One Card From Being Good: Deck-Building Lessons from Kingsbane Rogue and APM Priest

Balancing a card game is not an easy task, and Blizzard has traditionally been conservative with their balance changes, only touching cards months after they have been considered problematic. Therefore, the recent balance changes only two weeks into Rastakhan’s Rumble were a major surprise.

The nerf to Kingsbane Rogue through Leeching Poison is particularly interesting as a vantage point into deck-building and card game balance overall. Sometimes a single card can make or break an archetype, and sometimes even multiple cards cannot make an idea viable. Examining this intriguing dynamic can be useful not only for balance designers, but for deck builders as well.

Let’s take a journey into some successful and unsuccessful archetypes and see what we can learn from them.

Kingsbane Rogue: From zero to hero and back again

Kingsbane Rogue is an archetype that Blizzard carefully pushed to prominence ever since the introduction of Kingsbane itself in Kobolds and Catacombs. While it was able to build a scary weapon thanks to Valeera the Hollow and avoid fatigue forever, it had huge weaknesses against aggressive decks – until Rastakhan’s Rumble.

In its two weeks of dominance before the nerfs, this is what Rastakhan’s Rumble Kingsbane Rogue looked like:

The power of this list was built slowly over time, adding one piece after another over multiple expansions:

• Knights of the Frozen Throne laid down the preliminary framework with Valeera the Hollow and Leeching Poison
• Kobolds and Catacombs added Kingsbane itself and a way to draw it more reliably with Cavern Shinyfinder
• Witchwood improved weapon buffs further with Cutthroat Buccaneer
• Boomsday Project gave even more weapon buffs with Toxicologist
• Rastakhan’s Rumble added another tutor and more card draw with Raiding Party

The deck was built piece by piece over a year and a half!

The original list was a threat to slow decks, but it just could not find Kingsbane fast enough to survive aggression. The subsequent improvements to the power of the weapon itself did nothing to change this fundamental weakness of the deck, even though they made Kingsbane more and more scary in the late game. This improvement went largely unnoticed, because, well, the deck was fundamentally flawed.

All this changed with Raiding Party. Suddenly, there were five cards in the deck that would give you the weapon: Kingsbane, two copies of Cavern Shinyfinder, and two copies of Raiding Party. This removed the main weakness of the deck – its inability to find the weapon fast enough. With plentiful weapon buffs available, Kingsbane always had plenty of buffs available after being drawn.

With just one new card, Blizzard had created a monster! To be fair, strategies to counter Kingsbane were developed and were being fine-tuned, but it was still a powerful foe despite tech cards that attempted to weaken it, as they were based on weapon removal and Kingsbane Rogue had so many tutors for Kingsbane that even double weapon removal lists had a hard time.

Given the state of the deck, the nerf to Leeching Poison was the perfect way to remove the deck from the meta (if that is considered desirable). Changing Kingsbane itself would be difficult, it would have to become something completely different. Changing any of the weapon buffs was not going to do anything, there were too many of them. Changing one of the tutor cards would ruin them for other archetypes where they were not overpowered at all. Leeching Poison was unique to Kingsbane Rogue and the key piece that allowed it to defeat almost any burst damage short of a one-turn kill. Taking that away crumbled the entire archetype.

There are many interesting lessons to learn from the rise and fall of Kingsbane Rogue:

First, tutors are really, really good. If you’re not familiar with the term, tutor means a card that is used to find other cards. The name comes from one of the original Magic: The Gathering cards, Demonic Tutor, which is a spell that allows the player to search their deck for any one card and put it in their hand. This effect is so powerful that even Magic formats that allow players to use old cards (their equivalents to Wild) either limit Demonic Tutor to one copy per deck or ban it altogether. With the introduction of Raiding Party, Kingsbane Rogue reached a critical mass of tutors and was able to reliably procure Kingsbane game after game, even though Kingsbane itself was limited to just one copy. Whenever you have key cards that you need for your win condition, think of ways to tutor for them to increase the speed with which you are able to find your win condition.

Second, seemingly minor cards can make a huge difference when they reach a critical mass. What if there was no Cutthroat Buccaneer and Toxicologist? Kingsbane’s damage buffs would come from Deadly Poison and Captain Greenskin, and it would be much more difficult to build a huge weapon. Even with Valeera the Hollow and Vanish duplicating some of the buffs, sufficient buff potential simply would not exist.

Finally, a single card can make or break a deck. I’m not even talking about cards that literally form a part of a combo, such as Saronite Chain Gang used to do in Shudderwock Shaman, but simply providing the deck with key functionality in sufficient amounts. Kingsbane Rogue needed a number of things to go its way to become good: sufficient number of weapon buffs, enough tutors to reliably fetch Kingsbane, and a reliable healing mechanic provided by Leeching Poison. These were added to the game one by one, and even though the final addition in Rastakhan’s Rumble was only a single card, it made the deck complete. Likewise, Blizzard nerfed the deck by hitting an older key card for which there is no replacement.

Topsy Turvy OTK Priest (APM Priest): On the edge of viability

The story of Topsy Turvy OTK Priest is in some ways similar to Kingsbane Rogue. It was not built quite as slowly over time, but came out with a bang in The Boomsday Project when Test Subject and Topsy Turvy were introduced to the game. These two cards enabled players to cycle spells, and when combined with Vivid Nightmare from The Witchwood and Radiant Elemental from Journey to Un’Goro, to create infinite duplicates of cheap spells.

In the case of Topsy Turvy OTK Priest, the defining cards were the last ones to be released, but the full combo again relies on expansions spanning a year and a half.

Topsy Turvy Priest was briefly successful in the early days of The Boomsday Project, but as its competitors became more refined, it became more and more difficult for the deck to survive long enough to pull off the combo. The final straw was the nerf to Giggling Inventor, which robbed the deck of vital defensive capabilities and doomed it for the rest of the expansion.

You can probably guess what happened next. Rastakhan’s Rumble and deck lists such as this one:

There is exactly one new card in this list: Mass Hysteria. Appropriately, it sits in the mana slot of the old pre-nerf Giggling Inventor and gives the deck a relatively early board clear, which is much better than Giggling Inventor ever was. In combination with Psychic Scream, the deck has four full board clears, giving it a lot of survivability.

While Kingsbane Rogue relied on Leeching Poison for healing, Topsy Turvy Priest goes for the Priest Quest, Awaken the Makers. With its ability to combine card draw and quest completion thanks to Deathrattle minions such as Dead Ringer, Loot Hoarder, and Bloodmage Thalnos, it can simultaneously cycle through the deck and effectively heal itself.

Topsy Turvy Priest has not achieved success similar to Kingsbane Rogue, perhaps in large part because of how difficult it is to play as it requires the player to queue tens of actions on the final combo turn. Nonetheless, it is far more viable now than it ever was in The Boomsday Project, all because it received one new card that shored up a key weakness the deck had in its defensive capabilities.

Another interesting thing to note about Topsy Turvy Priest is its effective use of tutors: Dead Ringer fetches the rest of the deck’s Deathrattle minions, including Test Subject, and Witchwood Piper can fetch Stonetusk Boar after Test Subjects have been drawn.

Removal, healing, card draw, tutors. These key capabilities are repeated time and again in successful combo decks. If you have identified a potential combo, consider how you can implement these four capabilities in your deck to make it successful.

Discard Warlock: When quantity does not make up for quality

Just because Blizzard wants to push an archetype does not mean that it becomes successful. There have been several examples of such failed archetypes, from the complete meme that is Freeze Shaman to the ultimately decent enough Silence Priest that received more and more support after the Purify fiasco until it finally became at least somewhat viable – and is luckily now a thing of the past.

The one archetype Blizzard has spent years pushing, without any notable success, is Discard Warlock. Why were they able to build up Kingsbane Rogue piece by piece, but Discard Warlock keeps failing?

The most successful Discard Warlock decks were Zoo builds that used Malchezaar's Imp and Darkshire Librarian to nullify the discard effect with additional card draw, Silverware Golem to turn discarding into playing minions, and the most powerful discard cards where the benefits outweighed the cost: Doomguard and Soulfire.

This is what an actual mainstream discard deck looked like at the peak of its power in November 2016:

Discard as a mechanic is a harsh penalty. Only cards that offer a lot of power in exchange see play, and players are constantly seeking ways to mitigate the damage done by discarding cards. Discard decks are naturally ill-suited for running tech cards or individual high-value late game cards, as they may end up being discarded before they can be used.

Yet, Blizzard has repeatedly introduced cards that are at their best in slower decks, such as the Warlock Quest, Lakkari Sacrifice. So far, no one has been able to make the quest work, even though renewed attempts have been made over the past two years as more and more discard cards enter the game. The new cards are increasingly focused on enabling discard mechanic for slower decks either through semi-targeted discard (Shriek, Reckless Diretroll), mitigating the discard effect (Clutchmother Zavas, High Priestess Jeklik), or returning discarded key cards back to the hand (Soulwarden).

So far, slower discard decks have not become a thing. Despite a number of mitigation tools, there simply are not enough of them to reliably counter the damage done by randomly discarding cards – and if there were, the natural tendency of discard to favor faster archetypes means that we would more likely see a resurgence of Discard Zoo than the birth of Control Discard Warlock.

Simply getting lots of support cards does not make a deck, if those support cards do not work together. Discard Warlock has gone through many different phases and the general discard theme does not form one coherent deck but instead bits and pieces of various ideas. This does not mean that players could not put together something coherent by picking and choosing just the right pieces. It does mean that while the support seems comprehensive, it is not, because it is spread out over several ideas.

This is another key deck-building takeaway: coherence. All parts of the deck should work together, and if a deck incorporates multiple win conditions, they should be synergistic. Slow Discard Warlock decks suffer from anti-synergy between important cards and the discard mechanic: in an ideal discard deck, all cards are of equal value and replaceable so that it does not matter which ones you end up discarding as long as you can keep drawing new cards to replace them. The only Discard Warlock decks that reached mainstream success followed this guideline as closely as possible, whereas all others have failed.

One card from being good?

I am sure Kingsbane Rogue and APM Priest are not the only archetypes that needed just a little nudge to become good. How about Control Paladin with High Priest Thekal finally allowing it to heal to its heart’s content after Crystallizer paved the way? How about Captain Hooktusk bringing back Tempo Rogue (OK, with some help from Ticket Scalper)?

It’s too early to say yet what the final meta will look like. However, even when a deck uses only one or two cards from a new expansion, those cards may be crucial to the deck and turn it from zero to hero.

One of my pet projects is to build a Midrange Dragon Priest deck in every expansion, and Rastakhan’s Rumble kindly provided the archetype some removal tools with Dragonmaw Scorcher and Crowd Roaster. Just a couple of new pieces weaved into an existing deck can make it look and feel brand new.

What about you? Do you have any sweet homebrews or old favorites that became viable in Rastakhan’s Rumble? Let me know of them in the comments!