Will The Upcoming Minion Tribe Adjustments Affect The Meta?

Blizzard has just announced some changes that will be made to minion tribes – four minions that previously didn’t have any will gain it, while one will lose it. On top of that, one card art gets adjusted, but that’s irrelevant to gameplay. You can read more about the changes, including the official reasoning, here, or just see the quick rundown below:

• Molten Giant and Mountain Giant will be Elementals.
• Witchwood Piper will be a Demon.
• North Sea Kraken will be a Beast.
• Jungle Moonkin will no longer be a Beast.
• Witchwood Grizzly will get a new card art.

Before proceeding to the actual article, I have to say that I really like those changes. Consistency is one thing Hearthstone has been known to struggle with sometimes, and minion tribes were one of the worst offenders. It’s still not perfect, but these changes are a step in the right direction.

While these are clearly not big changes, adding a tribe to a minion, especially a minion that already sees some play, might actually make some decks stronger, thus affecting the meta. One great example is making Jade Spirit an Elemental late into the Journey to Un’Goro. The card’s popularity had spiked, mainly because Jade Elemental Shaman, a previously off-meta deck, became significantly more viable. We’ll have to wait a few days to see whether these changes mattered at all, but even if they don’t, more consistency is never a bad thing!

Mountain & Molten Giant

I want to talk about both of those changes together, because they are very similar – both affect a Giant and both add an Elemental tag. The main difference between these is format – Molten Giant’s change only affects the Wild format, while Mountain Giant is also relevant in Standard. Adding an Elemental tag makes a difference only if other Elemental synergies come into action, the tag makes no difference in a vacuum.

While we have some Neutral Elemental synergies, such as Servant of Kalimos or Blazecaller, the two main classes that play Elementals are Mage and Shaman. I don’t believe that the change will affect any other class, at least not right now. Theoretically, Even Warlock might now play Sandbinder in order to guarantee drawing the Mountain Giant, but that’s not a great idea. The deck already cycles a lot, it doesn’t need more draw, and playing a 4 mana 2/4 is a terrible move in this proactive deck (it wins by putting pressure, and spending Turn 4 putting a 2/4 body on the board is not a definition of pressure).

However, the change might be important in two classes I’ve already mentioned – Mage and Shaman. Shaman in particular doesn’t have an established Elemental deck right now, and I actually don’t think it would want to play the Giant anyway. On the other hand, the change is actually a buff to Elemental Mage. Lately, Kibler has popularized an Elemental Mage build running Mountain Giants. You can find the deck here. While Mountain Giants might not make much sense if you first look at it, the deck runs so many ways to gain card advantage that your hand is full or nearly full very often. 14 out of 30 cards generate other cards – sometimes as much as three (Greater Ruby Spellstone, Book of Specters). Giant being an Elemental is a real buff to the deck. It will no longer break Elemental chains, it will trigger Ruby Spellstone, and it will gain Lifesteal after playing Frost Lich Jaina (and 8 health gain is not something you can ignore).  Yes, this if an off-meta deck, and it won’t suddenly become Tier 1 material. It probably won’t even be competitively viable – I would imagine it will stay as a Tier 3 / 4 off-meta deck, just slightly stronger. But, it will definitely spike in popularity, at least for a few days. Which is great, even if it will only shake up the meta a little bit.

And now onto the Molten Giant, between unnerfing it with the recent Hall of Fame rotation (costing 20 mana again, down from 25) and adding a new tribe, the card has been buffed twice in a short period of time. While the first change was significantly more important, the Elemental tag might might be a nice upside too. Right now, the only deck I can think about is some kind of Giants Mage. While not meta decks, both Echo of Medivh Giants deck, and Open the Waygate version might run Frost Lich Jaina – and while it’s not a big difference, even if it will let you win one extra game in 100, that’s good enough.

Both of those changes might also matter in the future. It seems like Elementals is one of the tribes Blizzard keeps supporting, at least for now. Ever since Un’Goro, we’re getting some new Elementals or Elemental synergies each expansion. Even if not right now, those Giants having an extra tribe might make difference in some future decks. Funnily enough, if they ever decide to make an anti-Elemental tech card (such as Golakka Crawler for Pirates or Dragonslayer for Dragons), if that tech card becomes popular, that change will be a nerf. But since I can’t predict the future, right now it’s a clear buff.

Witchwood Piper

This one bothered me more than it should, to be honest. Witchwood Piper is a Satyr, and Satyrs are a race of Demons in the Warcraft universe. It just didn’t make sense that she wasn’t tagged as a Demon in Hearthstone. This change is probably more cosmetic than anything. Neutral Demons are irrelevant in 8 out of 9 classes – only Warlock has some ways to synergize with them. So, if anything, the change might be a small buff (or a nerf, later about that) to Warlock.

First of all, if you want to use this card in a Zoo-like deck running some Demon synergies, it gets affected by buffs such as Demonfire or Bloodfury Potion (Wild). That’s a buff. But it doesn’t make much sense to run it in a Zoo deck, it’s just too slow. It is also going to be revived by decks running Bloodreaver Gul'dan, which is generally a buff too – most of the decks struggles to fill the board with Gul’dan anyway, so that’s a 3/3 body as an extra. This is the only real buff for the card. Let’s say that you want to play it in RenoLock, the deck isn’t really saturated with Demons, and you often end up reviving only 2-3 Demons on Turn 10, so an extra 3/3 body wouldn’t hurt. But again, I don’t imagine RenoLock wanting to run this card.

On the other hand, it would be a nerf if you ever want to play Witchwood Piper in a deck, which uses ways to Recruit Demons or Summon them from your hand. Cards like Possessed Lackey, Skull of the Man'ari or Voidcaller definitely have better targets to pull than a 3/3 minion (not to mention that Witchwood Piper is mostly played for the Battlecry, which those effects ignore). Notably, those decks are also the ones in which this card would be a nerf to Bloodreaver Gul'dan, since they usually have their Demon pool filled to the limit with better options than a 3/3.

So as you can see, this change does actually matter IF you would ever want to run Witchwood Piper in Warlock. However, right now there is no Warlock deck that want to run this card. Notably, Warlock has natural card draw in form of their Hero Power and it rarely runs any extra forms of draw. That said, Witchwood Piper is a card that you MIGHT want to run eventually. Since it can be used to tutor some small minion from your deck, if you ever build a deck around some kind of small minion, like some sort of combo, playing it might make sense. But that’s a lot of “ifs”. In the current state of the game, the change makes no real difference.

North Sea Kraken

North Sea Kraken was one of my favorite cards from TGT. I liked it, because it was a great budget option for slower decks (e.g. when I was building decks for my casual friends with small collections, I put two copies of Kraken into every slower build) and for some reason, it was just satisfying to drop on the board. I actually played two copies in my Astral Communion Druid and they worked really fine.

Now, it was weird that they aren’t classified as Beast, but I didn’t think much about it. Right now, since they’ve rotated to Wild long ago, it doesn’t matter that much. The card was already mediocre in Standard, 3 years ago, and it is pretty much irrelevant in the current Wild. However, it might make difference in some very fringe cases. For example, if you’re a budget Wild player (yes, people like that do exist!), the buff to this card might make a difference. For example, you can use it in any Hunter deck running Beast synergies, but in Recruit Hunter in particular. If you’ve unpacked Kathrena Winterwisp, but you’re still missing a lot of big Beasts, such as Charged Devilsaurs or King Krush, North Sea Kraken might come to the rescue.

Alternatively, if you build some weir… interesting Ramp Beast Druid budget deck, then you got yourself a big target to potentially copy with Menagerie Warden (it never really worked in Standard, but nothing stops you from trying it in the other format)!

This is not a big change, but Kraken is actually a playable budget option if your collection is really small. So while it will have literally zero impact on the competitive scene, or even mid ranks, it might make a difference somewhere in the low ranks one day.

Jungle Moonkin

Most likely as relevant as the last two – which basically means that it might matter in very fringe cases/decks, but it won’t affect the meta at all. The card is questionable to begin with – while gaining +2 Spell Damage on a 4 mana minion is nice, giving the same amount to your opponent isn’t. You can get punished very easily by lots of decks. It was briefly used in Malygos Druid back in One Night in Karazhan, but only in some lists and mostly because the deck just NEEDED some sort of board clear, and Swipe alone didn’t cut it. Moonkin could often clear the board with 7+3 damage Swipe, and then it didn’t matter that much when it died (and even if your opponent played some burn on you, it was still better than taking lots of damage from the board).

Current Malygos Druid lists in Wild (because the card has rotated out a long time ago) don’t play Jungle Moonkin, and given that there are better options right now, I doubt they ever will. Even if for some reason they do, the deck runs no Beast synergy.

On the other hand, Druid decks that do want to run some kind of Beast synergies definitely do not want Jungle Moonkin. It’s a very reactive card for a spell-heavy deck, and Beast Druid builds are generally proactive and minion-heavy. So removing the Beast tag is likely completely irrelevant. While I COULD see some viable deck using this card in Wild (not very likely, but it might happen), I would be absolutely surprised if that deck would also care about the Beast tag.

More Changes Like That To Come?

It’s a great start, and I think that we might expect more tribe changes in the future, even if just for the sake of consistency. This is a very common complaint I’ve seen – “why X card is a Beast when Y, very similar card, is not?”. While some of those arguments make little sense, there are lots of interesting discussions I’ve seen tackling the topic, and some of them had a great point.

The most common one recently is “Can ghosts be Beasts?”, fueled after the release of Arfus. This is something they talk about in the blog post, actually. Despite Haunted Creeper being a Beast, the tokens it created (ghostly spiders) weren’t. It was mainly due to balance reasons, and I understand that. However, when Arfus got released, some people were asking why ghostly spiders aren’t tagged as Beasts, while ghostly good boy is. It seemed that Blizzard’s answer to the question was yes, since they’ve tagged Witchwood Grizzly and Ghostly Charger as Beasts too. However, it looks like they aren’t fully satisfied with that choice now, since they’re reworking card art of Witchwood Grizzly – it will now be an actual Beast, but “haunted”. And I do agree that changing art is much better in this case than changing the card – it has some great interactions with other cards, most notably Kathrena Winterwisp. However, they don’t seem to be changing Ghostly Charger or Arfus – will they get new art? Or maybe a tag change? In case of Arfus, removing Beast tribe would be relevant, as it’s a choice you commonly get when building a Beast as a Deathstalker Rexxar. It’s interesting to see what they will decide to do about it.

Other interesting case is the definition of Mechs when it comes to “Arcane Constructs”. Technically, cards like Zoobot or The Curator aren’t Mechs – they’re constructs fueled by Arcane magic. They aren’t mechanical, yet they’re classified as Mechs. What is even weirder is that Arcane Golem, which is basically the same construct as the other two, is not a Mech. Sure, it’s probably not relevant just like the Kraken or Moonkin changes, but there’s no harm in changing it anyway, one way or the other. In this case, I believe that those should not be classified as Mechs.

I think that consistency is necessary. Some minions having the right tribe, while others missing it (or vice versa, minions that should not have a tribe having it) just looks bad. For a card game as big as Hearthstone, a game in which they don’t have to worry about changing the card after initially printing it, since they can just patch it, having inconsistencies like that feels sloppy. Even if majority of the community does not care whether ghosts can be Beasts or not, there is a surprising amount of players who do. Which means that setting rules for this kind of stuff and sticking to them might make the game more clear and some players happy. And that’s great, no matter how you look at it.