This Hilariously Broken New Hearthstone Card Is Already Getting Nerfed

Hearthstone's new expansion, Showdown in the Badlands, was released this week and it only took Blizzard 24 hours to announce its first nerf. Azerite Serpent, a legendary Warlock card, is getting a patch soon, with details to follow on Friday. Blizzard game designer GallonHS announced the upcoming changes on Twitter/X, calling the map a "clear departure from feel," which sounds like a diplomatic way of saying the community is upset with this wildly unbalanced map.

Blizzard usually waits a few weeks for the meta to release before making balance changes to a newly released set, so Azerite Snake is definitely an exception to their usual approach. What makes the Azeri Serpent so broken, that it must weaken so quickly?

Where to start? At four mana, it's a very cheap card with a very high effect: stealing 10 life from your opponent and effectively passing it to yourself gives you 20 life. It's also worth noting that this is a permanent health reduction and not a life-stealing effect. So if your hero has 30 health left, you can't regenerate more than 20. It is also ignored by your armor.

Combine all of these factors with the sheer number of cards that can return cards to your hand or create copies of them, and the problem quickly escalates. Instead of an already significant one-time effect, Warlock players quickly began building decks with Azerite Serpent every game, dropping the max health to 20, then 10, then 0. And since you couldn't beat the new max health and it ignores armor, you have no choice.

Blizzard hasn't said what the solution will be, but it could be a cost or status adjustment, changing the life steal effect instead of permanent health reduction, taking armor into account, or somehow even introducing a special "no-bounce" mode. . Restore or copy the rule to cards.

While this is a very quick nerf, it's not the fastest nerf in Hearthstone history. That dubious honor goes to the Demon Hunter, the first new class to see multiple nerfs in a single day since the game's release.

Badlands Showdown has launched with a new unlock feature and a "progress set" that searches your collection and makes more sets available as more gaps are found in previous sets. At BlizzCon, the company also announced a new co-op mode called Duos, which will be added to Battlegrounds' auto-battle mode. Duo will be released in 2024.

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