Kill Frenzy: How Good is Hearthstone’s Latest Keyword?

A key part of Hearthstone’s design is the relative simplicity of its keywords, as the slow increase in complexity over time makes it easy to pick up and play while also allowing room for the developers to make sweeping changes like the introduction of tribal spells at the same time as adding something like Frenzy at the start of a new year. The bastard child of Enrage and Spellburst offers a wide variety of applications, but will it actually be viable at high levels of play? We’ve only got a few cards and our wits to go with, but there’s definitely enough here for a preliminary analysis…

Precursor Artifacts

To understand how we got to Frenzy, we must look at Enrage first. The now-defunct keyword was included on cards like Amani Berserker and Spiteful Smith, and it represents a big part of what Hearthstone’s devs got wrong about their own game in those early years: the attacker’s ability to dictate trades and the steady mana flow puts a premium on tempo, which means any marginal benefit from a minion engaging in combat and living to tell the tale is insignificant compared to the development edge and the face damage potential which comes with it, rendering Enrage irrelevant almost every time.

The keyword’s payoffs were too small and the minions mostly had vanilla stats (meaning health pools to low to sustain them on the board after taking a hit), and it’s no wonder it’s eventual removal was greeted with a resounding meh by the community. Enrage had very limited gameplay impact, offering little to no special design options – indeed, it has hardly ever been featured beyond the six cards in Basic and Classic: Goblins versus Gnomes offered Warbot, then it took another year and a half for Whispers of the Old Gods to bring along Aberrant Berserker and Bloodhoof Brave. That’s how many Enrage cards we’ve got in total before the keyword was nuked from orbit.

The official Designer Insights blog post on Enrage’s removal offers us a lot of interesting insights. The previously discussed nature of minion combat in Hearthstone made the devs focus more on “cards with triggered abilities that encourage you to damage them multiple times, like Acolyte of Pain and Rotface”. Enough said. Cards like Bittertide Hydra, Crazed Worshipper and Bonechewer Vanguard come to mind as further examples, many of which have seen competitive play over the years, and not just in classes which could directly ping them to achieve value.

What Makes a Keyword?

The post also features an interesting checklist about which abilities are ought to be keyworded in Team 5’s eyes, and even though this is almost three years old at this point, it still serves as an interesting launch point for our discussion on Frenzy.

• Keywords can make learning cards easier. Once you know a keyword, it can boil down a complex idea and help you understand a new card more quickly.
• Keywords are flavorful. They tell a story – Discover, Recruit, Taunt; these all help the game come alive.
• Keywords condense card text. This leads to more readable cards that fit better in the frame.
• Keywords give us mechanical hooks. So we can make cards like “Give your Taunt minions +2/+2.

The new keyword fits each of these marks. It neatly lines up with the troll-focused theming of the new expansion and it’s easy to understand, especially off the back of the introduction of Spellburst, another one-off effect. Indeed, this allows Team 5 to make its payoffs more powerful than what we’ve seen with Enrage and “each time it takes damage”, or even Battlecry effects for similarly sized and statted minions. We can already see this from the early reveals, even if we factor in that usually the most exciting cards are the ones which get shown off at this juncture. As an example, a card like Druid of the Plains is functionally almost analogous to a 7/6 Taunt with a Battlecry of “deal 7 damage to an enemy minion”, which is pretty nasty when you compare it with something like Bog Creeper (or Coilfang Warlord).

It’s worth making a few comparisons with Spellburst, the other recently introduced one-off effect. Here, playing out the minion by itself doesn’t rely on a contingency plan depending on your hand composition (ie. when you’re not holding the spell and need the immediate board presence). However, clearly it can be quite hard to trigger these abilities without initiative, even if some classes can trigger it with an Inspire-like 2-mana investment. This is a good reason to be skeptical about cards like Peon as long as we don’t see specific synergy cards.

On a technical level, Frenzy seems to offer more design space than something like Spellburst did, with a wide variety of potential applications (direct damage, AoE effects, resource generation, healing and more) with a higher power level than a normal Battlecry effect. These factors make it a very interesting keyword that offers much more gameplay complexity than Enrage ever could, but there’s a sweet spot in the power level which the devs need to get just right for it to work.

Feeding Frenzy

How reliably can you make use of minions with Frenzy if you’re behind on the board? Since they do sacrifice some stats for the keyword – as they should – dropping them onto the battlefield without an immediate way to trigger their ability will mean that your opponent will just happily take the value trade and keep on rolling. Frenzy combined with Rush (or perhaps Stealth, though that seems unlikely) basically ensures that you can trigger it, and it remains to be seen how many cards will feature it on its own on a minion – but relying on further abilities to make use of Frenzy would make it a pretty underwhelming keyword in the end.

It’s easy to imagine a meta where tempo is king and most Frenzy cards are just too slow to make us of, joining Overkill and Inspire on the rubbish pile of Hearthstone keywords. However, it would be even worse to see a bunch of cards where Team 5 kept combining them with other instant-impact keywords in order to artificially increase their relevance. It’s a tricky task for sure, and with the cornucopia of changes heading into the Year of the Gryphon, it is way too early to predict whether they’ll be able to pull it off – but if they do, the decision-making around Frenzy could make for some very interesting gameplay scenarios.