An In-Depth Card Analysis of Power Overwhelming

ControlZero was kind enough to allow us to re-host his great analysis of the card Power Overwhelming!

Since the release of Hearthstone, there have been eight major content releases, as well as the occasional balance patch, each of which has changed the meta, not only by adding new cards, but also by bringing some older cards to the forefront while causing others to bite the dust. This has never been more apparent than in the most recent Whispers of the Old Gods expansion, which has caused the resurrection of previously near-extinct cards like Stampeding Kodo, Doomsayer, and Cairne Bloodhoof. Yet, through all these trials and tribulations, some cards have managed to stay alive and well, or at least alive, for over two years. This will serve as an analysis in one of those, the warlock class card Power Overwhelming.

Overview

A one mana, common spell, Power Overwhelming gives a minion a +4/+4 stat bonus, an enormous amount of power (the equivalently costed Divine Strength only gives +1/+2), but with the major downside of killing the affected minion at the end of the turn. Horribly. Although there are select cases where the additional health matters, for the most part, the card might as well only give +4 attack. Still, four damage for one mana is nothing to scoff at, and compares decently with both Cold Blood and Blessing of Might. Perhaps the most comparable card in Warlock is Soulfire, since in the best case scenario both do 4 damage for 1 mana with no drawback. However, Soulfire’s drawback occurs more often, and discarding a random card is usually a big deal. Because of this, most decks choose PO over Soulfire.

Power Overwhelming is most commonly used to trade favorably with bigger minions, since four extra damage means that a 1/1 token can trade into many 4 or 5 mana minions, leading to a huge tempo swing, or the snowballing of an already advantageous board. If the board is already lost, it can also provide extra reach to kill the opponent before he can stabilize. However, while it can provide miraculous wins by allowing upwards of 14 burst from hand, it can also be a dead card due to its situational nature. When the opponent has board control, having any minion that is ready for action is preferable to a card that only snowballs a nonexistent lead. The +4 damage is also less useful when trading roughly equal threats into each other, since inflicting one or two damage is often enough to secure the kill.

If it belonged to some other class, Power Overwhelming might have more trouble finding its place. Because it’s a buff that kills the minion it is buffing, it seems difficult to consistently find trades that don’t give up two cards for one. To combat this, warlock has two weapons: life tap and tokens. No other class has quite as many (viable) annoying little guys as warlock. From Imp Gang Boss’s offshoots to the Possessed Villager and his possessor, there are plenty of targets that are worth, at most, half a card. Life Tap is also an extremely powerful tool, allowing efficient use of mana and the ability to play more cheap and situational cards. These two traits are what define the most popular warlock deck, which attempts to play as mana efficient as possible while using temporary buffs to trade smaller minions into bigger ones. Can you think of any cheap card that allows extremely favorable trades? Yeah, I agree, Abusive Sergeant is pretty strong.

History

Even though Power Overwhelming is synonymous with Zoo decks nowadays, it was an oddity in Zoo before any of the expansions were released. Considered too situational, and having anti- synergy with Doomguard and Soulfire, it belonged in the classic “He runs that card?!” category that jaded players so often vent about. Instead of Zoo, it was mostly seen in Handlock decks as a one-of for the potential 24 damage from hand with Leeroy Jenkins and Faceless Manipulator, as well as for the Shadowflame synergy.

The catalyst for the change from infrequent to ubiquitous was the release of Naxxramas. A new, slower version of Zoo appeared, called Deathrattle Zoo, which eventually proved itself as superior to normal Zoo. Sporting the new Undertaker, Nerubian Egg, Haunted Creeper, and even the occasional Zombie Chow, this deck focused less on developing immediately powerful minions, but had a more lasting board presence. Power overwhelming was dropped from most Handlock lists due to the Leeroy nerf, but it had found a new home. An excellent way to activate the Nerubian, it also worked well with the tokens from Haunted Creeper, and even synergized with Void Terror, another new addition to the deck!

As Zoo continued to evolve, Power Overwhelming was a fixture throughout. Goblins vs. Gnomes, perhaps the most meta-defining expansion to-date, introduced yet another form of the deck. Cutting the newly nerfed Soulfire, demon Zoo slowed down the deck even further by adding expensive demons that synergized with voidcaller, and even including big legendaries like Dr. Boom or Sylvanas Windrunner. Still, both decks ran Nerubian Egg, Void Terror, and token-creating Imp-losion, so it was only reasonable to leave Power Overwhelming in as well. Zoo has gone through a few iterations since, notably the fall of Deathrattle Zoo due to the undertaker nerf, and then the resurgence of a more classic version boosted by the releases of Imp Gang Boss and Dark Peddler, but PO has been there through it all, a constant in a sea of variables.

Another, rather novel use was also explored after the release Goblins vs. Gnomes. Combo-lock, as it was called, was a deck based solely around surviving until a 3-5 card combo was drawn, then bursting the opponent for obscene amounts of damage using a charger (either Leeroy Jenkins or Arcane Golem), Faceless Manipulator, and Power Overwhelming, which could be discounted by Emperor Thaurissan if necessary. When League of Explorers brought Reno Jackson into the equation, players tried to bring the same formula into a deck full of one-ofs, with some moderate success.

At present, Power Overwhelming is used in almost all Warlock Zoo decks and the majority of Reno-lock decks. It’s so ingrained in the nature of Zoo that some decks are switching out Doomguard, long believed to be indispensable, for Leeroy Jenkins, with Power Overwhelming being the biggest reason for the swap. It’s hard to see anyone cutting it anytime soon, if ever, even with the removal of Nerubian Egg and Haunted Creeper from Standard. Some notable Hearthstone personalities have even stated that it should be nerfed. This raises the question: Why did the card see so little play before Naxxramas?

Observations

Given that vanilla Zoo decks ran subpar minions like Young Priestess, Shieldbearer, and Amani Berserker, it seems strange indeed that Power Overwhelming was not an auto-include, or even a consideration. However, there there are a few reasons for this, two of which are intertwined. Before the expansions, getting a foothold on the board was much trickier. The stickiest minions available were Harvest Golem and Argent Squire; not bad, but not quite on the level of Nerubian Egg, or even Imp Gang Boss. Because of this, board clears were much stronger, and a lot more effort needed to be put into sticking minions on the board, hence the inclusion of cards like Young Priestess. Tied hand in hand with this was the relative lack of token-y minions in the deck. Sticky minions, by nature, have less raw power than an equivalently costed, more normal minion in vanilla Zoo, so while it still ran some small creatures whose value came from Battlecries, there were plenty of valuable bodies that weren’t optimal targets for Power Overwhelming.

The third strike was that there was already a similar spell in the deck that both did the job better and caused Power Overwhelming to be worse: Soulfire. At 0 mana, it was undoubtedly one of the best removals in the game for a fast, swarming deck. Even when it discarded a card, it might as well have been a 2 mana card that read “Deal 4 damage. Your hero takes two damage” which is already decent. Since it incentivized quickly dumping one’s hand, having an always playable one-drop was better than a one-drop that might not even be worth playing at all. Of course, as minions got stickier, this issue became less pronounced, since there were more viable targets for Power Overwhelming, and the anti-synergy became less important. Funnily enough, post-nerf Soulfire is making a comeback partially because Doomguards are being taken out for Leeroy, and Leeroy was put in because of Power Overwhelming.

Currently, it’s hard to imagine a future without PO; it’s one of the most powerful cards in one of the most powerful decks in the game. Nevertheless, there may still be a time in the future, albeit two years or so from now, where it could go from being core to being cut. Hearthstone is inherently a (relatively) low skill game, so even with all the progress Hearthstone players have made over the years, the original players were no slouches. The deckbuilders that perfected Reynad classic Zoo did just that, perfected it. If a Hearthstone pro from today went back in time to before Naxxramas was released, he would likely decide to play the same Zoo deck as everybody else. This means that, if Blizzard decides to release zero new token-related cards usable by Warlock in the next couple years, it is conceivable that Zoo decks, in whatever form they take on, will no longer be able to utilize Power Overwhelming effectively.

Whether or not Blizzard will, or even should, consider drastically limiting their design space because of one card is a separate question, and, conveniently, one that’s already been answered by Team 5. When providing reasons for nerfs to cards ranging from the seldom used Master of Disguise to the game-breaking Warsong Commander, the explanation has been the same: “To… expand future design space” and “[open] up exciting options for future cards” Even so, there could be other reasons for removing annoying or difficult to remove minions. Maybe they’re fundamentally hard to balance, or unfun to play against, or any other non-Power Overwhelming related reason that comes to mind. But if not, then the card’s balance should be questioned.

This introduces an issue that is a little more obvious. The card just seems too dang strong. On the surface this doesn’t seem to be related to design space at all, but dig a little deeper and the connection begins to be visible. Card strength isn’t just a product of it being too good in a vacuum, but also the strengths and weaknesses that it has with other cards. If the only overload cards in existence were Earth Elemental and Stormforged Axe, no one would complain about Tunnel Trogg. In the case of Power Overwhelming, the designers decided that it wasn’t strong enough to actually limit the design space significantly, and decided to release cards that increased its power level overwhelmingly anyway.

There are a lot of minions, spells, and weapons in Hearthstone that seem to be too dang strong. Some would argue that this is bad and there should be a more level playing field, but as things stand currently, a card needs to be extremely powerful, frustrating, or hard to design around to warrant a change. Every card that was considered some combination of these three was nerfed in conjunction with the release of the Standard format, and PO wasn’t one of them. It’s possible that another wave of nerfs is incoming, and many, including well-known names like Savjz and Kripparrian, have argued that the subject of this article should be included. In almost every situation, though, a deck requires cards that are unfairly costed, thereby giving it an edge to take advantage of, and thereby creating a win condition.

Doomhammer is a fantastic weapon, but it wasn’t until recently, when Shaman arguably got too many unfairly costed cards, that a growing consensus arose that it should be increased in cost. (The best change would be to give it Windfury for the turn if it hits a minion, but that is neither here nor there.) Few people have considered what will happen to Shaman a couple of years down the road, when the current expansions are gone and shaman is left with a lackluster lineup of overcosted overloads. Warlock has very few unfair cards in its core set. Imp Gang Boss and Dark Peddler are the two strongest minions in the class, both of which will be phased out of Standard in less than a year.

Changing Power Overwhelming to +3/+3 might seem wise at the current juncture, but it would necessitate that new warlock cards at or above the level of Imp Gang Boss be created every year to keep Zoo relevant. It’s better to leave staple, class-defining cards unaltered unless they are unavoidably flawed, and add the occasional Darkshire Councilman every so often to shake things up. Sure, in its current state, Zoo might have a bit too much going for it, but in the grand scheme of Hearthstone it’s a relatively tame deck with both winning and losing matchups. Overpowered cards, like Power Overwhelming, are often intentionally overpowered, and while the general antagonism towards them is understandable, they should not be considered impediments hampering the game’s freedom, but rather building blocks that support virtually every high-level deck that has ever existed.

TL;DR: Power Overwhelming is great for trading up into stronger minions, and works really well in the current meta because of all the token-y minions that exist in Zoo, and will likely continue to exist. Before any expansions were released, it was relatively weak due to the lack of small, annoying minions that work well with it, but it’s unlikely that Hearthstone will ever go back to that paradigm. Because of this, PO will always be very strong unless something is done about it. If anything, read the last two paragraphs, because I don’t want my argument about whether it should be nerfed to be misconstrued because I summarized it badly.