For those of you that might not be in the loop, Blizzard has recently announced the One Night in Kharazan Hearthstone Adventure, an expansion that seemed to be a whole bunch of fun until the developers finally and sheepishly revealed the upcoming Priest cards. As it turns out, the Priest class which has been in an absolutely terrible state for many months now is not getting the cards it needs to finally stand on its own, but is instead getting a "dank meme" in the form of the Purify card.
Naturally, this announcement left the community outraged given that Hearthstone currently has a big issue where a few classes constantly have viable and interesting decks, while the others are mostly neglected until they get propped up by some absurdly broken cards and mechanics. This problem is even worse in arena where the Mage and Rogue classes dominate over all and where Priests have around 30% win rate, so I hope you can now understand why there is so much anger over Purify, one of the worst cards to ever grace Hearthstone, being added to the worst class in the game.
However, in a bit a shocking turn of events given that the Hearthstone team isn't really prone to giving straight up answers, Ben Brode came out and released a video discussing the Purify card, the team's thought process behind its design, and what exactly they plan to do next. Have a look:
Before anything else, allow me to just say that I deeply respect Brode for stepping into a boiling cauldron in order to deliver some less than ideal news. I especially like how the team is willing to admit their mistakes and completely remove Purify from arena. To do anything else would've been a complete death blow to Priest in arena given that Purify will constantly show up as its a common card, so this is most definitely a welcome change.
On the other hand, the team's reasoning behind most of these decisions is absolute and utter nonsense, especially when it comes to the "not every card has to be competitive as long as its fun" argument. Majordomo is not a good card, its actually a complete dumpster fire in terms of competitive viability, but it is an incredibly fun card that I've personally designed decks around because who doesn't like playing as Ragnaros the Firelord?
Purify on the other hand is not fun, its just terrible in every sense. Silencing your Ancient Watcher and turning it into a 2-card Yeti is not something I would ever design my deck around, especially since there is already a card that does this for 0 mana, thus giving me an "absolutely insane" turn 2 Yeti! The same applies to its ability to silence 1/1 minions Barnes summons in order to have a Deathwing on turn 6. Once again, why wait until turn 6 when your opponent will be able to actually kill your Deathwing when you can do the same thing on turn 4 by running the already existing silence card, which also works on your opponent's creatures!
As you can see, Purify is a bad card, but the worst thing about it is that it will forever remain a bad card. For whatever reason the Hearthstone team is unwilling to do any changes to their digital card game, even though the card everyone knows is absolutely terrible is yet to be released, and as such there is plenty of time to think up something... anything.
One Night in Kharazan will be arriving to Hearthstone on August 12th, and while Priest will most likely continue its reign as the 9th class, there is plenty of interesting new tools and tricks for other classes to enjoy, so in all honesty things are not that bad, just slightly disappointing.