I’m certain this is a known bug given the nature of the card but it’s not listed so I’ll write this anyway. Archdruid of Thorns regularly causes ties in scenarios where you’ve already won, or would win if the card finished resolving.
The reddit post linked below contains an example, and someone in the comments claims it’s because Archdruid caused 34 cards to be drawn in a single action. Not sure if that’s true, but regardless the ties are an issue.
https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/s/GsNCChvFdU
Onto the real reason I wrote this. As a very long time player (Whispers), I do want to say that I hope you guys don’t kill Archdruid. Sorry in advance for the long post, but I promise I write it in good faith and with a lot of respect for the team and how complicated of a problem Archdruid is.
I’m sure it’s a card you’re looking at very closely right now, and it will absolutely need fixes and changes given how it works. I’m sure it’s causing all sorts of unintended behavior, and I’ve seen some reports that it’s causing turn skips. If that’s true it needs to be fixed, though I haven’t seen any videos of it and I’ve never seen it happen even in games with incredibly long animation chains. FWIW, I was around in the OG shudderwock days so I’ve got a good frame of reference for what a truly long chain looks like.
I also recognize that the way it interacts with KJ is incredibly unintuitive for newer players, though personally I think this is more of an issue with how KJ’s effect is communicated. Players are told the portal is infinite and it isn’t. That’s for many good reasons, but it’s still already a source of unintuitive interactions with other cards. They’re less glaring than Archdruid and they’re mostly confined to Wild, but it’s still true.
I get that card text space is limited, but if hovering over the portal instead said something like “You have an endlessly refilling portal of 30 demons” it would make this interaction and a few others much more clear. The card text itself could also say “endlessly refilling portal of demons”. Pair that with a small animation indicating the refill and it would make KJ’s functionality much more clear and intuitive.
Personally, I’d be really sad if you fixed the issue by making it impossible to mill through KJ. It would be yet another interesting late-game option rendered irrelevant by his presence. I love KJ, but much like Boomboss he severely limits the types of late-game decks that can exist.
Archdruid is a weird card. Archdruid is a card that breaks things. Archdruid causes long animations that frustrate people. I get that. But the deck itself is probably the most interesting I’ve seen since I started playing around the start of Whispers.
It’s incredibly difficult to pilot and the combo itself is flexible and modular in a way that’s so fun to master. There’s so many ways to play it out, so many decisions to make about what pieces to throw away and which to keep in different matchups. Something like 10 of the cards in the list can in some way be a part of your combo, but you only need 3-5 depending on the matchup.
In a weird way it reminds me of old school Freeze Mage, where you’d constantly have to make decisions about how many “combo” pieces you can afford to use to survive or free up hand space.
When Shudderwock animations caused turn skips you didn’t kill the card, you fixed the problem. Please do the same with Archdruid’s issues if it’s at all possible, though I understand it might not be. He’s a weird card.
Thanks for reading. Here are two other small issues I’ve noticed with Archdruid to close it out. I play on a Pixel 7 on the latest version of Android:
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An Archdruid who has copied itself more than a few times will take a very long time to attack, upwards of 10 seconds, even if it’s the first one played and thus no animations are playing. Each Archdruid afterwards will take a similar amount of time, though weirdly it feels like it’s usually a bit less even though animations are going. I haven’t timed it, but I can tell you that going as fast as possible I can consistently play and swing with exactly three Archdruids per turn before the rope burns out.
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This may have been resolved by the resolution order timestamp fix, but I haven’t been able to test it so I’ll mention it just in case. Archdruid’s resolution of deathrattles within ONE instance of copying appears to be random, or maybe flipped? Not 100% sure sorry, this basically always happens at a high APM part of the game, but it’s definitely not in line with timestamp order. For example: Say I kill Amalgam, play the murloc, kill it, and then play Archdruid all in one turn. When Archdruid dies the deathrattles will not occur in the expected order (Amalgam, then Murloc).