One of the most persistently annoying mechanics in Hearthstone is Taunt. When a minion has Taunt, you have to attack it — you can’t attack other minions or the enemy Hero. Usually, Taunt minions are not that difficult to deal with, as they typically have weaker stats than their Taunt-less counterparts.
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.
No Hearthstone card is bad on its own. Sure, some underperform in certain decks, in certain metagames, in certain pools of available cards. But time has proven that sometimes, cards that we thought were bad are actually pretty good when things align the right way.
In Hearthstone, the art of deck building has always taken a relatively specific shape: You choose a win condition (e.g. kill your opponent with small minions as quickly as possible), then fill your deck with the most powerful card combos to help you accomplish that.
When Hearthstone glitches out, you can see it. Cards fall into crevices of the board they should never go. Graphical effects linger perversely. Turn timers run on with no apparent end.
The object of Hearthstone is to bring your opponent's life points down to zero, so it stands to reason that Ice Block, a Mage-specific card that makes that literally impossible to do for a whole turn, is pretty strong. So strong, in fact, that starting with the next expansion, Blizzard is moving the card out of the game's Standard mode of competitive play.
