Hearthpwn

Rod used to be 3 mana (absurd that it was printed at 3 mana btw since it’s still solid at 5), darkglare was 2, flesh giant was 8, and I think a handful of others were also nerfed. The deck would still be quite good given what it did, but it would be several turns slower at this point. That, plus pretty severe power creep means I could arguably see an unaltered demon seed being fine. I’d rather they play it safe and nerf it anyway, but that’s for them to decide.

stealer was mostly a problem when you would cycle your hand to get a free hand of cards (assuming you got immune). Darkest hour is just a piece of the puzzle in that regard, but with this change the deck will be significantly less resilient and explosive. They’ll probably keep it at 6 just to be certain, but this change is a big nerf for that deck and will certainly keep it from being a top meta contender.

I feel like this change was largely targeted towards stealer of souls, since I think the old version of immune actually meant you didn’t take damage and therefore did not progress the quest. If anything this change is technically a buff to the questline since you can progress with health loss, but there are very few scenarios where that is possible since damage is significantly more common. 

undeniably the questline will need some kind of redesign, but people forget that rod was 3 mana during this time, and darkglare was 2. Flesh giant was also cheaper to boot. The deck was insane but basically every part of it including the questline have been nerfed significantly since it’s ban. 

Definitely had worse times. The most notable I recall was the mean streets pirate warrior era. Mage just couldn’t do anything against the aggro and the control decks had way more value than mage could ever have. While mage definitely wasn’t the only class suffering at the time, I do recall people trying to make the secret package work to no avail at the time, the class just didn’t have any redeeming factors in that meta game. This led to it being borderline unplayable in both wild and standard. It sounds like it’s struggling a bit a standard right now but in wild quest mage is a great pick. Aggro is dead outside of pirate rogue and therefore taking infinite turns is relatively easy and leads to tons of free wins. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the deck get axed just due to how utterly unfun it is to watch yourself die for 5 minutes, but for now the deck is genuinely good in the meta, even mech mage can pull off wins with the right hand.