Hearthpwn

You’re right on all accounts. I can see a lot of grief because of this card and I only play as Warlock. 

I guess it's confirmed that this literally steals the health, as in, your opponent's maximum Health becomes 20, then 10, etc.

This is so beyond the realm of overpowered it's hard to overstate. 

No need to tell them. I'm sure they have a balance patch where they nerf that deck ready to be deployed. I believe it's scheduled to be released after 2 or 3 weeks after the new expansion launches because that's usually when their sales campaign ends. Sure the patch could be delayed because of Christmas holidays, but hey, the important thing is they have the patch ready.

Good luck collecting this combo in aggro meta...

Quote from emkarab >>

Good luck collecting this combo in aggro meta...

 Good luck being an aggro player beating a control deck full of other healing and board clears, that has an inevitable heal 10 coming. Control/combo decks don’t need to pull their combo off to beat aggro, they just need to live. 

Excavate lock will beat an aggro deck just through value from treasures and board control. 

Sure. Just like Paladin is consistently beaten by Warlock right now, oh wait...

The new bounce panda (and the old bounce panda that’s still in the core set) are also 2 mana just, in case you wanted to go off more times

Or you could also bounce the Kobold to excavate faster. Idk if the deck has room but might be worth slotting 1 or 2 of them in

Quote from ravennos >>

The new bounce panda (and the old bounce panda that’s still in the core set) are also 2 mana just, in case you wanted to go off more times

Or you could also bounce the Kobold to excavate faster. Idk if the deck has room but might be worth slotting 1 or 2 of them in

 

 The brewmasters have almost always been bad. They really haven’t been used since leeroy shenanigans or maybe caverns below. I don’t think this will make them better. While you’re bouncing kobolds, DH and hunter will be going face. You can bounce the snake, but you have to get it first and that’s no simple task. I think this card is being massively overhyped. If you allow your opponent to play underpowered cards and bounce their board for 10 turns, you deserve to lose to this card. Just about every class will be more proactive and this excavate then abuse the snake strategy will buckle under board pressure.

Quote from lv426a11 >>

I don't want to put a downer on Hearthstone, but it really feels like the devs have run out of ideas and are just reprinting cards with powercreep.  Warlock can literally discover and play The Azerite Snake to be played on curve.  I'm not saying that it's very likely or you would ever want to do that, but it just shouldn't be possible. Such a swingy card should be more akin to a quest reward or 8+ mana card.

The fact it's a minion makes replaying it more than once very likely, and at worst we have a 10 mana, 2-card combo that deals 20 damage and heals 20 health. 

The discrepancy between the classess is going to be more pronounced than ever.  I'm also very cynical about the current approach of "release stuff that's obviously very overpowered" only to nerf it 2 weeks later after everyone has suffered from a shit meta for 2 weeks.  I would say that "maybe the devs have more data than us" but history tells us that this is not the case and the obviously overpowered cards are, in fact, overpowered.

 One: How do you discover it? Excavate is random, so to get the snake on curve would be a bit difficult.

Two: I think excavate is gonna be harder to pull off than we think.

Im pretty sure if you've excavated 4 times as a warlock this is the guaranteed reward for the 4th excavate.  There's no randomness to that part, only what you get for the other 3 excavates, and they increase in "rarity" with each excavation. 

I actually think it will be fairly easy for warlock to excavate 4 times. Smokestack is basically mortal coil and Kobold Miner is a perfect target for Smokestack if you don't have any other targets.  I don't think anyone knows whether an excavation deck will be good, but the act of excavating and getting the legendary is pretty easy for Warlock. 

It will be difficult (but not impossible) to get on curve, but I don't think that really matters as you're never going to want to play it on curve anyway.  More likely is that you use some bounce effects (or similar) to replay multiple times.  My point wasn't that you would want to play it on 4, more that it just shouldn't be possible to get a card this powerful on turn 4.  If it succeeds as a deck archetype in the new meta, I think Dirty Rat will be in a lot of decks...

So many ways of winning game faster, harder and more consistently must be nerfed for this to be good