Do you think this card is two strong?

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Based on the various effects, I really don’t know how to feel. I don’t want to have a chain of events basically feel like they’re unending and the only thing I can do is concede or have the opponent disconnect.

This opponent disconnected so I won.

They will get four ball hogs from the two 5-drops. Each with lifesteal and deathrattle damage that applies lifesteal. So at 5 mana, that’s 11/9 of stats (and potentially 12 life gain) with guaranteed 6 damage via card effects.

With the 7-drop, they get two 5-drop and thus have another 4 Ball Hogs nested in the minions. Giving another 12-24 life gain + 12 guaranteed board damage.

Do they honestly need two spawns? There are certain cards that are not as powerful to get such as Didra. However, cards like Ball Hog and Arkanite Defense Core feel like terminal win conditions against certain archetypes.

I consider this as more of a midrange deck problem. Which is my most common play style. This opinion might be coming from a large bias. I assume formal control decks have answers to deal with these types of dynamics. And without two copies, this Demon Hunter archetype would not be viable against the true aggressive deck types.

This is after playing four DH in a row. Every one had weapon on 1, Ball Hog on 4 and 5-drop on 5-6. The final DH reminded me about the spell that also triggers more Ball Hog spawns or whatever.

I should just play that deck I think. Like the other four players before. Think I will hit a fifth in a row?

Pretty sure villain #5 was a robot Zerg/Exarch/egg hunter with Death Roll … they didn’t even concede when I roped them with my archon out as they had 2 hp… oddly enough they played a Nerubian Egg on turn 6 that they had since turn 3. So they decided to hold it? “Bot evidence“ I guess blizzard wanted me to feel better after playing against all those Demon Hunters? (This is Diamond 4)

Oh no… another Demon Hunter after that… but at least it was the ADC kind with 45 HP/Armor that gets the 40 damage OTK ship. I guess that is my fault for not playing Murmur Shaman. Please blizzard do not change Murmur Shaman. I am not going to play it, but it probably counters what I just experienced.

Thoughts?

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Which card are you talking about? You went straight from “is this card two strong?” to details without, you know, naming the card.

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Three strong i would say, even four

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I tried to include a picture or figure out how to do that. I’ve seen some people have gifs or pictures. Maybe You can only do that on PC?

I typed it all as I did and then left it as a draft. But then I played another three Demon Hunters in a row after that. Thus I came back to submit the post.

The cards are:

3-mana Ball Hog
5-mana Ravenous Felhunter
7-mana Ferocious Felbat

Each one of the minions (except Ball Hog) spawns two copies of a deathrattle. Ravenous spawns 2 Ball Hogs. Ferocious spawns two Felhunters that will spawn two Ball Hogs (i.e., 4 total Ball Hogs from 1 Felbat).

But I forgot about the 3-mana spell Return Policy that discovers a previously PLAYED deathrattle not a dead one and then triggers it. So you could get:

A: 1x Ferocious Felbat in hand, 2x Ravenous Felunters on board, and 2x Ball Hogs as deathrattle summons.

B: 1x Ravenous Felhunter in hand, and 2x Ball Hogs on board.

Clearly A is much stronger but either is very powerful for 3 mana and neither requires anything other than “playing” cards. So you get a card and play them in order to achieve an increasing combination of power.

A comparison might be that every played Chrono Boost summons every previous zealot. With Artanis also doing the same (1, 2, 3, and 4+ zealots). Since Ball Hogs have lifesteal and a damage effect, the zealots could still have something… imagine if every time you summoned a zealot it gained a bonus effect. So Artanis would summon 7 zealots that all received bonus effects (with or without charge).

But you cannot hex or silence this chain of effects from occurring. Once a single card is played, the power cascade is in effect. In terms of a midrange deck pilot, your villain will mostly heal back to full health. If you are not playing an OTK or combo, I don’t know how you can win. Even then the game is usually over once they have played the Ball Hog or Ravenous Felhunter (Protoss Rogue anyway, but I imagine it’s similar circumstances). You cannot trade into these minions. Their minions will heal them while also clearing your board and potentially dealing lethal damage to your health pool.

Specifically with Archons, once a Ball Hog is on the field I may not be able to form one. Since when I play the second Templar if it kills another or more Ball Hog(s) the deathrattle damage can kill the previously play Templar before they merge into an Archon.

Note this interaction isn’t applicable to stopping Colossus battlecry damage. Since in that case, even though there are two steps to the damage, it’s a single instance, even if the Colossus dies while executing its effect. Visually After you see the first beam, the Colossus can die to subsequent deathrattle damage. However, the second beam fires afterwards.

The Archon merging event will be interrupted by a damaging sequence. I think it’s fine to have damage interrupt a minion in that way, but it should be consistently applied.

There was a previous card (Blademaster Okani) that countered any minion played and prevented its battlecry. Explosive rune will do the same thing if the minion dies, the battlecry will not trigger. Yogg Saron will stop casting spells (I.e., it’s battlecry) if it kills itself.

This implies that if the Colossus dies before the second beam, then that damage does not continue and the battlecry stops.

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wrong, the second beam goes off, I have personally experienced this very scenerio, just last night actually, the colossus died but still fired the second beam

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Wrong. You did not read what I wrote. It was confusing to you—maybe.

Colossus does not follow the rules all the other cards do. Thank you for agreeing with me by argumentatively disagreeing with my stated assertions.

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There should only be allowed One Ball Hog per team. Things don’t work properly when there is more than one Kobe Bryant on a team.

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True… but let it be noted in history that Michael Jordan had been on the same team as Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman.

To the best of my knowledge, there was a lot of ball Hoggin’

Maybe have a mechanic where Ball Hogs merge at the end of turn into a Super Hog :joy:

Ah Lawd He Hoggin’

… The Super “Ball” Hog could remove the 3-mana version from the spawning pool, if none have since been played. However, a Super Hog dying would be resurrectable through the Ferocious Felbat. So you remove some of the mid game power and transfer it into an actual late game win condition: getting your hogs fully online. Once you play your hogs and they merge, you do not keep spawning small ones unless you have played more afterwards.

This is a similar type of idea to Nythendra instances. Where each stat level is its own instance of a minion: 1/1, 2/2, 3/3, etc… so when you resurrect Nythendra you could get any one of those possible power levels 1-7/1-7. Which generally makes that minion awful to revive. This is only referring to different ways to identify Ball Hogs and then resurrect them through controlling and constraining the spawning pool.

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I have to answer the Michael Jordan comment. Dennis Rodman was not a ball hog. They never ran plays for him. He only got the ball off of offensive rebounding. And one of the things that distinguishes a Jordan or a Kobe is that they know when to hog and when to share, unlike an Allen Iverson who undermined his team by only sharing the ball when he ran out of options and routinely put teammates in a bad position.

Back to your topic. You kind of dance around the reality that HS is supposed to be a bit of Rock, Paper and Scissors. Some decks are not supposed to beat other decks. That leads to overall parity. The current DH deathrattle deck is not dominating as much as the one that was based on Crystal at 4 mana. For some decks, it will be a misearable matchup but others are beating it routinely. That is the way of matchups.

Currently at HSGuru, a DH deck featuring Ball Hog shows up as the 20th strongest deck. Hardly a meta tyrant.

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