Mr. Bigglesworth -- Warlock (Hearthstone)

This post is part a series wherein I've been designing Hero cards for Battlegrounds heroes who lack direct representation in Hearthstone proper -- or did at the time of publishing.

The Finished Product

The Process

This one was a bit more of a stretch, and a much more difficult design overall. While Bigglesworth doesn't really have a class attached to him, Kel'Thuzad himself is pretty unapologetically a Mage. But, meh. Evil cat is fun.

The real difficulty came in trying to figure out something for Warlock which is actually worth replacing your Hero Power with! Life Tap is so absurdly good already that it wouldn't be out of place on one of the early Hero Cards, and I would even consider it stronger than many of them.

Warlock is also a class with heavy competition when it comes to Hero cards. They already four options, most of which compete for the generic "control" Hero card. That space is both well-trodden and, ultimately, extremely hard to iterate on. So I went in an entirely different direction. I was going to make an evil kitty. One who's tired of being the pet, and wants to make someone else serve it for a change.

While this design still has some generic appeal -- kill thing, gain 5 armor isn't horrible for 6 mana -- it's intended uses are either as a mirror breaker (I have 9 Astalors. Good luck :D) or a combo enabler. Note that the targeting condition does not include the word "enemy", so this can provide nine additional copies of one of your own minions, if you wanted to.

How is that useful? I'm not sure, but the cost is high enough that I suspect it wouldn't break anything. But holy hell would I be trying.

Final note is that this is intended to give you a new copy even if the minion runs into something like Objection! or Life Sentence. You just always have more copies of your pet...at least until you don't.

My Rating

8/10

I love this card so, so much, and would jam it immediately. The only issue with it is that I'm not sure that either use of it really passes the "do we want a metagame to be about this test".

Taken only at face value, this card just absolutely punts any resource-focused deck who intends to win by a non-parasitic minion win condition out of the game entirely. Maybe that's fine, especially since decks tend towards build-enabling Legendaries for win conditions these days, which this isn't very good against. 9 Romnaths, Galvangars, or whatever doesn't really do anything for you.

The worse side is that if the "make nine copies of my own card" was good, it would also be a painful metagame. This is largely offset by the cost of Bigglesworth himself, since it's not like you can just slam a Voidlord and this at the same time -- and if this makes even remotely playable in Wild I would consider that a win, not a loss. My biggest concern would be around some game-determinitive combo -- and that concern is very deep seated since the mere existence of this card would require the team to police all Warlock and neutral minions released into Standard for the duration of its stay. Maybe that's too much to ask for my lovely little kitty.

(And yes, this is my third most-played Battlegrounds hero, at time of writing.)