The 7 manna 4/4 that summons copies of adjacent minions doesn’t see play. This seems worse all around, unless your copying Leroy’s. Oh, wait.

Can something be said about rush as a keyword? Charge usually comes with heavy downside and isn’t intended as removal (I know, leeeeeroy). But rush cards are essentially removal spells with the upside that they work on an empty board. For years, spells were usually reactive whilst minions were usually proactive. Why change that?

Flanking strike? No problem. Restless mummy? Make a spell that reads “deal 3 damage to enemy minions, twice”.

Another few more points to be made about highlander:

When building these decks, people often just throw together many of HS’s op cards and make it work. Legendaries are one of anyways, so why not? For example, siamet and zilliax are often added even if they don’t synergize with any other cards in the deck. A deck shouldn’t need “fillers”.

It’s also more complicated to play to your own outs. i.e. if you have two swipes in your deck, the right play may be spreading plague into branching paths for double attack when fighting against quest rouge’s 4/4s. (Yes, this is a reference).

Perhaps one exception can be highlander secret hunter, because it already requires 20+ unique core cards and many of its cards have anti-synergy as duplicates.

Mage is also not so bad, since her class identity is RNG fiesta, so why not make it more so :p.

I’d disagree with both sides. This article is about poor mechanical designs, not broken mechanics. Having an entire deck built around repeatedly generating specific minions is a unique design that makes sense. Cheating out undercosted minions is actually found in nearly every class. Also, barnes is neutral.

The cost of these “cheating” cards may need adjustment to make them not too op, but that doesn’t mean there is a flaw in design.