman spell that deals 1 damage to all minions 3 times, and costs 2 less if you played a spell previously. This card was Odyn's partner in crime, as it triggered Acolyte of Pain 3 times for three draws to dig up your key cards faster while being a good board clear. It was nerfed to 5 mana to bring Warrior down a notch. With nerfs being doled out to two of Warrior's other big board clears as part of the next major balance patch, it was decided to revert the nerf to its cost, but in exchange, its discounting effect was reduced to just 1 mana to keep it in line.
• Handbuff Paladin began the year with a bang, due to the re-introduction of the Charge minions Southsea Deckhand and Leeroy Jenkins to burst down enemies with a huge swing from hand and lots of Lifesteal and other good handbuff targets to put a stranglehold on the board and shut down aggro. As such, several of their power cards were brought down to size:
  • Deputization Aura was a 3-mana Aura spell from Showdown in the Badlands that lasted 3 turns and gave your left-most minion +3 Attack and Lifesteal. Because this was an Aura effect, this meant the buff was not attached to any one minion and clever positioning could get tons of value out of the effect for massive damage and healing while taking extremely good trades, particularly when paired with Rush and Charge minions played on the left of your board after your other minions have already attacked. It was way too powerful both as a control tool and as a burst damage tool, and was nerfed to only +1 Attack to make Handbuff Paladin less obscene in Whizbang's Workshop.
  • Shroomscavate was a 3-mana dual Paladin/Shaman spell from Showdown in the Badlands that gives a minion Divine Shield and Windfury, then excavates a Treasure. You read that correctly: Paladins, the class with the most ways to turn minions into huge-statted threats, now had access to Windfury. This was an absolutely monstrous finisher when paired with handbuffs and Deputization Aura and could be used for extremely powerful board clearing as well when paired with Rush, so the first Whizbang's Workshop balance patch burfed it to a 2-mana spell that no longer grants Windfury.
  • Tigress Plushy was a 3-mana 3/2 Paladin Beast from Whizbang's Workshop with Miniaturize, Rush, Divine Shield, and Lifesteal. This card was basically a Zilliax for 2 mana cheaper that also replaced itself in your hand with another of itself (a 1/1 version to be precise, not that it mattered because it's a Paladin card). It was an insane handbuff target, was very easily tutorable with Trinket Artist, and was incredible for board control and healing thanks to Rush, Lifesteal, and Deputization Aura. Because of just how insanely good it was, Tigress Plushy was nerfed a mere nine days after the set's release, bumping it up from 3 mana to 4 to make the cost a bit more proportionate to the payoff.
• Thrall's Gift was one of a series of event cards released as a Milestone Celebration for Hearthstone's tenth anniversary, and for 1 mana, it allowed you to add a temporary Lightning Bolt, Hex, or Bloodlust to your hand. In theory, it was meant as a flexible and adaptive card, but Shaman at the start of the year had a very consistent and very powerful Nature burn deck that loved having extra Lightning Bolts to throw at the enemy's face. It also didn't help that Shaman's pool of 1-cost spells was so shallow that Wandmaker was essentially guaranteed to give you more burn (this card and Lightning Reflexes were the only 1-costs that weren't burn spells, and even then both could easily generate one). To address this powerhouse of a deck, Thrall's Gift was changed to offer Lightning Storm instead of Lightning Bolt, making it more valuable for other Shaman builds while cutting down the amount of burn Nature Shaman had on tap.
• Awakening Tremors was a 1-mana Hunter spell from TITANS that added three 1-mana 4/1 Bursting Jormungars to your hand. A staple of Hunter decks in the Year of the Wolf for the aggressive value, Whizbang's Workshop finally saw it becoming a problem with the advent of Jungle Gym, a Location that deals 1 damage to a random enemy for each Beast you control (and the Jormungars were of course Beasts). The high Attack of the Jormungars also synergized incredibly well with Observer of Myths to buff up your board. Because the card was a little too flexible and Hunter was an overperformer at Workshop launch, the Bursting Jormungars were nerfed to 3/1.
• Zilliax Deluxe 3000 is Hearthstone's very first fully customizable card. While deckbuilding, you equip Zilliax with two of 8 possible modules, giving him the combined stats and abilities of both modules. While most were decently balanced, two of the modules caused problems, and thus had to be nerfed:
  • The Ticking Module was 4-mana 1/3, and reduced Zilliax's cost by 1 for each minion in play. This often resulted in him hitting the board a little too easily. This was particularly good for Hunter, who could use him as a relatively cheap board buff alongside the Pylon Module (3-mana 2/2, gives your other minions +1/+1 while Zilliax is in play), but would basically always let him come down unreasonably quickly no matter what module it was used with. As such, the Ticking Module was bumped from 4 to 5 mana.
  • The next problematic module was the Virus Module, which was a 3-mana 1/3 that had Stealth, Elusive, Poisonous, and Reborn. While most of the module was okay, the Stealth part became a huge issue when combined with the Power Module, a 2-mana 1/3 that doubles Zilliax's Attack at the start of the turn. While normally Awesome, but Impractical, the Stealth provided by the Virus Module allowed Zilliax to continuously gain Attack, oftentimes delivering a One-Hit Kill with the only thing the opponent can do about it being hitting it with a board clear, which isn't an option in a lot of classes. Because of this, Virus Module was burfed, gaining 1 Health but losing Stealth.
• Umpire's Grasp was a 3 mana 3/2 Demon Hunter weapon that, upon being destroyed, drew a Demon from your deck and reduced its cost by 2. Though already a decent weapon with a good mana-cheating effect, Grasp really became an outlier once paired with another addition from Whizbang's Workshop, Window Shopper, a 5 mana 6/5 Demon Hunter Demon with Miniaturize that Discovers a Demon, then sets its cost and statline to whatever Shopper's are. On their own, they were good, but it was quickly discovered that slotting Window Shopper as the only Demon in the deck meant that Grasp could consistently draw Shopper (with a discounted cost of 3 mana) by turn 4. This caused Shopper to become incredibly broken, letting you slam a 6/5 onto the board early into the game, Discover another 3 mana 6/5 Demon (preferably Magtheridon, Unreleased) to play later, and get a Mini version to Discover a 1 mana 1/1 copy of another Demon. As such, decks centered around this combo soon made their mark on Standard, becoming the third major meta tyrant alongside Paladin and Warrior; despite this, Demon Hunter was not touched when the first balance patch hit, allowing it to continue to terrorize the ladder. Things eventually got so bad that players eventually realized that Grasp and Shopper were the only important cards in the deck, leading to Highlander decks that ran both cards as two-ofs not only appearing on ladder, but actually finding noteworthy success. The combo was eventually nerfed as part of the Battlegrounds Duos patch, with Umpire's Grasp recieving a nudge to 4 mana to delay the weapon by a turn and lock early Window Shopper turns behind having the Coin. Window Shopper was left untouched, since it was relatively balanced on its own.
• Reno, Lone Ranger is the first ever Neutral hero card and, as befitting a depiction of Reno, has an insane Highlander effect: if your deck has no duplicates, he removes your opponent's entire board from the game (including minions, locations, and even Permanents) and shrinks their board to just 1 space on their next turn. This is quite possibly the strongest Battlecry ever printed on a Hero Card and the strongest board wipe effect in the game, single-handedly obliterating the opponent's board presence and killing their tempo recovery to make up for the tempo loss of spending 8 mana to change your hero. To give you an idea of how strong this is, a lot of non-Highlander decks with decent draw power opted to run Reno as a late-game panic button, and the fact that he's Neutral means any deck that doesn't mind the game going late could potentially bring him out and flip the table on their opponent, thus forcing players to tiptoe around him starting from turn 8 to avoid getting blown out and losing on the spot. To make Reno more costly to play, his cost was increased to 9 mana. Additionally, all the Highlander cards from Showdown in the Badlands (and only Showdown's Highlander cards) were significantly burfed by way of a change to their activation criteria: now, instead of activating when your deck has no duplicates when the card's played, they only activate if it has no duplicates at the start of the game, forcing players to commit to the Highlander archetype if they want the powerful effects these cards provide, but also preventing cards that shuffle multiples of themselves into the deck from stopping these Highlander cards dead in their tracks.
• Warrior was down, but nowhere near out after the nerfs to Odyn and Aftershocks, with Highlander decks centered around Deepminer Brann's Battlecry-doubling quickly filling the void. In addition to the aforementioned Highlander card changes burfing Brann himself, three of the class' key cards also recieved nerfs with the second major balance patch (though they wound up not doing much to actually weaken the class; see Deepminer Brann's section on the main Game-Breaker page for more info):
  • Sanitize (see TITANS Nerfs above in Year of the Wolf) proved to still be obscene at 5 mana after its first nerf. Much like how the significant amount of cheap armor gain Warrior had made Odyn overpowered, so too was the case with Sanitize, which was easily the class' best board clear option, especially when Forged. Forging the card not only adds more armor/damage, but also activates Ignis' powerful weapon-crafting Battlecry (which Warriors could now double with Brann), which only made Sanitize even stronger. As a result, Sanitize was burfed, with its cost bumped to 6 mana in exchange for increasing the Forged version's armor gain to 4 armor.
  • Also from TITANS is Trial by Fire, which was a 6 mana Fire spell that summoned five Val'kyr Champions, 1/1 Undeads with Rush that gave other Champions +1/+1 on death. This was a strong, incredibly flexible board clearing tool, letting Warrior efficiently pick and choose which enemy minions to hit to maximize the Champions' Deathrattle value. Of course, if any champions happen to survive, the opponent now has more enemy minions to contend with, and they'll want to clear them in case Warrior has another copy of Trial by Fire ready to go to buff them up even more. In addition, its status as a Fire spell meant it could be drawn and discounted by Steam Guardian, ensuring Warrior could reliably find a board clear option by turn 5. Trial by Fire was thusly bumped to 7 mana to balance out its cost-to-stats ratio.
  • Boomboss Tho'grun was a Legendary 8-mana 7/7 Warrior Legendary from Showdown in the Badlands whose Battlecry shuffles 3 T.N.T. into your deck, which Cast When Drawn and destroy one card each from your opponent's hand, deck, and battlefield. This is effectively a more draw-dependent version of Patchwerk, who himself was quite dreaded for his tempo swing and potential to strike down the enemy's win condition before they got to play it. What made Tho'grun particularly nasty, though, was his interaction with two other cards: Gaslight Gatekeeper lets you shuffle your hand back and draw a new one, and the aforementioned Deepminer Brann increases the T.N.T. count to 6. To top it off, Warrior actually had an obscene amount of card draw that Standard format, so Tho'grun was basically guaranteed to get value. As such, Tho'grun was changed to shuffle T.N.T. into the opponent's deck instead to make the effect more controllable for the opponent (although T.N.T. cannot blow up other copies of itself). This does still give the opponent 3-6 absolutely terrible draws, though, making it debatable as to how much of a nerf this really is.
• The other big class the second balance patch targeted was Warlock, who also received 3 card nerfs:
  • Wheel of DEATH!!! (yes, that's actually how it's printed) is an 8 mana Shadow spell that kills your opponent after 5 turns... but also destroys your deck. When it was revealed, Wheel was largely dismissed as one of those cards — funny and flavorful, but unlikely to actually be a strong meta contender. When the expansion actually launched, however, those opinions were proven to be very, VERY wrong: with the right cards, Wheel Warlock was a powerful force on ladder, rapidly drawing through its deck to find Wheel and other key cards, churning out big threats using Dark Alley Pact and Forge of Wills (more on it in a moment), and taking advantage of the deck being empty post-Wheel by dropping Fanottem onto the board for free and clearing the enemy board with Reno. These decks also usually included Sargeras, the Destroyer for an additional board clear and guaranteed board presence, as well as Symphony of Sins to refill your deck with strong spells after Wheel activated. However, what really made Wheel of DEATH!!! a problem was the fact that the card's turn counter ticked down at the end of your turn, meaning that your opponent really had only four turns to kill you once Wheel was played. Consequentially, Blizzard took the obvious route when nerfing Wheel, making it so the turn counter ticks down at the start of your turn, finally making Wheel's effect actually take 5 turns to proc.
  • Forge of Wills was a 3 mana Location with 2 durability that summoned an Ironbound Giant, a minion with Rush and stats equal to that of a friendly minion of your choosing. As Thaddius and Waste Remover both demonstrated, Forge of Wills essentially gave Warlock a cheap way to double up on big minions, usually resulting in two minions with statlines of 7/7 or higher hitting the board simultaneously, with one of them having Rush to clear out one of the opponent's threats (if they had any). What's more, Warlock had multiple ways to enable Forge on-curve, including Imposing Anubisath, Waste Remover (which still saw play post-nerf), and the newly-rotated Dark Alley Pact. After being a core card for Warlock for roughly three expansions, Forge of Wills was finally nerfed by increasing its cost to 4 mana, preventing it from summoning big threats too early by making it the same cost as its earliest enablers. Combined with the adjustment to Wheel of DEATH!!!, this nerf effectively killed Wheel Warlock.
  • Wheel Warlock wasn't the only strong deck the class had — Pain Warlock, centered around self-damage, also rose to prominence after a few weeks, and one of the deck's central cards was Imprisoned Horror, which was a 9 mana 5/5 that costed 1 less for each point of damage you took on your turn. With Pain Warlock damaging itself constantly and for large amounts, this meant it could quickly and easily play Horror for free, which put a 5/5 onto the board faster than the opponent could likely answer, while also giving Warlock a good on-curve Forge of Wills target. It also saw some play in Wild alongside the unbanned The Demon Seed to give the Questline some much-needed big threats. With all this in mind, Imprisoned Horror was nerfed to a 4/4 to make it easier to deal with and less of an ideal Forge target.
• For the longest time, Priest lacked anything that closely resembled a proactive win condition. Whizbang's Workshop rectified that by giving Priest one HELL of a power swing in the form of Timewinder Zarimi, a Legendary 5 mana 4/6 Dragon that, if you summoned 5 other Dragons, gave you a once-per-game extra turn. Priest getting a minion version of Time Warp immediately caused players' heads to turn, with Zarimi becoming one of the expansion's highest-rated cards before release. That said, it did take a while for a Zarimi-centric deck to really find its footing, but when it did, Priest suddenly became a powerful aggro class capable of fighting with the best of them, playing Dragons as fast as possible to swarm the board and activate Zarimi, then OTK the opponent on their extra turn with minions like Dreamboat, Pylon Module Zilliax, and the returning Leeroy Jenkins. Wild also greatly appreciated Zarimi, pushing Priest to the near-top of its metagame. It was therefore no surprise when Zarimi got hit with the nerf bat with the next major balance patch, increasing the amount of Dragons needed to 8 to greatly slow Zarimi down... though all Zarimi decks had to do was slightly adjust their decks to account for the increase and they were almost instantly back to being as powerful as they were pre-nerf.
• Flash of Lightning is a 2-mana Shaman spell that draws you a card and reduces the cost of your Nature spells by 1 on your next turn. Anyone familiar with the shenanigans enabled by Radiant Elemental and Sorcerer's Apprentice will likely not be surprised to hear that Flash of Lightning enabled some pretty degenerate things and became the centerpiece of the notorious Nature Shaman. Lightning Bolt, Lightning Reflexes, and Pop-Up Book all became free (and Lightning Reflexes' extra Discover became much easier to trigger), Bioluminescence came down for 1 mana cheaper so you could fling more burn at your opponent, and the cost reduction not only benefited Crash of Thunder directly but also let you easily string together enough spells to get it down to 0 cost. Shamans were burning people to death on turn 5 at some points because of how much mana this card could cheat, thus allowing them to stack a crapton of Spell Damage on the same turn. This card ended up getting Thrall's Gift and Bioluminescence both nerfed due to the degenerate burn combos, and even outside of those decks, it just gave too much value for Shamans to pass up. Flash of Lightning itself later recieved a cost bump to 3 mana, and Crash of Thunder also recieved a nerf from 5 to 6 mana, making two of Nature Shaman's key cards just that bit more expensive.
• Though one of its biggest enablers was nerfed, Jungle Gym continued to be a strong card in Hunter thanks to all the great token support it recieved with Whizbang's Workshop — and even then, Awakening Tremors still saw play post-nerf due in no small part to its ability to enable Gym. As such, Jungle Gym's durablility was nerfed from 3 to 2 to lower Token Hunter's damage output.
• Threads of Despair was a 1 mana Death Knight Shadow spell with 1 Blood Rune that gave all minions a Deathrattle that dealt 1 damage to all minions. When played with a big board, Threads of Despair becomes a very efficient board clear, essentially acting as Death Knight's equivalent to Defile. The fact that it also affects your opponent's minions effectively punishes them for having minions on board, which severely hurt minion-based aggro decks in particular. Threads' deckbuilding requirement only being a single Blood Rune also meant the class could easily give up a Rune slot to put it into their deck, but its biggest benefactor was Rainbow Death Knight, who very much wants its minions to die to generate corpses to spend and power up Climactic Necrotic Explosion. As such, Threads of Despair was bumped to 2 mana.
• Sickly Grimewalker was a 3 mana 2/4 Death Knight Undead with 1 Unholy Rune from the Fall of Ulduar mini-set that gave any Undead you summoned Poisonous while it was on the board. Much like Threads of Despair, Grimewalker essentially punished the opponent for playing big minions or being buff-centric, turning all of Death Knight's Undead minions into guaranteed kills on any minion the opponent plays. Though great with just about any Undead minions, Grimewalker especially worked well with token generators like Death Knight's own Hero Power, Mining Casualties, the Unholy Plague spells shuffled by the plague generators from TITANS, and especially Crop Rotation, which summons 4 1/1s with Rush, all but guaranteeing an empty enemy board. And of course, all these Poisonous tokens dying generates Corpses for Death Knight to spend, making Grimewalker a shoe-in for Rainbow Death Knight as well. Grimewalker was thusly burfed into a 4 mana 3/5 to reduce its combo potential.
• Even after all this time, Open the Waygate continued to be a pest in Wild, and thanks to March of the Lich King, it had a new way to be annoying and broken: Grand Magister Rommath's Battlecry recasts every spell you've cast that didn't start in your deck, which conveniently includes Time Warp, thereby allowing Quest Mage to gain multiple extra turns thanks to Rommath and cards like Potion of Illusion that let Mage add copies of him to their hand. It also later got The Galactic Projection Orb to potentially cast Time Warp again, and it was this interaction that finally pushed the deck over the edge and caused Blizzard to take action, nerfing Time Warp to make its effect only work once per game, finally preventing any card that recasts spells from giving Mage additional extra turns.
• Floop's Glorious Gloop was a 1 mana Legendary Druid Nature spell from The Boomsday Project that caused any minion that died the turn it was cast to make you gain a mana crystal for that turn only. Though a great mana cheating/generating tool for the longest time, Gloop suddenly became incredibly strong thanks to the 10th anniversary patch making it so that temporary mana crystals (like those given by Gloop or the Coin) could push you past the mana cap, potentially allowing Druid to gain insane amounts of mana under the right circumstances. A Wild deck centered around this change eventually made its presence known, using Gloop to generate loads upon loads of mana, followed by Forbidden Fruit to turn all that mana into attack to OTK the opponent (or at the very least get them within spitting distance). This was very clearly not what Gloop was supposed to be used for, and it was nerfed in the same fashion as Lightning Bloom, with Gloop's effect now refreshing mana instead.
• Snowfall Graveyard was a 3 mana Rogue spell from Fractured in Alterac Valley that made your Deathrattles trigger twice for the next 3 turns. With Rogue having all sorts of Deathrattle shenanigans in Wild, it was practically inevitible that Snowfall Graveyard would find some way to be overpowered in the format, and the deck that eventually did just that was Mine Rogue, a deck that uses Snowfall Graveyard and Necrium Blade in tandem with cards like Backstab and Shadestone Skulker to OTK the opponent using the Deathrattle of Naval Mine. What really helped the deck was its insanely low curve, with Graveyard and Necrium Blade being its two most expensive cards, enabling Rogue to potentially pull the OTK off as quickly as turn 4. As Snowfall Graveyard was the card that enabled the deck to be as strong as it was, it recieved a brutal nerf to 5 mana to hopefully kill this uninteractive combo.
• Miracle Salesman is a 1-mana 2/2 Neutral minion whose Deathrattle gives the controller a Snake Oil, a 0-mana Tradeable spell that deals 0 damage. On its own, Miracle Salesman was a very strong 1-drop (basically being a Loot Hoarder with a better statline once you Traded the Snake Oil away), which was good but not game-breaking. Here's the catch: the wording on Snake Oil is "Deal 0 damage", meaning that the 0 damage can be increased by Spell Damage, basically making it a neutral Moonfire for OTK decks like Burn Druid and Nature Shaman that could also help you dig for combo pieces. To cut down on the amount of burn such decks could easily put out, Snake Oil was nerfed to 1 mana.
• Gaslight Gatekeeper was a 3 mana 3/4 Neutral Undead that, as already mentioned, shuffles your hand into your deck and draws cards equivalent to said hand's size. In addition to increasing Boomboss Tho'grun's power, Gatekeeper was also particularly strong in Rogue, where she was a central card in a deck that drew cards en masse to find and rapidly discount Playhouse Giant, then use Celestial Projectionist and Breakdance to put as many 8/8s on the board as possible, with Everything Must Go! also included as a secondary card draw payoff. With two classes using Gaslight Gatekeeper to overwhelming effect, she was nerfed to 4 mana to reduce her combo potential.