Lol, actually I didn't contradict myself. I said what they're getting is a sign that they can potentially rotate Ice Block in the future, but they're not there yet--I've been playing a ton of Control Mage this week and it wouldn't get by without Blocks, even with a really heavy focus on removal and board control. But Mage is getting close to not needing it, it's just that they'd have to maintain how Mage can stay alive with their minimal available healing throughout rotation cycles (imagine post-rotation after DK, Artificer, and Block are all gone). And having paid attention to card game design during the last few years, I can tell they're trying to ween away from not only Ice Block in Control Mage, but Control Mage entirely (as the main archetype of the class), trying to get Mage back to playing Tempo, like old Mechs. People build decks based off what they know, it takes a while for people to pick up on card combos that are blatantly there--Patron Warrior, for example, took MONTHS before someone figured out that the deck could even exist, let alone be really good. Blizzard wants people to stop thinking of Mage as a Control-oriented class before they ban Ice Block, and hell, I'd MUCH rather them rotate it than nerf it to oblivion.
Speaking of which, I think I'm going to start a (new) petition to "unban" Warsong Commander and rotate it to Wild. Their nerfs to the standard cards really do not effect Wild in the slightest, and yet there's super problematic cards already ruining Wild and have been fucking it over for months. They seriously need to fix Barnes and Naga Sea Witch, and I personally think it's time to buff old cards that were nerfed into memes.
- Warsong Commander should give things charge like it used to, not buff Charge minions (aka doing nothing).
- Blade Flurry should have definitely cost more than 2 (4-6 is right), but it damaging heroes was how Maly Rogue existed. Newer versions just don't work as well as the old school version, and the deck has potential in Wild to be a Tier 2-1 deck without being oppressive now that it has Kingsbane.
- Nat Pagle was nerfed waaaay back in like beta or alpha, but I think it was wrongly. I guess they wanted to intentionally have BAD legendaries, because he used to have a 50% chance to draw a card at the end of your turn instead of the start. I guess they didn't want a 2-mana 0/4 Mana Tide Totem for all classes that only functions 1/2 of the time, but I think it's totally fine.
- Molten Giant is definitely a problem but only through Naga Sea Witch. In other decks, it's unplayable, but unfairly so. Molten Giant should have been nerfed to cost at most 22, but I don't think 20 was wrong. Handlock was a favorite of people, Renolock kind of changed the game but Handlock really was a different experience, and even nowadays you wouldn't put a Molten in Renolock because it's just that unplayable. Playing giants and drakes into Arguses and Sunfurys just isn't good anymore, and it's a shame, because I think old Handlock could be a reasonable way to beat Naga + Giants.
- Keeper of the Grove should get its 2 lost health back. They based the nerf purely off of how much the card was being played, but I guess they ignored how Mages always run Arcane Intellect and Rogues almost always run Backstabs, Saps, AND Eviscerates (pre-Keleseth). I'd love old Keeper so much in Wild because Druid needs something they can invest to take out 2-3 enemy aggro creatures. There's a deck near and dear to me called Infinity Druid, which runs a mix of Taunts, Deathrattles, and Mill (Deathlords, Sludge Belchers, Astral Tigers, Malorne, N'Zoth, Hadronox, Naturalize, Coldlights, The Darkness, etc.), and it would probably succeed more with just one 2/4 Keeper that can help stem the tides after a Deathlord and before a Sludge Belcher.
- Dreadsteed was a really fun card and they nerfed it in order to add a common card that saw no constructed play. Deathspeaker should instead say "Battlecry: Give a friendly minion Immune until this dies." which wouldn't make Knife Juggler + Defile + Dread + Death that terrible. Terrible, terrible move on Blizzards part, no idea what they were thinking there.
I don't see Hearthstone holding up well post-rotation, but it all depends on the impact of the next set. It's a problem though that they print sets with individual purpose--in other words, I'll give an example. Magic the Gathering did things in pairs for a long time, up until the last set, where 2-3 sets were part of a "block" where the second and third sets of the block were continuations of the same story and world as the first set of the block, and often some stories and game concepts carried over from one block to another. This meant that they could reinforce archetypes that weren't as strong as they hoped them to be or prevent strong archetypes from breaking the meta more so, by making tiny tweaks to the 2nd/3rd sets before release. I think the biggest place something like this was ever needed in Hearthstone was Whispers of the Old Gods. That set was basically how they parallel to the Battle for Zendikar block (2015) and the Shadows over Innistrad block (2016), which both had to do with these creatures called the Eldrazi, which are like a mix between Lovecraftian old ones and the Crystalline Entity from Star Trek. They were basically the Old Gods of Hearthstone--they were big, they did a ton, but they were done differently. There were three Eldrazi Titans, and each were printed as two different variants over the course of the game, with each version of a Titan doing something different but thematically the same, giving them "character" despite not really having any. Anyway, these cards are still playable in Modern (the Wild format of MTG), but you don't see the Old Gods as much as you used to. Sure, Y'Shaarj was played more than ever with Big Priest coming around, and N'Zoth is always playable in Deathrattle-heavy decks, and Yogg-Saron was playable for quite some time before he was nerfed pretty considerably, but the one I'm specifically thinking of is C'Thun. When WotOG came out, C'Thun decks were BIG. Midrange C'Thun Druid was fairly popular, C'Thun Tempo Mage saw a little play, C'Thun Control Warrior was a popular and strong archetype, and even C'Thun Rogue popped up after a little while and was pretty decent. But none of these decks are played, at all, in Standard or Wild. This is because C'Thun decks saw 0 support and hadn't had a ton of options available to begin with. Brann was a staple in a lot of C'Thun decks, but the problem with Wild is that it's not balanced. Because C'Thun had no further support given after WotOG, it's extremely hard to build a Wild C'Thun deck that both techs against the meta-game, stays alive, and pulls off big C'Thuns, and between those things, you're likely not going to be doing any of them as much as you're going to need to. N'Zoth will always get support in Deathrattle cards, Y'Shaarj will always get support in big creatures, and Yogg-Saron will always get support in spells (even though he's not the miracle god he once was). But C'Thun will likely never get support that helps it dramatically. MTG's Modern format has something like 35 cards that are banned, which is actually a ton despite there being SO many more Magic cards ever printed than Hearthstone cards, and Modern is one of the game's favorite formats right now, with a lot of people saying it's at its golden age now, because you can play pretty much anything and have reasonable success with it, and that's to thank a healthy card pool and a smart ban list. But in Hearthstone, Wild has even less viable decks than Standard, it seems. There's clearly a problem with that and Blizzard needs to act fast with a major rotation coming that'll send a lot of people who used to spend a ton on the game and have spent less and less the passed few expansions, like myself, to Wild, or they're going to lose a significant portion of the playerbase who doesn't like where the game is at right now.
tl;dr: uhhhhhhh hearthstone players are introvert spergs and magic players are extrovert gods lololololol
