“Maly Goes to Hall of Fame?” – Malygos and the Limitation of Design Space

The five Dragon Aspects from the Warcraft universe have been in Hearthstone since its beginning. Being the most ancient and powerful creatures within their world, the respective cards in Blizzard’s card game needed to be just as influential.

Over four years later, one of these aspects still keeps shaking up the meta-game. Malygos, supposedly the most powerful of all aspects, turns out to become a serious issue for Team 5 and Hearthstone’s design space as a whole. Is the time finally ripe for Malygos’ introduction to the Hall of Fame, or can the design team work around the tremendous impact of a card that supports spell-heavy decks the way Malygos does?

Bad Influence in the Past

To really get behind the inherent problem of Malygos as a card, we need to take a look at the past.

Malygos has always been a dark horse in the Hearthstone meta. May it be in Miracle Rogue with Sinister Strike, Control Shaman with Ancestor's Call or Freeze Mage with Ice Lance – the potential of turning harmless spells into lethal threats has fit into several archetypes over the last four years.

However, as it is with any other of the Dragon Aspects, Malygos has always been limited by one factor: Mana cost. 9 mana is a lot to pay for a mere 16 points of stats, and that is why Malygos has never been able to really take off in the earlier days of Hearthstone.

That changed with the release of one particular card that we now only know from the Wild format: Emperor Thaurissan. Being the first card that offered what the community today calls “mana cheat”, Thaurissan opened up countless possibilities for all archetypes involving Malygos.

Cards like Frostbolt, Sinister Strike or Ice Lance really benefited from a 1 mana discount; in fact, it made one-turn plays in combination with Malygos a realistic scenario.

Everybody’s least favorite Barnes is the second “bad influence” card when it comes to Malygos synergy. The ability to summon 1/1 copies of powerful minions like Malygos has been a thorn in the side for a majority of the competitive community: Non-reliable mana-cheating not only feels less rewarding for the executing player if it doesn’t work; it also creates a zero fun experience for the opposing side if it works.

Needless to say, the ability to get that much spell damage for that low amount of mana bypassed the already mentioned mana cost factor even more.

The Holy Trinity of Balance

What can be already said is that Malygos itself is not the problem. In fact, its initial card design limits its own use to an extend that, looking at it from a standpoint in the past, makes it more than balanced.

It may not be conveyed through Team 5 officially, but balance in Hearthstone can be heavily simplified when looking at some sort of “holy trinity”: Stats, effects and costs. All three of these factors need to even out eventually, and if one or more factors outweighs the others, balance issues are inevitable.

Looking at Malygos in that particularly simple way, it becomes crystal-clear that an incredibly powerful effect goes along with a subpar stat line and an expensive cost of mana.

But what if one of the weak factors becomes pretty much non-existent?

The Druid Dilemma

The result is Malygos Druid as we know it in the current meta-game.

What both Emperor Thaurissan and Barnes started has been exponentially translated to two cards of the Boomsday Project: Dreampetal Florist and Flobbidinous Floop. Both cards not only enable mana-cheating on a whole other level; now they also come in numbers, meaning that you have multiple ways to enable a deadly Malygos combo.

Besides those two newcomers, Twig of the World Tree has also been in the focus when it comes to bad design in terms of Malygos synergy – but, similar to the time when Barnes and Emperor Thaurissan reigned, the core problem lies elsewhere:

Moonfire is one of the few vanilla cards that do nothing but spell damage to a selected target, may it be heroes or minions. Looking at the holy trinity, Moonfire’s cases may seem obvious: A low-mana spell combined with a very powerful spell effect that has a low spell stat.
In addition to that, the community regularly falls victim to the “low mana, low power level” misconception; however, both the community and the developers know for a fact that similar cards like Stonetusk Boar don’t have to cost a lot of mana to become a serious issue within the design space of Hearthstone.

Druid’s cheapest spell has not always been in a similar spot. The fact that you reserve two card slots for a spell that deals one damage was a limiting factor in early deckbuilding back in the day; but together with Malygos, double Moonfire hits for 12 damage, and with one or two copies of Swipe, Druids gain ridiculous reach with Malygos on board or discounted in hand through Flobbidinous Floop or Dreampetal Florist. And not only that: Druid has multiple ways to ensure to get through the game without drawing win conditions early.

By the looks of it, the problem around Malygos is nothing less but multifactorial. What is Druid’s new identity, why did Team 5 design two new “mana-cheat” cards, and how is Moonfire still in the game?

Different Design Paths

To put down everyone’s favorite blue dragon could be the end of Druid’s ongoing reign in the current polarized meta-game. Malygos Druid has been the only deck that seems to perform well against the majority of archetypes on a competitive level.
We have seen the full spectrum of decisions in Blizzard’s history when it comes to the Hall of Fame: Cards like Sylvanas Windrunner have been moved to the Hall of Fame preemptively, while high-priority deckbuilding cards like Ice Block have been in the Classic set for the longest time before they rotated out.

The decision to keep cards like Moonfire and Stonetusk Boar in Standard shows the worse end of the spectrum, and Malygos got the short end of the stick, even more so after the release of the Boomsday Project.
And not only that: The fact of Malygos being in the Classic set limits Team 5 when it comes to spell-damage-related class cards, something that is undoubtedly one of the main factors in Druid’s class fantasy. On the other side, controlling mana as a resource should have a significant place in the Druid toolkit as well, which is why cards like Flobbidinous Floop or Dreampetal Florist should have a place in the current meta-game.

An answer to this problem may not lie on the surface.
Cutting Malygos, one of the most iconic Hearthstone cards, would definitely hurt from a gameplay perspective and only serve as a band-aid solution, just because Moonfire and mana-cheating cards still confine design space. We have seen last week that Blizzard not only seems to think about new Hall of Fame contenders, they also just printed replacement cards to fill the void that cards like Ice Block and Conceal left behind.

After four years, one can only hope that remnants of ancient card design like Malygos, Moonfire and Stonetusk Boar, who restrict both the community’s ability to enjoy new cards and creative ways to come up with new design ideas, are getting the attention they deserve in terms of Hall of Fame rotation.