Hearthstone Needs More Hand Disruption Tools

…or any, as the case may be in the current Standard environment. However, it’s not just nostalgia that makes me think that having Dirty Rat-like cards in the game is necessary to Hearthstone’s health: there are quite a few core tenets of its design philosophy that warrant the presence of tools that allow you to reliably mess with combos.

Fun and Interactive

The trifecta of aggro, control and combo archetypes usually form a perfect harmony in card games in a predictable rock-paper-scissors manner: control decks have efficient tools to shut down incoming aggression, but their slow nature means that they are very susceptible to combo decks as they can’t pressure them enough before they can launch their fireworks. In turn, aggro is fast enough to just murder combo decks very quickly but they lack the sustainability to reliably beat down an effective control deck.

In Hearthstone, this dynamic has always been skewed a bit against the control decks as both of its “rivals” have some sort of a leg up on them: not only do the aggro decks’ favor the attacker’s ability to choose the targets (as opposed to something like Magic the Gathering) and the lack of interaction on your opponent’s turn puts a premium on tempo, card draw is relatively cheap in the game as well, greatly increasing the potency of combo decks. It’s therefore no surprise that it’s almost always one of these two archetypes that get out of hand and warps the metagame around itself until its eventual nerf.

Logically, this means that control decks require some sort of help against their combo opponents in order to increase their viability – and the lack of such cards in the current Standard environment goes a long way to explain why there isn’t a single purely control-oriented archetype in the higher echelons of the metagame (though the problematic Recruit mechanic and the ever-increasing focus on external resource generation also plays a part in this phenomenon).

Not having a tool like this also forces the playerbase to go for pure aggro in order to counter an effective combo deck, leading to the sort of extremely polarized metagame that we’ve experienced before the nerfs as the presence of Quest Rogue (yet again) led to a dearth of supposedly insta-win and insta-loss games, and consequently the second time the developers were forced to adjust the key card of that particular archetype.

Back in My Day

There’s hardly any precedent for this kind of a mechanic in Hearthstone. Historically, the only card capable of hand disruption was the infamous Dirty Rat. Upon reveal, its parallels with Deathlord were immediately striking. That one was an interesting control tool released in The Curse of Naxxramas that was meant to be a very heavy punishment against aggressive decks but could cause quite the sticky situations in slower matchups. It turned out that you can sometimes throw a wrench into a combo strategy by prematurely pulling a key card from their deck, but that the decision-making in that regard was nowhere near to the nuances of a Dirty Rat’s timing, especially considering how its effect was a Deathrattle rather than a Battlecry, which meant that it was almost always your opponent who got to trigger it, not you.

It was basically a fringe card in Control Priest until it unexpectedly found its home in the pre-Standard Fatigue Warrior lists, which were the then-logical extreme of control strategies before cards like Jade Idol were printed specifically to make sure that winning purely via resource exhaustion is a lot less viable. In fact, if Mike Donais is to be believed, it was purposefully designed to knock Garrosh off this particular perch. Of course, Deathlord didn’t get a chance to play in Standard – but it goes to show that even the acceleration of the opponent’s fatigue counter can be useful for certain strategies by itself, and having a powerful anti-aggro component doesn’t hurt either.

Basically, Dirty Rat seemed like a worse Deathlord on its reveal: it wouldn’t advance the fatigue counter in slower matchups, and while it is still an overstatted Taunt, it would provide way too much tempo for the aggressive strategies. Its disruption capabilities weren’t appreciated immediately, but it quickly became clear once players got to play with the card that they had something really special on their hands. For the first time in the history of the game, combo decks didn’t have guaranteed inevitability.

Dirty Rat has indeed become a staple in most control decks for its two-year presence in Standard, and remains a very versatile disruption tool in Wild to this day. It’s one of the few cards from MSoG that would be quite welcome as an evergreen option.

Side effects? No… Trust Me…

It’s not just the jaded control fans who benefit from having a card like Dirty Rat in the game: the knock-on effect of hand disruption has a tendency to improve the gameplay experience for everyone. For starters, modular combo decks are always more interesting that fully linear ones that go all-in on one particular win condition: the presence of a Dirty Rat-like card forces a more nuanced deckbuilding and gameplay strategy. Say what you will about Razakus Priest’s boundless burn capacity, at least it had alternative win conditions than its OTK. Same goes for the original Miracle Rogue: it may have expended a Shadowstep or two on SI:7 Agents to keep up in tempo early on, but the lack of its full combo didn’t mean automatic defeat.

Nowadays, Shudderwock Shaman can just shoot itself in the foot without any disruption whatsoever. As amusing as that is, the simplistic nature of the deck’s combo (“play all the necessary cards at some point throughout the game and then reap the rewards) is also a bad kind of inevitability that would be very easily reined in by the presence of a Dirty Rat or two in the metagame. It’s quite likely that the second nerf to Quest Rogue could have also been avoided if such tools were available for control decks in the Witchwood meta.

Their presence increases the skill cap for both the disruptors and the “disruptees” as the former tries to time the effect to maximize the probability while the latter has to be more ingenious about closing out the game when it actually costs them a combo piece. Yes, losing to a Dirty Rat pull may feel frustrating, but I’d argue this is simply because such effects are way too rare in Hearthstone in the first place. It’s also well-known how important a varied gameplay experience is in the eyes of Team 5, and it is fairly evident how such cards create unique gameplay situations over time.

Of course it’s always possible that we will get an effect like this in the next, yet-unannounced expansion – but it might as well become a part of the core gameplay experience. The rat may not be talking, but his company would nevertheless be appreciated in the Classic set even if he remains mute until the end of time.