Platebreaker
Platebreaker is a 5 Mana Cost Common Neutral Minion card from the Descent of Dragons set!
Card Text
Battlecry: Destroy your opponent's armor.
Flavor Text
Worst. Dinner guest. Ever.- Mana Cost: 5
- Attack: 5
- Health: 5
- Crafting Cost: 40 / 400 (Golden)
- Arcane Dust Gained: 5 / 50 (Golden)
- Rarity: Common
- Class: Neutral
- Card Type: Minion
- Set: Descent of Dragons
- Mechanics: Battlecry
This card is going to be great for the lich king boss. Especially for warrior.
Holy crap, this card literally annihilates some decks. RIP control warrior permanently in wild format, as well as the entire duration of this expansion. Also RIP High Priest Thekal – this card has singlehandedly made Thekal completely obsolete.
With the sheer potential of this card, I see no reason to run it outside of any deck asides from hyper-aggro.
No one will run this in wild in current meta mate.
I mean there are only 2 classes this does anything against and to play a 5 mana 5/5 for no benefit against 7 other decks it’s downright awful.
if this card like this exist, then a card which destroy enemy quest should be available too..
balance in all things
Do warriors have you down?
Are combo druids in wild just the worst?
Do shudderwock shamen makes make you want to die?
Well do I have the card for you
This card doesn’t counter Shudderwock Shaman
Fair enough, nothing counters shudderwock shamen.
I always imagined a card like this existing in the classic set, honestly great, not sure any deck to put this in besides maybe highlander as they have a lot of tech cards. Easily kills any Paladin deck besides aggro and Murloc (if it’s even viable anymore) because paladins rely on being able to heal they play thekal, and maybe against control warrior. 5/5 in those matchups but 2/5 in pretty much any other so 3.5/5
Imagine playing this on a Paladin that just converted all of his health to armor and then you kill him with a 1 attack minion.
I like the idea of a tech card for armor, but I just feel that this is a bit too extreme. Mainly in Wild. Even if it’s hardly played, it still completely invalidates some already bad (but fun) decks. I’d have rathered if it only destroyed up to 10 armor. It then wouldn’t counter combo decks that use armor as their win condition while still being able to deal with Control Warrior and other Combo Druid decks. Idk, maybe I’m looking too into this, but it would seriously suck if the opponent randomly got this when you’re just trying to have some fun with Armor Shaman, Linebreaker Druid, or Dead Man’s Hand Warrior.
First i thought this card is broken, cos it totally invalidates armor. But thinkning more about it, its not that big a deal. Its a tech card. A lot of other tech cards can be considered just as “unfair”. Imagine having 5 secrets up, and your opponent plays Flare or chief inspector. The result is similar, you invested a lot of resources (cards and mana) into a strategy, and your oponent spent 1 card into invalidating it. But that is the best case scenario. Many times, you would play against a class that has no armor gain, and then this is just an understated minion. To me it sounds like a fair card after all, specially considering that it will only be around for 1.33 years.
The other thing about this card, is when to use it.. i doubt any deck would run more than one of these. so, if you are playing against control what do you do? you use it in the middle of the game to remove its 6-10 armor and start to hit face? but then he still has a lot of cards in his deck that give armor, so he can stabilize and start gaining armor again.
You could also wait to the late game to use it, but any damage you get to his armor in the mean time would be totally irrelevant (similar to what happens when you have Alex in hand, that any damage you do the enemy before 15hp is pretty much wasted). To me the main use of this card is to deal with situations when your enemy somehow managed to get a ridiculus ammount of armor cos it help you negate that advantage. Other than that i think is a good tech card, but nothing too game breaking. 3/5 id say
Actually, you’re kind of right. Some cards like that just outright win the game for you, and that’s just how Hearthstone works.
Personally, I think Blizzard should remove all the tech cards from the game : EMP Operative, Hemet Nesingwary, Mind Control Tech, Flare, Chief Inspector and so on. But that’s just my opinion.
… and that pretty much sums it up.
I’m guessing that this will have less impact than Skulking Geist.
It has a very strong effect, but it’s too situational to actually be played. Though it will help you win matchups against control warrior, its just a 5/5 against nearly all other decks in standard (including tempo warrior). You are better off putting more removal in your deck than using this.
“Those soab’s. They finally did it”
So can we confirm that Freezemage will be Tier 1 again.
I love it.
Won’t see play. 1/5
Why would it see no play? This card is the absolute counter to Control Warrior and makes High Priest Thekal unplayable
Ferocious howl is now less reliable to save current quest druid against crazy aggro… I like that it still has decent stats so it doesn’t feel like totally wasted space when up against non armor classes…
YAAAAAAAY! No more Control Fatigue Warrior!!! I’ve been wishing for this card since Rise of Shadows!
5/5 do 40 damage to face to warrior? Sure why not.
5/5 do 5 damage to face (in case of DK) to other class it’s still decent.
A little bit too late but better late than never, i suppose. The main purpose of this card is to shut down decks that rely too much on stalling and gaining armor which leads to long and frustrating games. Right now, this card only affects one deck meaningfully: Control Warrior. Unless Control Warrior reaches tier 1 status, this won’t see much play.
The main problem with it is how Warrior was designed around armor as a class. The Warrior hero power does nothing other than give a little bit of armor. It doesn’t impact the board in any way and it doesn’t progress you towards winning the game (like Hunter). To compensate for this, they created armor synergy cards for the class. Cards that take that number (armor amount) and do X thing with it. This new tech card is capable of nullifying completely the hero power and all its synergy cards instantly. Warrior doesn’t just lose X amount of health. They lose the ability to use many of its class specific cards that are meant to compensate for the weak hero power. That’s really bad. Whether or not this kills the class, it certainly targets and hurts it much, much more than any other class in the game. That’s not a really fair thing, i’d say.
It’s not like Warrior can’t get armor after this card is used? I get your point but people will probably run max 1 of these in their decks and it doesn’t mean warrior can’t get armor afterwards. This is a very fair card in all sense. Armor itself can be seen as a very overpowered things in the amounts warrior and Druid got them back then, I don’t see this card being very useful anymore. It would’ve been a Godsend during Kobolds and Catacombs and Rise of shadows but now it’s hardly useful. So long as they don’t print some new op armor cards all over again. Dr Boom will rotate soon.
My main concern is with the fact that warrior hero power does just this one thing: stack armor. And this card effortlessly deals with that. The warrior hero power is already the worst in the game. Now, all the mana and time spent accumulating health to tank those big late game attackers will be gone in the blink of an eye. By one single neutral common card. It will feel awful every single time it happens. Wasn’t warrior supposed to be the tank class? Yes, warrior can regain armor after losing it but that will take mana, time and many cards. Will you even survive after they destroy your armor? Combo decks can just do as they please with you now. It’s a good thing that warrior will have some alternate hero powers (quest and Galakrond) because otherwise warrior wouldn’t have a hero power for more than a year.
Good card… for 1 year ago…
Now its meh
Goodbye Control Warrior 🙁 I think this card should be legendary, playing against rogues with shadowstep will hurt too much…
Why would you want to do this more than one time?
Since it’s a tech card with no tribe (surprisingly not a dragon, so it must be the dragon rider the card is focusing on), this will live or die with the meta.
If warrior is able to gain lots of armor, decks will run this to hard counter. If heal paladin with thekal is really powerful for some reason, this will be too.
Would this be played if it said “deal 15 damage to your opponent if they are a warrior”? It would mean that warrior is no longer played, which is bad card design.
Overall, I feel mixed with the design. I dreamed about this card when druid had malfurion DK, UI, and branching paths, but now this just seems gratuitous. But this will likely be enough in the future to stop decks from winning by armor alone.
goodbye 2500 druid in wild though
this was a custom card a few months back
im honestly surprised they made it can be pretty weak or incredibly powerful
with stats that are almost good it will be added as a filler for some decks
I don’t play wild enough to know the meta, but I’m glad that problem is being dealt with.
This might be like skulking geist, good enough stats for some decks to run. Where they differ is that most classes don’t have natural access to armor
Yeah, this should have been printed ages ago. Armor ended up being way, way better than healing as a mechanic, which led to insanely lopsided matches like Control Warriors with 80% winrate vs. aggro.
Yes this counters armor stacking, like Dragon Slayer will counter Dragons and Hungry Crab counters Murlocs and there is anti-Secret tech cards and so on. The point of this card is not to make armor-stacking pointless, but to prevent armor-stacking to represent 30%+ of the playerbase again. If Control Warrior or Combo Druid or some other form of armor stacking becomes oppressive again, THEN you’ll see people start putting this card in their decks to counter it. But if this is just going to be a 5 mana 5/5 in 90% of your matches, then no one’s going to play it. That’s just the nature of tech cards.
Love it, 5/5
Exactly!
Couldn’t have said it better. People are overreacting and acting as if this kills Warrior as a class altogether which obviously isn’t true.
I realy like this card, it is quite good but i don’t know if it will find a place in the top tier decks after the realise of the espansion.
I can hypothesize using a single copy of the latter to counter warrior and druid, especially in my opinion in the highlander or tempo decks
Don’t get me wrong, I like it and cards like this should have been released years ago, but isn’t it a bit extreme? I would be happy if it removed 15 armor.
to me it feels like a card targeted at wild and the 2500 armor druid build.
in standard not that strong
Just play Uther OTK or mechathun
ok that requires you to play a specific deck type which you may hate when you can just throw in a tech card?
most decks have a few cards that can be changed around without hurting the overall deck
I mean ya, now you can just play this instead of otk paly for line cracker druid, but it isn’t that bad tbh, i was mainly joking
Remove X armor is probably a card they will add to the classic set to replace something that went to hall of fame. This card destroys the possibility of a Control Warlock while a “remove X armor” only weakens it.
You probably meant control warrior :>
And it doesn’t destroy anything, warrior can gain armor even after this card is played. It just exists as a counter card because aa things have been up till now there hasn’t been any counterplay for high armor gain. This card is perfect as it is.
Of course I meant Warrior ^^
And I think in most situations this is a finisher that removes 20 Health from your opponent and your minions or spells deal the last (for example) 10 damage to finish the Warrior of. Playing the card just because your opponent has a lot of armor wont help. At least not if its a Warrior.
I like to see this in response to Thekal 😀
I think it is good we get the possibility to counter armor but it is really depending on the format. For now I guess in 90% a dead card so 2/5 but if the meta shifts this will be insane.
Long due indeed. They may have overdone the stats a bit for a tech card. I think this now may be a automatic inclusion in any wild deck, with the death knights it almost always deals 5 damage. And a 5 mana 5/5 isn’t the worst line ever even without the battlecry.
Should be a dragern.
I’m interested how this will work in adventures many bosses has armour like lich King with his 130 armour when you are warrior
So basically druid got smacked healadin got nerfed and warrior just lost all ability to be a control deck. Unless they activate a hero card this literally only effects 3 classes for the most part in the current standard. The fact that this isn’t even a legendary made this a tech card with average stats that can completely obliterate certain classes. With this warriors might as well not have a hero power. This is likely to be a card saved in hand for when armor gets to much and then just nuke it all off and smash. I seriously don’t get making a card that is only effective against 3 standard classes as a set card. Until this set rotates out warrior will practically be dead and several wild decks will be dropped before that.
I Agree and do not agree with you: Warrior was way to powerfull before Uldum and de Dr. Boom nerf. Games with 40 of armor were a Nightmare. Now is the oportunity to Warrior to shine as a Tempo/Aggro deck. It has lots of good tenpo cards, so I don’t think Warrior will be dead. This card will have place in Wild probably.
Oh stop whining, this card is long overdue.
Where were you when another card named Reno Jackson completely invalidated another Hero Power, namely Hunter’s?
This or a similar card has always been necessary in the game, and would have avoided previous Druids and Warriors getting out of hand like they did.
The druids getting out of control also occurred during a period where one particular rotation was admitted to being overpowered. And it took several cards spread across different sets to make it powerfully this is a card from a single set that would have on its own killed the use of half a decks worth of cards. This would basically be almost like having a card that did dmg to a person equal to about half of the healing their character received.
Having cards with armor piercing or took out percentages of armor would have been more reasonable. Basically if this took out say 80% of the armor that would still have been powerful and more used when opponents built up to much armor instead of fully nullifying it.
Point is … starting December the 10th, armor classes can’t get any tier 1 decks using… well… armor. Because this card is busted against them.
I actually don’t get it why they simply didn’t re-buff Classic Alexstrasza to her old form.
But yeah. Cool card.
This is just dumb. It doesn’t do anything most of the time, but when it does it can deal 30+ damege, which is just stupid. If you let your opponent gain that much armor, then you did pretty badly that game, and shouldn’t win by playing a common 5-drop. What was Blizzard thinking???
this card is broken!! 6 stars
Damn they really did it. This hurts wild druid so much. Thought more they were going to do something like piercing attacks that could ignore armor. Or remove a large amount, but this just melts it all. Going to be interesting.
Also goodbye any chances of paladin using thekal again. “Oh you have 29 armor and 1 hp, that’s cute”
Haha right, most useless card ever now.
Hahaha…. This card was printed so freaking late at this point.. I’m glad it exists but c’mon Blizzard, make these cards when armor is actually busted xD
FINALLY
Finally, we have a card that upsets armor. now mind you that it’s not just an Anti-Warrior Card because it can also be used just to get rid of Galakrond’s Armor as well. Or what Druid used to be back then which was pretty scary. I believe Mage also had a ton of armour too back then as well, and we know that there will be others that will try to cheat their way for gaining armour, such as Lifesteal Paladin for example. Essentially a good card as of right now, but I wouldn’t throw it away as soon as the next expansion starts, because you can almost guarantee that somewhere out there, and other than warrior, one of these days there’s going to be yet another class that found a way to get a whole much of armour, and we will be calling upon uhh… This Guy. Honestly, I would rate it 4 stars in my personal opinion because I just want a minion that gets the job done, so I would like it to have lower mana but lower stats, but a 5 Mana 5/5 Body that deals somewhere around 5 to even 20+ Armor is still pretty amazing. And now that I said it out loud, a 5 Mana 5/5 that “Deals 5 Damage” is probably 5 stars.
This card will most likely be one of the few put on the nerfing block it basically targets only 3 classes in the current standard warrior, druid, and pally. No other class is affected nearly as bad and the hero cards won’t mean to much of targets galakrond gives 7 armor and a 5/2 weapon which will likely be used to remove a minion so may not even have armor to remove.
Yeah armor is a pain but completely breaking it is a bit much for a card targeted against only 3 classes 1 more than the others.
If the idea is that because only a few classes have a mechanic it would be unfair to release tech cards to counter them you would have to remove all secret removal as well. A mechanic shared between only 3 classes (4 if you count rogue) meets the same criteria. This is like asking for chief inspector to be hall of famed cause it deletes your Christmas tree of secrets. Problem mechanics needs answers regardless of how unique they are to a class.
Armor has been a problem for a long time making some of the most one sided win rates a tier 1 deck has ever seen (upwards of 80% against meta aggro decks). And for years control decks have been given anti aggro tech so it’s about time for there to be anti control tech.
This dosent negate the armor mechanic. The opponent just has to be smarter with how they play armor cards. Perhaps you no longer stock pile to 40 armor as a warrior and keep some armor cards in hand incase this card is played. At the very least the card costs 5 so alot of the aggro players turn will be eaten up. This will make aggro v control matchups closer making hearthstone a bit less rock paper scissors esque which is healthy for the game.
The thing is though aggro loses against control when control is able to stall out the tempo till late game. Armor is just a tool used to stall but even then I’ve had warriors drop to near dead before lost momentum. Sure armor breaking could have helped but this also sets up a card that can make non armor control decks have advantage in a control vs control matchup. What I would have expected was probably something that was more armor piercing being able to do life dmg even if opponent had armor.
But it’s also the fact that they pretty much killed the legendary for a class that doesn’t even really generate armor through other methods. An on curve thekhal is basically horrible now or played at any point in fight unless had a lot of heal so basically the 10 Mana dragon to restore health to full on a curve IF survived to play it.
Shouldn’t this just say, “destroy warriors armour”? :p
High priest thekal feels sad
Oh poop :p
holy cow..
such an easy task to do? and a common card?
no prerequisite whatsoever. just a battlecry.
go have intercourse with this..
goodbye warrior.
no offense but, even I can come up with a better and balanced card than this.
“armor penetrate. deal 5 damage to enemy health directly”
One of the downsides of playing warrior is that he don’t have much healing cards, instead warrior uses armor to stand on his feet. And just by making this card, they’ve just nerfed warrior hero power next to useless.
“oh, you waste some turns to save some armor”, how bout I play this card.
Bam.. 2-3 turns wasted away.
Warrior isn’t the only class to use armor to some extent.. Druid was argueably a bigger problem with it back then. Armor is nowhere near op enough for this card to matter now. It should have been printed at the time of Kobolds and Catacombs.
And no, it doesn’t make warrior hero power useless, that’s like saying that hunter hero power is useless cause healing exists 😀 No one is gonna use cards like these unless armor is op which it isn’t anymore.
“like saying that hunter hero power is useless cause healing exists”
what kind of analogy is that? we’re talking about how if someone has stacked a lot of armors and it’ll be just a tick, and the armor is gone.
I’ve played a lot with warrior, and I know 15-20 armors is average, and hoping that fatique will be the finishing play, and with this card, you’re dealing 20 damage with a basic card. it’s totally nerfing how warrior’s play.
your analogy with hunter and healing doesn’t come anywhere near it.
There are other similar cards that exist:
– Skulking Geist vs Jade Druid (also killed Miracle Maly-Rogue): 6 mana 4/6
– Chief Inspector vs Secret Mage, Pally and Hunter: 5 mana 4/6
– Dirty Rat, Gnomeferatu and Hecklebot can all potentially destroy key cards in combo decks.
Control Warrior is hardly the first deck to get trounced by a single, easy-to-play card… and this doesn’t even kill control Warrior really, you just need to not go “all in” on armour – hold some back if possible.
I prefer ridiculous combo decks personally and Blizzard have been printing anti-combo tech for yonks – it’s about time there was something to target armour.
you can still gain armor after your armor has been wiped? ya just dont wanna stack it anymore.
Not even just warrior this card completely invalidates healadin since it nullifies the whole point of playing thekhal. Druid is affected but that’s more in wild than current since standard only has a few decent armor cards. But unlike other classes this nullifies several of warriors cards since they need armor to work.
yeah, I’m here just to justify warrior since I’m a heavy warrior player.
it’s basically a basic card with more value than it should be. (in the negative way)
broken card.
The fact they released a card that targets one class more than anything is ridiculous at least the secret counter that’s brought up can apply to possibly 4 classes and even then the cards are more varied stealing secret or killing secret to gain stats. Neither of those cards can make as big an impact against one class as this one can. Most of the time warrior gets high armor it’s from playing several different cards and using up this invalidates that. Warrior also needs armor for when using weapons to remove minions or to trigger other cards that are dependant on amount of armor you have. Seems like a targeted attack to remove control warrior and force tempo warrior.
Imagine playing Thekal on 3, just so your opponent coins this out on 4 😀
On more serious note, interesting tech card which will probably mostly hurt warrior and partially druid.
If we’re going to get something like this, can we have a common that reads “Battlecry: all minions that have died this game become 1/1 sheep”?
I expect the heck of a lot of Trolden with this one
As someone who mostly plays Warrior, I now want a refund…
The ultimate counter to linecraker combo druid
*Control Warrior forces players to rage on hour long games*
*A shining knight appears, forcing it to retreat to the hole it came from*
Wh-what is your name kind sir?
Neutral Common.
Underrated comment
Amazing against warrior, pretty good against Druid, mediocre against any other class, overall I think this card is extremely meta dependent. 3/5
Against decks that have hero cards, this can be saved to straight up deal 5 damage to face.
LOL bb warrior
What the hell?? This should not have almost premium stats for such op effect!!
Ultimate tech against warrior
Wtf?
This card is so OP vs a controll warrior.