The Enrage Keyword is Being Removed From Hearthstone
But don't worry, the effect is staying! The goal is to clean up card text since the keyword wasn't being used much. As of today, there are nine collectible cards in the game with Enrage. Peter Whalen explains below.
Update: Mike Donais has confirmed the Enrage quest (Play 10 Minions with Enrage) is being removed too. (Source)
Quote from Peter WhalenFirst things first: we’re removing the Enrage keyword from Hearthstone. All the Enrage cards will keep their effects; we’re just rewording them without the keyword. For example, Angry Chicken will read “Has +5 Attack while damaged.”
Our goal with this change is to clean up the game a little by removing a keyword we weren’t using much, but we also wanted to take the opportunity to share some of our general philosophy on keywords.
Keywords in Hearthstone are the bolded words in the card text – they’re words that have a special meaning in the context of the game. We use them a lot; most of our sets have introduced at least one keyword and the Basic and Classic sets have a bunch. Why are keywords helpful?
- Keywords can make learning cards easier. Once you know a keyword, it can boil down a complex idea and help you understand a new card more quickly.
- Keywords are flavorful. They tell a story – Discover, Recruit, Taunt; these all help the game come alive.
- Keywords condense card text. This leads to more readable cards that fit better in the frame.
- Keywords give us mechanical hooks. So we can make cards like “Give your Taunt minions +2/+2.”
So why not make lots and lots of keywords? In the extreme, we could keyword everything – the “Kel’Thuzading” keyword would mean “At the end of each turn, summon all friendly minions that died this turn” and the Doomsaying keyword would mean “At the start of your turn, destroy ALL minions.” That feels a bit silly – because it is! Keywords aren’t all upside, so it’s worth taking a look at which keywords are worth keeping.
Ultimately, we have keywords to make cards easier to understand. The best keywords appear a lot, are flavorful, and give us useful mechanical hooks. In the last year, we added two examples that we expect to be permanent: Poisonous and Lifesteal. These are great abilities that make minions a bit more interesting – they alter combat math, change which minions you prioritize, and spice up gameplay. The full text for both of these abilities is also fairly long – without a keyword, it’d be hard to pair them with much else.
So let’s take a look at Enrage. Enrage means “While damaged, this minion has a new power.” It’s on nine cards: six from the Basic and Classic sets, two from Whispers of the Old Gods, and one from Goblins vs. Gnomes. Part of the reason we haven’t used it much is that it’s a difficult keyword to design for: minions in Hearthstone don’t survive very long, especially once they’ve been damaged. Instead, we’ve favored cards with triggered abilities that encourage you to damage them multiple times, like Acolyte of Pain and Rotface. These lead to more interesting gameplay as you try to maximize the number of times they get damaged.
How well, then, is Enrage serving us as a keyword? First, it’s not clear that Enrage is actually any easier to understand than “while damaged”. It is certainly flavorful though, and does shrink the card text a little. On the other hand, we haven’t made any cards that key off of Enrage minions and aren’t likely to in the future. Overall, Enrage isn’t doing very much work for us, we haven’t used it in a while, and it isn’t on very many cards, so we’re cleaning up the game a little bit and removing it.
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Yes, that's what he is saying. Is reading and understanding what you've just read so hard? :)
they are not even changing the cards and they where also near unplayable... calm down.
Yeah WotC bought the rights to use it, otherwise this wouldn't be necessary
This is sad, I always thought Enrage would have its moment to shine in the future. The mechanic has potential and it is a theme I've developed while creating cards. Here are some of them:
Enrage doesn't have to be used only to gain Attack so it can be a lot more flexible. Honestly the flavor alone should be enough to keep this keyword in the game.
only Enrage as a keyword is being removed the effect not they said in reddit "this minion when damaged will do this cool stuff"
Yeah I know but I think they shouldn't remove the keyword. It's the same as if they'd announce that Discover was going to be replaced by "choose from 3 random cards". If the keyword doesn't have a lot of support maybe you should expand it instead of deleting it.
Those are pretty nice ideas!
These are excellent
All the cards you listed could still be printed and will play the same way. The only thing that is changing is the wording. There are still plenty of cards and design space that looks at "damaged" minions.
The problem is that there're too many mechanics that uses the damaged effect so there's no point to keep a keyword that don't represents all of them.
I'm sorry but I don't think I see your point. You might think the cards are boring, that's fine although judging by the number of upvotes I'd say quite a lot of people would think quite the contrary. Now enrage not being an interesting mechanic and LIMITING the game is just plain wrong. If Enrage is too simple for you then what about Battlecry? It's a way simpler keyword and one of the most popular in the game. This is because there are a lot of interesting cards that use it to have a shorter text and the same effect.
This brings me to my second point, which is that a keyword doesn't limit design space in any way. Giving Enrage to cards that don't have it is a bad argument since clearly they wouldn't be the same card and both options could exist within the game. You don't have to change Rotface or any other card to make Enrage work, you have to design new cards that make more sense if they use Enrage.
You also say that my cards wouldn't bring anything to the game. Well, that's wrong too. They might not interest you personally but they genuinely let you play the game in ways that you couldn't before. A negative effect for being damaged, +2 spell damage for a very low cost compared to other cards or a very powerful taunt that can single-handedly save you if your opponent doesn't use removal all look like pretty cool ideas to me.
Of course more cards with the Enrage effect could be printed, they just wouldn't use the keyword. Nonetheless this seems to me like blizzard is giving up and closing design space because they think that Enrage is a dead keyword that can't be interesting. It wasn't doing any harm by existing so the only reasonable explanation I can find for it being removed is that they don't want to use it anymore and they're sick of people telling them that they aren't making new cards with it.
Overall I'd say that permanently removing things from a game is rarely a good idea. Restricting them and allowing players to choose how they want to play is the way to go, especially in a card game. Wild is a good idea, nerfs that kill cards and removing keywords from the game are not. If they don't want to print any more cards with Enrage for now that's fine, they've been doing it for quite a while and nothing has happened but if they remove it they're saying "we don't like this, it was a mistake, it's not interesting" and I think that's very sad.
You can make these cards without the keyword. The point is... no one will ever design a card that says "give your enrage minions +2 attack" because then instead you would use "damaged" instead of "enrage".
Kudos on those cards! Desert turtle is really cool; I wish they'd print it!
Also, (though you may have made these earlier when the power level of constructed was just lower) did you feel Ogre Charger really needed the 50% miss chance? Obviously removing it is inconsistent with the Ogre theme, but a 5 mana 5/4 with charge that costs 2 cards (itself plus the whirlwind effect) doesn't seem THAT strong.
enrage isnt an actual keyword, its a contition, for be a keyword it sould be allways "gain +3 attack wile its damaged" for example, so every minion just need contain enrage,and everybody should know that enrage means that gain +3 attack wile its damaged.
How about this keyword? Only one card has it :)
Counterspell