Hearthstone’s Starving Buzzard Nerf Could Be Bad News for the Game

Hardcore Gamer: A few weeks ago Hearthstone had a problem. With the release of new cards in curse of Naxxramas, the Hunter class had gone from being ignored by most players to making up 70% of the ranked ladder. Mad Scientist made the class’s powerful secrets viable, Haunted Creeper’s beast tag gave the powerful card amazing synergy with key Hunter cards, and Loatheb helped the once-fragile rush deck to stabilize its board presence. To make matters worse, many of the only cards that could counter these strengths were hunter-exclusive. The deck was inarguably overpowered and in need of a nerf, but Blizzard may have taken things too far with their response.

[Jdoki]

What a crock.

Balance and adjusting to the new Meta are what high level Hearthstone, and any digital card game is all about.

For the vast majority of players this isn't even an issue.

And the format of most Hearthstone Tournaments require multiple decks from each competitor to be used. So I have no doubt there will be a lot of similar decks out there - just as we see in every tournament.

[g-0ff]

that's not even remotely what the article is about.

Adjusting to new metas is an important skill in any card game. Nobody's debating that, and nobody's debating that Hunter needed to be nerfed for the sake of balance.

But taking a good card and making it terrible is a bad way to balance the game. It's effectively the same as banning the card entirely, when redesigning it could make it playable without being overpowered. Giving it a worse stat-line than auctioneer and a worse everything than cult master when its effect is more situational than either is silly.