The new patch is going live on April 26, featuring changes to the two most popular Standard decks and two adjustments to Wild. Not every strong strategy got immediately nerfed, though. Demon Hunter remains untouched, but the devs are looking to keep an eye on it.
Ramp Druid takes a hit
It seemed like it was only just a matter of time until Kazakusan was going to get some sort of an adjustment: the card served as a solo win condition in a wide variety of strategies, where decks that ran no other minions (or just a few of them) got to consistently trigger its Battlecry early on, generating an overwhelming set of Treasures to take down an opponent.
Druids were also taken down a notch by a change to Miracle Growth, which saw its mana cost increase by one. Gallon noted that the developers also considered changing Druid’s survival toolkit, but they feared it would lead to a very polarized metagame, so they made these adjustments instead.
Piracy is a difficult business
Pirate Warriors were also taken down a peg: the Questline will now require yet another Pirate to complete, meaning now you will have to play three of them for each portion before you can get to Cap’n Rokara and The Juggernaut payoff. Though stats sites have shown that the deck’s power level greatly drops off at higher levels of play, it remained a menace in the lower-ranked brackets, which has prompted yet another nerf to the card.
The other card to get nerfed in Standard is Switcheroo: from now on, the card will only swap Health on the minions drawn instead of all their stats and mana costs, meaning you will no longer be able to get two 3-mana 12/12 Rush minions with Twin-Fin Fin Twin and Deathwing.
Notably, the emerging Aggro Demon Hunter archetype remains untouched for now, but the developers are actively monitoring it and it could get adjusted in a patch later down the line depending on how the new metagame shakes out.
Where the wild things are: the eternal formal also gets a few changes
The patch also marks one of the rare occasions where the developers make changes specifically with Wild in mind.
Like Stealer of Souls, Switcheroo also got banned outright, as the combo of Stonetusk Boar and The Darkness enabled monstrous 1-mana 20/20 Charge minions to emerge early on in the games. This is now no longer possible. Druid’s critical mass of 0-mana spells also led to incredible gameplay scenarios with the unnerfed Kael’thas, with this clip below showing a turn two lethal play.
Once the patch goes live, the card will once again read ‘Every third spell you cast each turn costs (1).’
