The Ice Block Dilemma – How it Began and Hopefully Will End

The new Standard year is just around the corner, and with that certain cards are considered to be put into the Hall of Fame, a Wild format card set that contains design-hindering or problematic cards.

The mage spell card Ice Block is marked as a top contender for the Hall of Fame by both the community and the developers. And while Team 5 didn’t officially confirm anything regarding that matter yet, almost every player expects the card to rotate out of the Classic set when the next expansion hits in Spring. But why has Ice Block been in the sights of players and Blizzard, and what would its exclusion mean to the Mage class as a whole?

One Card to Rule Them All

The history of Ice Block begins with the most successful multiplayer online games of all time, World of Warcraft. This spell was introduced as and still is one of the major defensive cooldowns for Frost Mages, protecting them from all harm for a certain amount of time.

The WoW TCG thankfully put Ice Block as an instant ability into the Mage repertoire due to its very distinct and easy to understand design idea. The card was implemented in Hearthstone as well for obvious reasons; however, Team 5 decided to make it a secret card, one of the few really new mechanics introduced with Hearthstone compared to the WoW TCG.

As Hearthstone players of course know, Ice Block as a result could be played whenever during the game, just to be triggered after lethal damage would normally end the Mage’s game. The versatility of this card was set in stone over countless expansions by one of or if not the most dominating archetypes in the history of Hearthstone, Control Mage.

The decks’ win condition was centered around the self-explanatory usage of Ice Block. In combination with Alexstrasza, another prime contender for the Hall of Fame, and offensive spells like Fireball, Pyroblast, Frostbolt, and Ice Lance, every Control Mage was able to power through basically every amount of enemy pressure while setting up lethal damage on its own over the course of a single turn.

Obviously, the inclusion of Ice Block wasn’t limited to the Control Mage archetype whatsoever: Tempo Mage in its various iterations over the last years used at least one copy of Ice Block, just because it always has provided every Mage deck with that additional key turn to overcome the opponent. Depending on Mage archetypes used in the given meta-game, Ice Block continued to represent a core idea for the class’ deckbuilding.

That particular influence of a single card has rung Team 5’s bells several times already. Yong Woo, Lead Game Producer for Hearthstone, explained in an invenglobal interview back in February ‘17 that he and his team would carefully monitor cards that form decks with similar cores and ideas.

Everybody’s favorite Game Director Ben Brode also stated in his Reddit AMA from last year that Ice Block “matches our red flags for cards that maybe shouldn’t be in Standard forever”.

Fear of Change and How to Overcome

Many Mage players anxiously await the future of their class in the upcoming Standard year, and that is totally understandable. All three Mage archetypes in the current meta-game, Secret, Exodia and Big Spell Mage, use the Ice Block spell to their advantage. Secret Mage needs the card to improve its worst matchups against aggressive board-flooding decks like Murloc and Aggro Paladin, although it would love to play a more aggressive card in that particular slot; Exodia Mage needs as much defense as it can get to draw into its ultimate win condition as soon as possible.

The most severe case of forced inclusion is showcased by Big Spell Mage, an archetype that, as the name already tells, wants to use as many high-cost spells as possible. Ice Block certainly doesn’t belong to the high-cost spell category, and that hurts the archetype looking at cards like Raven Familiar or Dragon's Fury, but Ice Block’s power level by itself is so high that it justifies its inclusion even in that particular archetype.

So what does Mage have in store to compensate for the lack of its most iconic defensive ability at the moment?

One of the more promising approaches are Mage’s class elementals. With the last three expansions (that will still be played in the upcoming Standard year), a total of six Mage elementals has been released. Especially the last expansion Kobolds and Catacombs provided Mage with two very budding elementals: First there is Arcane Artificer, that can create tons of Armor value when played in the right situation; Leyline Manipulator on the other hand can discount important defensive spells created by Primordial Glyph or other sources.

But most importantly, the Mage’s Death Knight card, Frost Lich Jaina, which got introduced with the Knights of the Frozen Thrones expansion makes Elementals worth to tech in. Her altered Hero Power that can create additional Water Elementals and puts Lifesteal on them and your other Elemental tribe minions will most definitely buff up the Mage’s survivability for the rest of the game. Other neutral elementals like Tar Creeper or Arcane Tyrant already see play, trying to push the Elemental package just over the edge of being viable in the current meta-game.

And while the idea behind lifestealing minions in terms of defensive capability may sound intriguing in theory, surviving until turn 9 to turn into Frost Lich Jaina and then establishing an army of elementals surely turns out to be way more complicated than to just play a single secret on turn 3.

Other approaches to solving the problem are currently scarce – out of the 30 Mage cards released throughout the last three expansions, only 6 to 10 see frequent play in different archetypes, a number that is awfully low in comparison to other classes. That again shows how deck building is dominated by Mage’s Classic set, which in itself is a whole other problem of course, but Ice Block surely leads the way in that regard.

Mistakes Were Made – Don’t Make Them Again

Ice Block poses a big problem in the design space of Hearthstone. But repeating that this has been the case for way too long or giving up hope on finding an equal replacement for the card can’t be the community’s solution to this particular problem.

Let us try to think out of the box. What cards just need a little bit more support to be viable in the next meta-game (Inkmaster Solia, Manic Soulcaster)? Which mechanics could be used in the future to compensate for the loss of Ice Block (Freeze synergy with unused cards like Coldwraith or Cryomancer)?

Yes, in the end not the community but Team 5 has to make multiple decisions: First off, Ice Block needs to move to the Hall of Fame. It clearly qualifies for numerous criteria that have been stated by several Team 5 members in the past, and it is time to put an end to this era.

Secondly, the community needs to wave goodbye to the idea of buying oneself an additional turn of play as Mage, and not only because it’s simply overpowered, but also because it just feels incomparably wrong when looking at every other class mechanic in the game.

Hearthstone will have to offer deck building alternatives in the new Standard year. This will not become a make or break deal with the release of the next expansion in April, just because certain mechanics and “archetype packages” need several expansions worth of time to finally make sense. It is also imperative to keep in mind that you must not try to fight fire with fire by fire by filling the Ice Block design hole with a similarly working spell.

Ultimately,  Team 5 needs to be aware that without a proper compensation, Mage, at least as how it is operating right now, will become the big loser of the upcoming rotation.

One can only hope that a combination of both old and new cards will fill the void that a possible rotation of Ice Block will leave behind, because this sort of renewal, one way or the other, could revolutionize the Mage class as a whole in the best way.