With a new expansion coming out soon, and the addition of a new split ranking system, Blizzard has announced some rather massive Hearthstone Nerfs. It’s no secret that Card games start becoming bloated with new releases, and the whole delicate balance becomes ever increasingly hard to enforce. This is also the case with Hearthstone, after having several new cards added since its release, the game became very hard to balance, resulting in cheesy decks and blizzard nerfing cards to try and balance stuff.

Whispers of the Old Gods is the new Hearthstone expansion coming out next week, and besides the obvious new cards and themes, introduces a new game changing system that will strike a balance between the ever increasing cards and competitive PvP matches. Rankings will be split into 2 different Ladders, Standard and Wild. In the Standard mode you will only be able to use classic Hearthstone cards and cards from the latest game update. Cards from previous expansions and updates will be unavailable in this mode. On the other hand, Wild will be the same as the current Ladder, meaning you can use any card ever released, with Blizzard not promising it will be 100% balanced, hence the name “Wild”

In order to make the new Standard ladder more balanced Blizzard announced several Hearthstone Nerfs coming to its classic card decks. These nerfs are being put in place to futureproof any other balance issues that may arise with additions of new cards and to make the devs lives easier by having less to think about.

Below is the complete Nerf list, and while all these sound logical it does strike me like they overdid it a bit with some of these nerfs. Time will tell if this was a good move, for now we can only speculate.

• Ancient of Lore – Draw a card (was “Draw 2 cards”)
• Force of Nature – Cost: 5 (was 6), Treants no longer have charge.
• Keeper of the Grove – 2/2 (was 2/4)
• Ironbeak Owl – Cost: 3 (was 2)
• Big Game Hunter – Cost: 5 (was 3)
• Hunter’s Mark – Cost: 1 (was 0)
• Blade Flurry – Cost: 4 (was 2), no longer does damage to opponent
• Knife Juggler – 2/2 (was 3/2)
• Leper Gnome – 1/1 (was 2/1)
• Arcane Golem – 4/4 (was 4/2), no longer has charge
• Molten Giant – Cost: 25 (was 20)
• Master of Disguise – Now grants stealth until end of turn only