Nydra’s Minutes: We have to be careful about Open the Waygate’s game breaking potential

Every card game—and game in general—operates under its own rules and laws. Every match in a card game is in balance and harmony as long as the laws are abided by. The moment a player strays away from the rules, there appears a potential for unfairness.

In the case of Hearthstone, there is a quartet of what we can call overarching, or fundamental laws. First, players take turns (1). Then, on each turn, they draw one card (2) and one mana crystal (3). Then, during their turns, they play cards which cost X (4).

These Hearthstone laws, however, can be broken by plethora of effects, which create swings in the balance. I’m not talking about the actual balance of classes or whether or not patches the pirate is broken. Rather, this has to do with the general flow of the exchanges that define a match. Each of these swings puts one player or the other in an advantageous position. arcane intellect and Life Tap let you draw extra cards each turn. Innervate and wild growth cheat the one-mana-per-turn rule. sorcerer's apprentice and emperor thaurissan make certain cards cost X-1 instead of X.

These are some of the most powerful effects in the game precisely because they break the rules, but this rule-breaking isn’t exclusive to Hearthstone. In 1993, Magic: The Gathering printed for its alpha edition a handful of cards which later came to be called the “Power 9” and which represented some of the most game-breaking cards in the history of the game. Among them are the infamous Black Lotus, a strictly better Innervate which currently sells for upwards of $27,000, and Ancestral Recall, the strongest draw engine in Magic to date.

Even though these effects are without a doubt unfair, they are needed in card games, up to a certain power level of course. In Magic and Hearthstone alike, players need to face and overcome challenges and bending the game’s fundamentals is an elegant way to do it. If your opponent just drew more than one card this turn, for example, your strategy needs to adapt and maybe you’ll have to kill him faster, or re-think your resource management. A card game which lacks all rule-bending risks being figured out and its exchanges streamlined and therefore becoming boring and predictable.

While card draw, mana gain and cost reduction are softer laws in the sense that the swings created by their bending are manageable, the fourth law is one that very few card games dare mess with: That players get exactly one turn before they pass it over to their opponent. Magic’s Time Walk was the first of its kind, a ludicrous two-mana “take an extra turn” effect that has since been banned in almost formats, but it wasn’t the last and more recent prints such as Emrakul—a monstrous 15-mana god creature—or Temporal Mastery have also played with the idea. Still, the number of cards who alter turn-taking is significantly lower compared to the rest.

The reason is that taking an extra turn is not just breaking one fundamental law in your favor, but potentially all, while also breaking them in your opponent’s disfavor. You draw an extra card, get an extra mana, get an extra turn, while your opponent loses his regular card draw, his regular mana gain, his regular turn. This is why the player who’s gained that extra turn usually wins the game on the spot—the swing created by law-bending is no longer manageable.

The severity of this extra-turn must be well comprehended—hence the lengthy “intro”—because it has now arrived in Hearthstone. Mage’s quest Open the Waygate rewards Time Warp, a five-mana “gain an extra turn” card, Hearthstone’s first.

Granted, Time Warp is hidden behind an intricate quest which involves generating and playing spells which didn’t start in your deck through cards like babbling book or cabalist's tome which is supposed to make up for the power of Time Warp itself, but there’s still a hanging threat that will cause issues in the future, possibly the very near one. Open the Waygate’s requirement is convoluted but to a reasonable extent. The player isn’t required to go too much out of his way to complete the quest. Mage already has plenty of ways to generate extra spells and it’s also the class with the best spells in the game. What Open the Waygate is asking is that you just play more good spells in a single match of Hearthstone and if you do that you will win the game, and I’ve already seen it being completed as early as turn four several times.

I fear this text will be misunderstood as a cry for balance towards Open the Waygate, potentially caused by a couple of sour losses on ladder. That’s not the case. Such a cry would in fact be a silly one, since Waygate decks aren’t even perfected one day into the Un’Goro Standard. It’s more about being mindful of the oppressive, tyrannical, bullying potential of Time Warp's effect.

I’ll illustrate my last point with another example from Hearthstone. master of disguise, a card nerfed with the arrival of Old Golds, was changed because it broke another, more minor law of Hearthstone—that minions can be attacked by other minions. At the time, the card never saw play, but it had to be altered because it restricted future design space. With a permanent Stealth effect in play, there can never be Rogue or neutral minions that are too powerful, because keeping them untargettable will create situations a lot of classes simply can’t deal with. End-of-turn effect minions would have to be weaker, or those of questing adventurer persuasion.

Time Warp has the same restrictive design nature, but on a much more serious scale, as it represents a more game-breaking and game-winning mechanic, and as long as it stays in the game in its original text, it will remain a blinking indicator for danger. The moment that completing open the waygate becomes easier or more beneficial is the moment when Hearthstone will have a serious crisis.