I’ll be honest, I sometimes get quite salty when I lose games. It’s especially bad when you lose to a cheese strategy or because of the opponent abusing game mechanics. I can accept losing a valiant battle to the death, but it’s hard to accept losing to that. It’s perhaps worse when you care about the game and don’t appreciate people exploiting your favourite past time. Saying that, have you been so annoyed by someone exploiting game mechanics that you bought an ad to get the developer’s attention? Because that’s exactly what this dedicated Hearthstone player did.
In Hearthstone, players take turns throwing out cards that are spells or minions, which each card costing a certain amount of mana. At the start of the game each player only has one mana, and has one more for every turn to a maximum of 10. You can probably see from this that you’d expect low mana cost cards during early game, and big battles of powerful high mana cost cards by end game.
For purposes of this article, I’m going to ignore spells for a bit, and just talk about minions. Some of these minions have special effects. For example, the card Fungal Enchanter restores two HP to all friendly characters deployed. Some cards can also change mana costs based upon game conditions. For example, the card Wing Blast deals four damage to an enemy minion, and costs four mana to deploy. However, if a minion had already died in the same turn, it costs just one mana.
Now Reddit user and dedicated Hearthstone player JamieFTW had enough of dealing with people abusing the Naga Sea Witch card. See, the Naga Sea Witch’s special effect is that, until it dies, all other cards in your hand cost five mana to deploy. Normally, people don’t really play it early game, as that means your early game cards of one to four mana all cost five to use now.
Here’s the triggering part: giants. Giants are minions that usually cost 10-12 mana. They are also very powerful for a minion, with 8 DMG and 8 HP. However, they cost less mana to use based on certain game conditions. So with Naga Sea Witch lowering their initial cost to five mana followed by more reductions based upon game conditions, you get the ridiculous situation of giants costing zero or almost zero mana by turn four or five (the earliest turn possible to deploy Naga Sea Witch). At the time where players are just about to stop using early game cards, you end up facing against mostly end game cards, such as below:
Let me quickly explain what’s happening here. It’s turn five, and JamieFTW’s opponent puts out Naga Sea Witch. This means all mana costs for his opponent is now five. He also had been hoarding giants in his hand. Giants, as mentioned earlier, usually cost 10+ mana, but are now five. Despite having zero mana left, his opponent manages to deploy four giants by turn five! Each giant’s mana cost had been reduced to zero, due to game conditions altering their mana cost. For example, the leftmost giant, Sea Giant, normally costs 10 mana, minus one for every minion already deployed and still alive. With his initial cost only five mana thanks to Naga Sea Witch, he cost zero to put out! You can probably see why Naga Sea Witch is pretty gamebreaking and frustrating to come up against.
What JamieFTW, tired of people abusing Naga Sea Witch, did next is incredible. He buys an ad on Reddit, targeted at those subscribed to r/Hearthstone, to publicise the issue! Redditors, including me, began seeing this ad as we scrolled Reddit:
Like I said, JamieFTW is a dedicated Hearthstone fan. At time of writing, his ad has over 8,000 upvotes. “Naga Sea Witch is not fun. I will pay for this ad until it is nerfed. Blizzard: prove to the community that you care. It is time for Naga Sea Witch to either be reverted or changed. I am paying for ads on reddit to bring this to your attention. I could be spending that money on packs or having fun with my kids. Please fix this issue,” says JamieFTW in his ad.
He’s also giving us updates on how his ad is doing:
Needless to say, his ad generated a lot of discussion on the Naga Sea Witch exploit. Someone else asked lead Hearthstone balance designer August Ayala about it, who responds:
For NSW it's one of those strategies that is pretty cool to see once in awhile but when it's a core part of the meta it gets really in-fun to play against. Just like anything else, it takes some time to evaluate whether or not it's going to be a flavor of the week…..
— August Dean Ayala (@IksarHS) May 6, 2018
Or more long-term. At this point it feels like it's going to be a higher than we would like population unless a change happens, so we've been discussing how best to go forward with that if it becomes necessary.
— August Dean Ayala (@IksarHS) May 6, 2018
As far as standard goes, every day we are playing on the ladder and evaluating player data. Every expansion we prep balance changes for high population or unfun community decks/cards, but I think it's still too early to make an informed enough decision on a balance patch.
— August Dean Ayala (@IksarHS) May 6, 2018
Coincidentally, Blizzard are planning to patch Hearthstone after the next tournament. For the sake of the community and JamieFTW’s wallet, I do hope they tweak Naga Sea Witch. Furthermore, you can click here to visit r/Hearthstone on Reddit and join the discussion.
