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Senior ‘Hearthstone’ Game Designer Ben Brode on the Warsong Commander Nerf

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A few days ago we posted about Blizzard’s announcement of Warsong Commander getting nerfed. Warsong Commander has been an incredibly controversial card as of late, playing a key part in the Patron Warrior deck which has been vaguely dominant in very high-level Hearthstone (Free) play. The problem with the Patron Warrior deck wasn’t even necessarily that its win rates were too high, it was that the way you lost wasn’t fun at all, as the deck effectively punishes you for playing minions before just killing you in one turn.

However, the problem with Warsong Commander specifically is that giving charge to cards is an incredibly powerful ability that was having a negative impact on the cards the Hearthstone team could design with it around. For instance, Deadsteed was originally going to be a Naxxramas neutral card, but with Warsong Commander in the mix that card would be game breaking. Anyway, you should really just watch Ben Brode explain the whole process of dealing with this card:

If it wasn’t obvious enough from the video, I’ll echo my experiences in working with the Hearthstone team: These guys genuinely care about the game, its players, and the health of the game both from the perspective of veteran players knee-deep in the high-level metagame and new players dipping their toes in. Nothing is a spur of the moment decision, and as mention in the video, there were tons of potential solutions discussed and tested before this one was settled on.

It’s really, really rad getting these behind the scenes, no B.S. videos explaining the how’s and why’s of substantial changes with the game. Nothing you can do will ever please angry Reddit pedants, but, if you were on the fence about whether or not this Warsong Commander nerf was a good thing or not, I’d be really curious to hear what you think after watching this. Hopefully Blizzard keeps this sort of thing up, as it’s so much better than a sterile set of bullet listed change notes.

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