ROGUES ARE GETTING NERFED! 4 Card Changes Coming May 22
In a blog post from Blizzard this afternoon, they have announced changes to Rogue cards and Archivist Elysiana. The patch comes out May 22.
- EVIL Miscreant - Now has 4 Health (Down from 5)
- Raiding Party - Now costs 4 Mana (Up from 3)
- Preparation - Next spell cast cost is now reduced by 2 (Down from 3)
- Archivist Elysiana - Now costs 9 Mana (Up from 8)
Quote from BlizzardAfter evaluating game data and working through internal and external feedback on the most popular decks currently in the meta, we’re looking to address the power level and overall pervasiveness of Rogue decks, alongside a specific interaction with Archivist Elysiana. Look for these changes in an update slated for May 22.
We chose to focus primarily on Rogue in this update due to seeing the meta stabilize around the class’s most popular decks. Currently, if you want to build a deck that is strong against Rogue, you have just one reasonable option: Warrior. If you compare Rogue to Warrior, however, you’ll find that the latter class has a wide variety of good and bad matchups, which makes it unlikely that it’ll overtake Rogue in popularity in the current meta.
While we recognize that there are other powerful and popular decks (like Token Druid, Conjurer Mage, and Mech Hunter), we decided to not address them in this update because they all have varied matchups. If any of these decks were to emerge as the new prominent strategy, there are plenty of decks available to combat them, which would allow the meta to continue shifting.
As always, we’ll be evaluating the results of these changes over the coming weeks and look forward to your feedback. Read on for details on these changes, our thought process around them, and our goals for each of the cards we adjusted.
- EVIL Miscreant - Now has 4 Health. (Down from 5)
- EVIL Miscreant is meant to be a value-generating card that creates future swing turns, but having 5 Health on this minion means Rogue players sacrifice very little to set up those turns. We expect that EVIL Miscreant will continue to be a great option for Rogue decks, just at a power level that is more in line with other available cards.
- Raiding Party – Now costs 4 mana. (Up from 3)
- Rogue already excels at drawing cards, so having another powerful option that offers consistent results has resulted in Rogue games that play out a little too similarly than we think is fun. We’re making this change to better represent the power level of drawing from a very specific subset of cards.
- Preparation – Now reads: The next spell you cast this turn costs (2) less.
- All changes we make to the Basic and Classic sets are aimed at ensuring Hearthstone’s long-term health. Preparation is currently seen as such a powerful card that it appears in nearly all Rogue deck archetypes. That said, the change we’ve landed on is a small one. While we do want the card’s power to decrease, we also think it’s important for Preparation to remain a reasonable option, since it fits the Rogue class fantasy so well.
- Preparation is regularly used to reduce the cost of cards like Sap or Eviscerate, and those interactions will remain unchanged. Reducing the cost of your next spell by 2 as opposed to 3 opens our design options up a little more to create higher cost Rogue spells without having to balance so closely around the assumption that they’ll be cast alongside Preparation.
- Archivist Elysiana – Now costs 9 mana. (Up from 8)
- Our goal here was to preserve the feeling and power level of Archivist Elysiana when it comes to general use, while making much more difficult to play her multiple times in the same game. Shaman will still be able to replay Elysiana through Shudderwock, but this is not as common or problematic as what we’ve seen in control Warrior decks. Now, playing Elysiana alongside cards like Baleful Banker or Youthful Brewmaster should be a less consistent strategy.
Rogues only weak to Warrior and has playrate between 20 and 25%. That is what unbalanced looks like.
Played a bit of Rogue yesterday and today. Damn, I'm gonna miss the original Prep. :'(
1 Mana less reduction means a lot, and i mean A LOT. So many tempo and clear plays get weakened or completely destroyed.
The card Preparation is the very core of the Rogue class and is THE card to stand for the class identity.
I hope they have some good spells in the next expansion for Rogue to make up for it.
What are you preping exactly? Other than raiding party that is
Vanish, Fan of Knives. Especially in Mill Rogues.
Prep pretty much useless now outside of a Malygos OTK deck
Honestly the fairest nerfs ever:
EVIL Miscreant before was a 2.5 Mana body, so it was 0.5 Mana for two 1-Mana cards (Spare Parts usually were 0.5 Mana for only one card, and the Spare Parts were much worse than the Lackeys). Now it is a 2 Mana body and 1 Mana for the Combo, which is still very powerful if we consider Lackeys > Spare Parts.
Raiding Party previously was "Sense Pirates" with an upside. Now it is bad when played without the Combo, and strong when played with the Combo. Which is the typical design pattern for Combo cards.
Preparation remains powerful. Mana cheating is powerful.
Elysiana nerf is flavor of the expansion I don't think it would be a problematic card in future expansion. It is solely related to the current Standard meta game. The card is not played in the Wild format, which has the higher powerlevel, whereas the Rogue cards are top tier in both formats and have been so since each of them was released.
There is a deck that has a terrible matchup against (unnerfed) rogue, but otherwise performs good to at worst with "decent chances" against all other archetypes: midrange hunter.
All hail our new Hunter overlords!!!!
Elysiana was included in CW for the mirror-match - it's a dead card against most other decks. A lot of the decks pushed out of the meta by Tempo Rogue have heavily favoured match-ups against CW, so it isn't obvious that the deck will see much play post-nerf. CW enjoyed an inflated play-rate because it was the best counter against the most popular deck. CW might not want to include two otherwise dead cards in their lists, just for the 50/50 chance of having the coin when they queue into a less-frequent mirror. Add all those considerations together, and it isn't at all obvious that Elysiana sees any play after tomorrow, let alone that she required a nerf to 10-mana.
We'll see, I suppose . . .
It's pretty sad, that for Blizzard word "Balance" means nerfing the strongest decks, and not buffing somehow the weakest ones.
For me some of those nerfes are "meh", like Evil Miscreant from 1-5, to 1-4. It changes nothing. I also miss some nerfs for Dr. Boom. Like maybe more mana cost for this hero card, and maybe even some changes in some of hero powers. Maybe change the "Discover Mech", to "Get random Mech" or something? But overall it's good, that Rogue Domination is going down. At least a little bit.
Bruh , my golden Lorewalker Cho is waiting Blizzard
Good luck matey - patience is a virtue!
I just made this deck yesterday, I dont play much anymore can I still get a full dust refund on nerfed cards? Or am I confusing this with hall of fame cards
You get the refunds on the cards above. Anything else related to the deck you're screwed.
With Hall of Fame cards you get the dust and you keep the cards. With nerfed cards, you get your dust back if you disenchant the cards.
Ironically, this might spark off crazy value rogue that ends warrior. Or maybe I'm just being nuts.
The nerf to prep demonstrates the balancing team's complete misunderstanding of "tuning" cards. Preparation is hardly an auto-include, especially in tempo rogue decks (just look back at Keleseth rogue lists... pre and post-patches nerf). The main reason it sees play in the Pick Rogue is due to its synergy with Raiding Party. Raiding party and its inherent synergies with weapon and pirates (which synergies with weapons) have been the problem. To say "Preparation is regularly used to reduce the cost of cards like Sap or Eviscerate, and those interactions will remain unchanged," is asinine. Preparation is rarely placed in a rogue deck to reduce sap or eviscerate cost... that's never been the case. I'd argue that preparation has been to enable draw turns (either through Sprint/Auctioneering/FoK) or combo-effects (Edwin, Questing Adventures, SI, Violet teachers, Malygos).
The nerf to preparation and the lack of buff to other rogue spells that pay the "Prep tax" essentially means the following cards are also nerfed... along with potentially others.
Fan of Knives, Sprint, Wanted, Toggwaggle Treasures, Necrium Vial, Myra's Unstable Element, Vanish.
As a rogue main, I'm glad rogue will be hipster again but the class doesn't feel the same to me now with the Prep nerf. The blind nerfs to all these spells will influence my favorite deck types... Miracle will be slower, creating big token boards with teacher will be harder, explosive Edwin's or Questings to beat control will be less likely... and the complete lack of AoE due to nerfed Prep/FoK combo & Blade Flurry (RIP) means rogue will be even more squishy to board flood decks.
On the up side, rogue may get some better high cost spells printed in the future as prep has always limited design space for them.
I used to play this game called Magic the Gathering a while back. They kept on banning "broken" cards which were always some big dumb flashy thing that would win the game. This went on for years, banning after banning but nothing seemed to work. Then one day they realized that that everyone of these broken card was able to be played because of something called an "enabler". These enablers let players cheat cards into play by doing thinks like - generating extra mana, reducing mana costs, or even letting cards be played for free! Well it turned out these enablers were actually the problem. Once they were removed people could still use their other cards without issue and the game because much better.
While prep is certainly not broken when used with some cards there are plenty that are a huge issue, such as raiding party or Myra's. This nerf is long overdue and it looks like Blizz is finally figuring out what other card game developers have known for decades. Instead of just nerfing all the cards that prep brakes they just nerfed the card that was actually the issue (although I'm not sure that a 1 mana reduction is enough). I hope these kind of changes help the game get back to a better spot .
I allways saw nerfs, never saw balance changes, that is what the game needs.
There will always be a deck that will shut down most other decks out there because Wild is an eternal format and that eternal formats work. If you want to have fun with new decks, play friendly matches and stay out of ladder. Simple as that.