The Mind Control Tech Conundrum

Engaging TC-1-30-oh-come-on-really? This is the usual reaction when MCT hits the board, a moment of truth which is guaranteed to disappoint one of the players and can quite easily decide the outcome of the match on its own: still, it seems like it’s generally been accepted as a problematic, yet necessary little pest. However, it has recently become a powerhouse tool in Arena that is basically omnipresent in high-win decks, even though the card’s Constructed impact remains negligible – is there a change on the horizon, and what could possibly be done to improve the gameplay experience when it comes to Mind Control Tech?

Once upon a time

To understand how a card like Mind Control Tech got to be, we’ve got to look at many of the initial design concepts of Hearthstone, a hefty chunk of which have been abandoned over the years.

If you only look at the Basic and Classic sets, it’s clear that the developers couldn’t foresee how cut-throat the battle for board control would become, creating a lot of largely useless tools that were meant to provide a benefit for complicated board states. Enrage is a prime example – the cards with the keyword basically never saw play and it got canned fairly recently because of its uselessness. Many high-health/low-attack minions also failed to get any traction due to a similar reason. Wonky spells like Ancestral Healing, Totemic Might, Blessing of Wisdom and Betrayal all meant to promote such gameplay that was never to be.

Similarly, MCT was clearly designed to punish zerg-like, token-oriented archetypes which summoned a lot of tiny minions onto the board. Even then, the card’s value is off the charts if you look at it in a vacuum: a 3 man 3/3 that summons a 1/1 and destroys a 1/1 on the other side of the board would be one of the most powerful cards in the game based on raw stats. Anything else being picked off is just a bonus. Conversely, when the minions on the board are of similar size, losing one of them to MCT may be problematic, but isn’t guaranteed to lose you the game outright.

The lack of sideboards also incentivize the developers to create prohibitively powerful tech choices by either not sacrificing too many stats or by providing a punishingly large swing against the archetypes they were meant to target. As such, MCT happily retains three health and three attack despite its game-winning potential, making it a reasonable play on the third turn against archetypes where you don’t expect it to actually hit – just like how the infamous Big Game Hunter was basically a Jungle Panther with benefits in its original three-mana form. One has to wonder: why did the drawf attract so much scrutiny back in the day when this purple-bearded little fellow seems to get away with his shenaningans scot-free? It is especially egregious if you consider the fact that it is a tech card with a random effect, something which really should be an oxymoron in a card game.

This is especially a concern nowadays with the multiple viable Recruit archetypes and the mass summon capabilities of cards like Bloodreaver Gul'dan which generally place a wide variety of minions on the board with very different values at the same time. An environment like this greatly incentivizes people to run Mind Control Tech, and it introduces a sort of variance that was very likely not considered at the card’s initial design. This problem initially reared its ugly head back in the Goblins versus Gnomes era as Dr. Boom, his explosive bots and a random straggler would also lead to game-deciding steals by MCT, except for the fact that Big Game Hunter was often a more desirable tech choice back then. Still, just pit this little guy against a recently deceased Hadronox or a full Master Oakheart and tell me that the eventual outcome is fair and balanced for the game.

And if you think the card is problematic in certain Constructed metagames, just wait until you see what it does in a limited format…

Messy draft

The problem with cards like MCT in Arena is that they don’t serve as a “tech choice” but as a punishment of your opponent for gaining incremental advantages. Getting wiped out by a Primordial Drake is so frustrating precisely because the otherwise favorable board state of low-health minions was likely achieved by making value-trades and getting a lead in resources, which is then completely erased by the fact that your opponent simply played a very powerful card. Of course, strong late-game taunts in Constructed require effects like that to even potentially see play.

The same goes for Mind Control Tech: if your opponent gets to put out four different minions in Arena, you are likely at a major tempo disadvantage which was accumulated over the course of the match. Essentially punishing them for that is similar to the old combo of (2-mana) Starving Buzzard and Unleash the Hounds, which was widely criticized for disincentivizing you to play any extra minion against a Hunter. You could argue that it is basically a quasi-AoE – however, you’ve got to keep in mind both its extreme variance and its three-mana cost as additional problems. Its low casting price allows you to do many other things on your turn alongside engaging the mental dislocator – and when it takes the largest or second-best minion, that can easily prove back-breaking. This is yet another example where the old Brodeian argument about the good players being able to deal with an unlucky Crackle roll simply falls flat on its face: the effect is so cheap (3 mana 3/3 with a battlecry that destroys a minion and summons an exact copy of it) that it is often the tempo swing that gets you, not even necessarily the value you’ve just lost.

Just compare and contrast the card with Shadow Madness – a Priest card with a similar effect that has no body attached to it which costs four mana – or the recently printed Mossy Horror, which also tries to punish decks that go wide: it isn’t even necessarily a more punitive effect in Arena on average, but it costs three more and has much worse stats for the cost as well.

I can fix anything!

So what could you do in order to sort out this minion – giving players a tech tool to punish decks that go extremely wide without it simply ending the game 20 or 25% of the time? There are many options you could go for depending on how much you want to destroy the card. Historically – again, BGH comes to mind – Team 5 was quite wary of providing powerful neutral options for tech cards, especially for effects that would otherwise be taken care of by class-specific spells (ie. hard removal in the case of the aforementioned dwarf). The fact that MCT as a relatively low-priority issue is a double-edged sword: while it allows for a less punishing nerf, it also makes it more likely that it will simply not be adjusted at all.

The most ham-fisted solution would be to put it in the Hall of Fame, which definitely seems like overkill. If you want to maintain its exact effect – “the soul of the card”, if you insist – you can tinker with its stats and mana cost. The former doesn’t seem like a reasonable solution: the problem has a lot more to do with the minion’s highroll capability, though it would be nice if it wasn’t basically a vanilla minion without the ability as well. A price increase – which was, if you remember, BGH’s eventual fate – would make it an even less reasonable tech inclusion for sure, and could be a viable fix for the problem, but it would not adjust the real issue with the card, which is its text. (Similarly, it could essentially be soft-removed from Arena by moving it to a prohibitively high bucket, but that would also not address the underlying causes. It is, however, an interesting band-aid to consider for the current situation where it is close to an insta-pick in the limited format.)

As long as MCT’s effect is predictable by both players as the game progresses, its power level is a lot less of a concern. Even if it always took the second-largest minion, I could throw it in to get damaged or play a bunch of smaller ones in order make up for its eventual loss. Just like how Reynad infamously argued that randomly generated resources are fine even from a large pool as long as both players are aware from what the end result is, Mind Control Tech taking a pre-defined target, like the minion with the lowest Health, highest Attack or something entirely different, would actually add complexity and skill to the gameplay experience rather than punishing you for a tempo lead with an RNG roll. Unfortunately, Team 5 have never been a fan of such “complicated” wording on cards.

Like I said before, this is a low-key issue, which is exactly what makes it so egregious. There is really no reason to keep the card in its current form: it is a way too fairly costed tech card with high variance that has only really seen fringe play over the years whose current application goes way beyond what it was originally intended to do. While it would be nice to see it adjusted, it’s a fairly unlikely development after so many years.

Be aware of the number four: especially in Arena.