Hearthpwn

Exactly. A neutral card, not even an epic, with very decent stats, strong enough to include in almost any deck and totally fucking up strategies that could diversify the field. Great call. Blizzard at its finest. While DH is a blatant money grab, this is I don't even know what. Lack of vision, incompetence, you name it. They create cards for decks that are not even powerful enough, but rather could be fun to play, and at the same time they print a card that would ruin these strategies and be good enough to be present in any deck. The albatross is not even a "tech" card, it's an overpowered card per se. As if the DH is not enough to make the meta even more degenerate.

It can be fixed with changing the wording on spell-mage or similar paladin class-specific cards. They should read "if your starting deck had no minions... (or no neutral cards)". They hardly use any minions in their deck anyway (Kadgar, perhaps), since if not drawn early, they will make their theme cards much weaker. This way albatross will not ruin the idea of the deck, just give dead draws (which is what it should do). Albatross only mildly screws up highlander decks compared to spell mage, so no need for further tweaks here. Actually, there already was a neutral card with similar effect (weasel), but it was generally weaker, very poorly statted and epic. Albatross is a neutral rare with very decent stats. Even if not abused, like in res priest, it makes perfect sense to run 2 copies in virtually any deck just to have a better chance to screw highlander decks and totally fuck up spell mage decks just in case. So, yes, they offer an archetype which is completely unplayable due to a card which existed before and was widely played. Explanation? We all know. The devs don't playtest at all and aim only at monetizing (absolute incompetence might be an issue as well). Surprise? Hardly.