Most of Hearthstone’s nerfed cards have gotten into the sights of Team 5 for a reason. They restricted the design space of the game, enabled unfun gameplay or made a certain archetype reign supreme. And while many card changes got introduced way too late in the eyes of the Hearthstone community, almost all of them happened for an existing or soon-to-be obvious reason.



But what about these cards now? Yes, some of them, like Gadgetzan Auctioneer or Leeroy Jenkins, survived the nightmare trip back from Nerftown. Others were swallowed by the Standard rotation, and the majority of nerfed Classic Set cards never recovered from their loss of stats or effects after balance patches.



However, nerfed cards are still part of the game, and a lot of players enjoyed competing with them in the meta-game. With the upcoming expansion The Witchwood, Team 5 announced two new keywords, one of them being Rush. This keyword allows minions to attack immediately, but that attack is restricted to only hit other minions.

That announcement revived a two-year old discussion about one of the most controversial cards in Hearthstone history: Warsong Commander. With the newly introduced keyword Rush replacing the Charge portion of Warsong Commander’s old effect, a lot of players could see one of Warrior’s most iconic minion coming back to be in a playable state.

That simple yet beautiful idea brought up an interesting thought when it comes to the game’s development: What would be needed to bring back nerfed cards from the graveyard, how would it look like, and why didn’t it happen yet?



New Mechanics, New Ways

As the introduction of the keyword Rush shows, Team 5 makes new ways when it comes to limited design space. Yes, swinging the mighty nerf bat to hit all problematic cards may re-balance the meta-game in that very moment; the addition of improved mechanics however solves problems in the long run, and Rush does exactly that. The Charge mechanic, the pendant to the Haste keyword in Magic, has always been a thorn in Hearthstone’s side, and its developers often stated that Charge minions like Stonetusk Boar challenge the design space of the game the most. Rush is the creative answer for that limitation, and it took a very long time for it to be released.



Looking back at Warsong Commander, Rush could work perfectly well: Warriors nowadays focus on spell-heavy board removal, and even in the recent Pirate Warrior days, its minions were not meant to trade aggressively, something that seemed to be incredibly wrong and counter-intuitive, not at last due to the domination of high-utility weapons in the deck.

Patron Warrior, however, was able to take on high-pressure minion board states by playing Warsong Commander, and that process needed a lot of thought. The interaction with Frothing Berserker alone was the reason that the balance change happened eventually; after that the Warrior class fantasy that involved hurting yourself and your minions never really took off in terms of competitiveness compared to other Aggro archetypes, although several cards that fit this exact theme have been released since then.

The comeback of the “old” Warsong Commander with Rush instead of Charge could revive a healthy alternative to the Warrior approach, just because the card itself transports one of the core ideas of the class so incredibly well.



The Starving Buzzard Dilemma

Sadly, the approach to bringing back Warsong Commander can not be applied to all cards. Hearthstone’s beastly card draw machine Starving Buzzard for example actually took two nerf rounds to the face and has never been seen in any Hunter list on the internet again.



“But Hunter needs card draw!”, the community exclaimed. Well, not if you are able to hit your opponent’s face just hard enough. Team 5 decided to “design around” the lack of card draw in the Hunter case, and Spell Hunter, the deck that plays no minions but a certain stage manager and his Old God in a pocket, is the epitome of that “workaround” mentality. Yes, cards like Rhok'delar exist, but in general, Hunter archetypes are not in need of card draw as we know it right now in comparison to the past.

And what would happen if we would get Starving Buzzard back in a playable state? Exactly: Hunter would become the threat it once was. Some players would love to see that, but that is not how smart design should look like in the long run.



What is Dead May Never Die

As you can see, there is a case to be made for every single previously balanced card by itself. I personally would love to see the mechanic behind Corridor Creeper make a comeback. It felt great to play the card, and it took a lot of strategy to play around it. But none of that mattered, because the card body was too strong, and now it is too weak. There is no in-between, similar to Starving Buzzard.



Spirit Claws for example is another great case: The amount of RNG with the roll of the totem felt very satisfying to play, but the core weapon was too strong in the meta back then. Could that weapon bring back Shaman from the dead? That is written on another piece of paper, but it would certainly help to contest early boards against Aggro Paladin or Dragon Priest.



Maybe it is better to not resurrect changed cards. As already said, balance changes happen for a reason.

But one thing is certain: there was once a certain design intention when printing these cards, and while many of them played out to be dead wrong, some cards would most definitely deserve a comeback. The case of Warsong Commander shows that, and instead of going completely new ways with every expansion, it could sometimes make sense to look back at your mistakes that are now no longer mistakes and see that they are now nothing less but great opportunities.