Today we will be rolling out a small server-side hotfix patch with a couple bans and a couple bug fixes:
[Hearthstone] Splish-Splash Whelp is banned in Standard. o Dev Comment: Since our last balance patch, Druid has emerged as a warping force in the meta, and both a power and play experience outlier. We’re banning Splish-Splash Whelp as one of the class’s strongest cards for accelerating them to their early power plays. This is a temporary emergency action that we’re taking until we’re able to re-evaluate and adjust in our next planned balance pass (after the launch of Perils in Paradise). Any cards that are weakened at that time will get our usual dust refund treatment.
[Twist] Thorim, Stormlord has been temporarily removed due to a bug. He is expected to be returned to the Hero Pool with Patch 30.0.
[Twist] Fixed a bug where some Heroes sometimes had the wrong Health.
[Battlegrounds] Fixed a bug that would sometimes cause crashes.
They still can be discovered so need another quick fix if you really want this banned… but should ban Doomkin instead in my opinion. (Cactus Construct for example)
Well, what can I say… The supposedly ‘brilliant’ plan to ‘fix’ or at least spice up the abhorrent meta didn’t work in the end, did it? Who would have thought… Thus these emergency measures, I suppose? Good, good… Now, if you’d also ‘fix’ those, ahem, anomalies, Standard might be worth a try again, if you ask me.
It’s disputable whether banning the card in question is a good decision, as this article [1] argues, or it’d be better to address the root of the problem, which’d be Doomkin, if you ask me, but I guess it’d do for now as a ‘temporary emergency action’.
It’s not a spell, so ‘played’ would be a better word than ‘cast’. But apart from that, it wasn’t a bad card at all in Warlock when that Wheel was a thing: it saw play and made a big impact in a right situation.
Oh, and one more thing, to point out the flaw in your logic: just because Warlocks didn’t run the Virus Module of Zilliax, for example, especially the old one with stealth, doesn’t mean that it wasn’t problematic.