If you’ve been enjoying some Highlander decks this expansion, then I have some amazing news for you. Zephrys the Great, which is definitely one of the most innovative cards in the history of Hearthstone, is getting updated in the upcoming patch. We already had one hotfix a few days after the expansion, which made it a little bit smarter (for example, it started recognizing Doomsayer‘s effect and offering you Silence to deal with it). But what we’ll see soon is even bigger.
Hearthstone Initial Game Designer, Chadd “Celestalon” Nervig was a guest at The Angry Chicken podcast, where he shared a lot of interesting information about what happens to the card in upcoming patch. You can hear it yourself in the video below (starts around 5:30), but here are the few most important points:
- He gets smarter about weapon removal in general. There were some situations in which he should offer you Acidic Swamp Ooze when you were at 2 mana and opponent had weapon, but it didn’t. It will also recognize that 0 attack weapons (such as Skull of the Man'ari in Wild) are also worth removing even though opponent can’t attack with those.
- A bunch more cards will get offered in the appropriate situation that we didn’t really see before. Those cards include Holy Fire, Avenging Wrath or Bloodsail Corsair.
- In general, we should see more different cards being offered (that weren’t offered before) when the time is right.
- There are NO plans to teach him more interactions with specific minion effects, though. Doomsayer was an exception. Teaching him more interaction manually would be a “slippery slope” (Celestalon most likely meant that once they start doing it, they should do it for most of the important effects, and there’s just too many of those).
If you want to learn more about the card, be sure to watch the entire interview with Celestalon about Zephrys, where he talks about the history behind card, a deeper look at how it works etc. It’s really interesting – for example, you might learn that compared to the usual card, which has 2-20, maybe up to 50 lines of code, Zephrys had a 1000 before it was even finished. For more, check out the video below!
In general I like that a card does what it says. Still at some level I dislike the whole card. It is so powerfull that many players will need to have it and more or less I need to think crafting it also.
Also even that I use Myra to get final death blow from my deck (and probably annoy them as much I annoy getting killed by Zephrys) getting that without need for luck and self chosen cards it just seems a bit unskilled way of play.
I agree with you that making neutral cards that are just good and required is not necessarily healthy for the game (maybe like the lich King or ziliax). But the bug difference is that most of the time, you need to build your deck around zephrys (minus decks like tip the scales that just use him to find lethal after self-milling).
However, I don’t think zephrys is simply a lucky win card. When compared with the new card vulpera scoundrel, if she gave you fireball lethal, that would be considered lucky and rng. When zephrys gives it to you, you might have to set your opponent to 6 health, or do something so that zephrys knows which card you want.
The big difference between random discover cards and zephrys is that zephrys will give you something specific and good if you help him out (such as clearing off some minions, or spending Mana so that he’ll give you cheaper cards), which makes him less about luck and more about skill
Yes, I know it’s not that simple one and you need to know how to use it. Still as long as you play highlander or know how else benefit from it, it makes deck building many ways easier and not so dependent current meta. Do I need weapon removal, no I have Zephrys. What I should use for finisher, Zephrys does the trick. Sure it’s one timer, but still gots your out of many situations that good players does not get in. And in even games winner might be the one who has it and losers need to craft it.
I just hope the designing team could be smarter and see what the real problem is with the meta…
What is the real problem with the meta
Umm a card called dr.boom lol?
I mean they just nerfed him…maybe the nerf won’t be enough, but we can at least give them some credit
Sure they increased the mana cost to 9 but it’s still gon be broken af and absolute no affection on midrange/control matchups. Control warrior is still gonna be the best deck in the game. Mage is one of the few classes that beats control warrior and they just have to wreck the class and clear the path for warrior, Although I do like the Conjurer’s calling nerf btw, with all the existing removals and value generation cards, boom gives you infinite removals and value on top of that, all control warrior games just become one single boring pattern with the existence of boom, you play stuff and they remove your board, and then they play boom, discover more removals and value, continue removing your board until one gets to fatigue. The card is oppressive and makes the meta toxic. I don’t understand why they don’t see it…
People complaining about the nerfs before they even came out. Never heard that before…
Then you probably don’t read enough comments lmao
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sarcasm
Nice
Maybe you can’t sense the time cause it’s text bruh. But I might just really have to break it down for you. I mean, if you go read some comments you will find everyone, literally everyone is complaining about the nerfs before they even came out, so if you’ve never heard of people complaining about nerfs before they even came out, then you probably don’t read any comments lmfao, and as an admin you’re not very good at your job apparently. And btw you probably wanna go follow some pro players like JAlexander or Rdu on twitter and go watch some analysis videos on the nerf, and you’ll probably find out I’m not the only one thinking this way.
I really cant understand how some people that a TWO MANA NERF on a card will be almost irrelevant!!! Even against control you will lose some value and tempo since you have not enough mana to hero power or do anything else other than shild slam. Also against warrior it will be a useless card most of the time since it will come too late (though warrior may still be good against aggro. But where i think warrior will hurt most is against midrange decks. At turn 5-7 they start putting too match pressure and quests are usually finished by that time. Playing dr 7 on curve was almost game over in these games. Now playing it on turn 9 and trying to come back on turn 10 may be toooooooo late. You may even hold it and still can’t play it because you may need to answer their board every time to stay alive.
Probably it will still be playable for control warrior but at least it won’t be that broken and warrior will start thinking mulligan it away.
Bruh I just don’t have the energy to type in the long ass text anymore. Go follow JAlexander on twitter and read his tweets, and go watch Zalae and Rdu’s YouTube videos on the nerf.