On December 22, 2017, when SpaceX launched its Falcon 9 test rocket and lit up the skies of Los Angeles with a glowing orb of smoke, a not-insignificant number of Southern Californians began to believe the aliens had finally come to murder us all.
I was there for that, and I can say with confidence that my vexation in that moment didn’t even approach what I felt when I first laid eyes on the latest Hearthstone reveal.
This new card from Hearthstone’s upcoming The Boomsday Project expansion is a Druid card so perverse and so powerful that I’m still trying to process what the catch might be.
Here it is. Juicy Psychmelon. I honestly don’t even know what it has to do with the World of Warcraft universe. The art looks like something you’d find in the poster rack at a Spencer’s Gifts, or a hallucination that the cast of Super Mario Bros. 2 might have seen after a dose of off-brand LSD.
And yet, holy hell, this card is so strong. Drawing four cards with a single card used to be a hard cap: the Rogue card called Sprint, from Hearthstone’s classic set, let you do it for 7 mana. Then Ultimate Infestation dropped, a 10-mana spell that lets you draw 5 cards (as well as deal 5 damage, gain 5 armour, and summon a 5/5 minion).
At 10 mana, Ultimate Infestation was a big investment that requires you to give up your entire turn to play a single card—and even with that caveat, Ultimate Infestation has been regarded as one of the most powerful Hearthstone cards ever created.
Now here comes this Barney the Dinosaur-looking melon that draws you almost as many cards as Ultimate Infestation for less than half the mana. Not only that, but you get to draw specific cards depending on how you’ve built your deck.
To speak in the card game vernacular, it’s a cheaper Sprint that tutors.
In Hearthstone’s Wild mode, where you can use cards from every expansion that’s ever been released, Druid is already one of the strongest classes thanks to a combo that relies on a very specific mix of 7-, 8-, 9-, and 10-mana minions.
The fact that Druids can now draw this entire combo for 4 mana means that Wild players will face one of the game’s strongest combos on a much more consistent basis.
Even in Standard mode, Psychmelon is still a force to be reckoned with. Even though Druids currently lack access to powerful 7- and 10-mana minions in Standard, it’s possible that either Blizzard will release cards to fill that void, or players will simply start running mediocre minions just to draw them with the Psychmelon.
It’s not that far-fetched, actually, considering that some streamers like Thijs are already running just-OK 10-mana cards like Tyrantus in their Druid decks.
When Juicy Psychmelon first dropped a few days ago, the /r/hearthstone subreddit erupted in rage over the card’s power level, which serves to boost a Druid class that’s already considered the most powerful in the game. Indeed, up until this point, it comes across as one of the strongest Hearthstone cards I’ve ever seen.
But compared to a lot of the other cards that have already dropped from The Boomsday Project, the power level of Psychmelon looks to be about on par with the rest of being shown, which I think says more about this expansion than about the Juicy Psychmelon itself.
My only hope is that Hearthstone becomes equally broken for all classes across the board, and not just Druid.
Comments
4 responses to “Freaky New Hearthstone Card Is One Of The Strongest I’ve Ever Seen”
When are people going to realise that the Hearthstone design and balance team are completely crap at their jobs, and that Hearthstone basically sucks? It’s why I quit the game, despite the amount of money and time I’d already wasted on it- I wasn’t going to let the Gambler’s Fallacy make me waste any more.
“When are people going to realise that my opinion is the right opinion” is not an especially persuasive argument. For example, my equally persuasive opinion is that Hearthstone doesn’t suck.
It might not fit in with ramp druid and it might be too slow anyway.
The intentions are very clear there. You can play at turn 4 but you go behind quite significantly due to a full wasted turn 4 to get guaranteed on curve play at 7,8,9, 10. You’re paying 4 mana to essentially “draw well” which might be far too slow at the start.
After turn 10, you’re drawing 4 cards that you cannot play that turn – nor can you play any 2 of on any turn, so the benefit is not a huge dump or anything.
It’s not as if you’re playing a druid that has extra power – the druid could have basically drew those cards legitimately.
It’s a smart card and it might show strong power in some decks but I think this idea that blizzard often make too high powered cards is bs
Yeah. This card doesn’t ring as especially powerful to me. Aside from clogging your hand with one-a-turn cards, it gives away enormous intel to your opponent on what’s coming.