Further changes to Nat Pagle coming

Blizzard are considering making more adjustments to Nat Pagle in some of the following patches. The changes will aim to balance Nat Pagle's draw rate further and restore his popularity to a reasonable extent.

Previously one of the most widely used control cards, Nat Pagle was first changed shortly before Hearthstone's official release. "Having too much draw power" and "being fairly hard to counter so early in the game" were the reasons Blizzard community manager Aratil stated in a blue post at the time, further explaining that having Pagle draw at the start of the turn rather than at the end would give opponents time to react to it and possibly counter it.

The nerf was well accepted by the community as posts and threads criticizing the design of the card - voiced by community members, pro players and eSports writers alike - flooded the Reddit and Battle.net boards. A 0/4 for 2 mana, Pagle was known as a logical T2 play (or even T1 with coin) and was seen winning games almost by himself, most notably the DogeHouse vs Liquid Value ace match from Season 3. GosuGamers own GosuCup even went on to ban the card from the tournament, a decision which sparked further discussion for and against the fisherman.

The nerf to Nat Pagle, however, proved to be too big a hit to the card and it is rarely seen in competitive games. Drawing at the start of the turn essentially gave the opponent one more turn to counter it and Pagle would often end up being a 1-for-1 or even 0-for-1. Even though he'd often draw a removal or a silence effect, the vast majority of the players considered the card too unreliable and it was taken out of almost all the control decks that previously used him. Parallels between Nat Pagle and Novice Engineer - another card which went down from being a staple everywhere to barely used even in combo decks - were drawn.

For these reasons, the Blizzard dev team will be going back to the Nat Pagle drawing board in attempt to fix the card and make it more reliable.

"It's always been our intention to keep a healthy balance for each card," a Blizzard community manager commented, "where it's not used in every single deck but it has its rightful spot in a certain number of builds."

"The version that is currently live in the game might be too weak and too risky of an investment," he continued. "We wanted to make it less of a game-breaking card but by changing it the way we did made entire builds obsolete. Miracle Rogues, for example, who previously relied heavily on Nat Pagle to draw into their combo, are now almost obsolete and there's essentially just one Rogue spec at the moment. We don't like limiting our players too much and that's why we'll be looking at Nat Pagle again, possibly buffing him a little in the next patch."

The Nat Pagle seen on the right is likely how the card will look like when patched. It retains the "draw at start of turn" component - thus giving opponents the same time to react to it as before - but its draw power is very slightly increased to make up for that extra reaction time. His attack will also be buffed to 1 so that he's not a dead body after a silence.

In unrelated news, Blizzard have announced that they will be releasing a series of collectible card version, which can be unlocked after certain achievements are unlocked. These cards will have altered art, names and minion type and will only be playable in casual mode. A preview of some of the cards can be seen below.