All things come to an end eventually, and the ruthless reign of Patron Warrior dominating every ladder matchup and tournament in the past six months is no exception. Today Blizzard announced a pending nerf to Warsong Commander, changing the text to read “Your Charge minions have +1 Attack,” effectively dismantling the entire strategy that Patron Warrior is based around. Many people were surprised by the severity of the change, hoping instead for something that would weaken the deck without rendering it unplayable.

Warsong Commander attempts to charge away from her feelings.

But, as it turns out, this is just the first step in a much larger plan on Blizzard’s part. Signs of something greater first appeared several hours after the announcement, when large numbers of players took to reddit and the Hearthstone forums to report that their Patron Warrior decks had mysteriously vanished from their collection.

“When I said I wanted more deck slots this isn’t what I meant,” said reddit user /u/EVERYONEGETINHER. “I spent a whole three minutes copying this deck list off HearthPwn. And now I have to do that all over again?”



But the mystery doesn’t stop there, and players only got more confused as VoDs of major tournaments featuring Patron Warriors started disappearing from Twitch and YouTube. One by one the videos were taken down, from the Archon Team League to the Blizzard hosted Hearthstone World Championships, until the only videos remaining were Challengestone VoDs and the occasional Handlock vs Freezemage matchup.

Not long after, the official Hearthstone forums exploded with players claiming that they had been wrongly banned. According to the posts, hundreds of players have had their accounts suspended simply for typing the words “Patron Warrior” in chat.

“We understand that some of you are upset,” said Chairman Zeriyah in one post about this issue. “And this isn’t a decision that we take lightly. But this is the only way to move beyond the atrocities of the past. Think not of you, but of your children, and your children’s children, and imagine them living in a world where they not only won’t have to deal with Patron Warrior, but where they’ll never even have to endure the pain of knowing that it existed in the first place.”



“Tell no one what happened here,” added Senior Game Designer Ben Brode, shortly after changing his title to Chief of Historical Revisionism. “Tell them only that Warsong Commander is dead, and that Patron Warrior died with it.”

