So today it happened. In a move we likely all saw coming Patron Warrior got nerfed.

I want to talk about this from a design perspective, and maybe help offer what I consider an explanation for why they went down the path they went. In a Battlenet forum post @cm_zeriyah laid out the reasons why this was done. She said some stuff, but there was one line that really stood out to me:

"we felt this change was necessary to help expand [the] future design space"

This is what I want to talk about. I don't know about you, but every time that I built a card (especially for Warrior) I would look at it, and go "Does this make Patron Warrior better?" I mention it on my blog (sorry, shameless plug).

The fact is, it was hard to make a card for Warrior that didn't run the risk of improving that deck. You couldn't give Warrior any draw mechanics, you couldn't give them any more (reliable) damage enablers. Basically, any Warrior card I built was a ham-fisted attempt to intentionally deny the Patron deck.

Frankly that's just lame.

By way of example, here are two cards I built to encourage a more tempo-based Warrior (expected to be part of an Ahn'Qiraj adventure that I'll hopefully be posted the first part of soon in video format). The first contests with too many 2 drops that the class already runs, and already has Charge, so doesn't synergize well. The second can put 3 mana minions directly into play, which may accidentally put combo-activators like Warsong into play prematurely.

So, Patron Warrior damages the design space. The question is, now that this deck is out in the wild, how can we as designers fix it? cmzeriyah mentions "the best way to shake up the meta and innovate in Hearthstone is by introducing new cards into the game," but in this case they elected _not to do this.

Why?

Well, I think they tried, with TGT. Chillmaw specifically really shut down the deck, but it had two problems: it needed help, in the form of other minions, to activate and it was Legendary, which meant it wasn't reliable enough. Other cards factored in, a bit, but ultimately it wasn't easy for all decks to play a given number of cards simply to counter the OTK patron/frothing combo.

Tons of decks had the ability to clear a board full of patrons, or to remove absurdly strong berserkers, but only 3 classes have access to secrets which could be activated between the point that the Warrior plays their cards and strikes the killing blow. The problem wasn't the Patron, or the Berserker. It wasn't the card draw enablement that set up the combo. Further, the issue wasn't that a single minion was given charge. The problem was the infinite ability to add charge.

It might have taken me a long time to build up to it, but Patron becomes viable because it can create a million dudes that create more dudes that can wipe a board and be replaced by more dudes so long as the animations don't get you. That's why I believe that Blizzard made the correct choice with completely changing the spirit of the Warsong Commander card. So long as Warsong gave you a near infinite loop of plays it was going to continue to cause problems.

There are two unfortunate things about this change to Warsong:

1. The change is uninteresting. They didn't enhance the design-space with the change, because they've basically wallpapered it. There was the potential to at least let Warsong do something interesting, but it was sadly squandered.

2. The much more unfortunate consequence is the death of an Archetype. When people proposed any number of changes to the archetype, their intent was to make a correction that allowed the deck to persist. I understand why: Warrior is a one-archetype wonder without Patron, and no one ever wants to see an entire type of deck stop being. As mentioned above, while I'm sad to see Patron go, I think that this is good long-term thinking from the folks at Team 5. My expectation is that Warrior is going to get some serious love in the next expansion (but likely not the next adventure, which probably has the ink drying on it already). My theory is that a tier 2 aggro or tempo Warrior will emerge within 9 months.

In my next blog article I'm going to write about ways we can define a Meta that's "healthy." This Warsong change has given me plenty of fuel and food for thought in that regard.

So what do you think? Was this the right call for Blizzard? Why or why not?