How would you buff Apothecary Helbrim?

Multiplayer Discussion
1

Apothecary Helbrim is an oxymoron. It’s a slow value card designed for a fast aggressive deck. Poisons are designed to deal lots of damage in a short amount of time. A 4 mana 3/2 that adds cards to your hand is a slow card designed to give you an advantage in longer games.

Rogue doesn’t have many defensive tools, so long games increase the chance they develop a big board you can’t clear. What Rogue does best right now is draw cards, and deal damage. If you look at Poison Rogue on HSReplay, that’s exactly what they do.

Every card in the deck is either drawing cards, dealing damage, or being the only 3 defensive cards Rogue has. So, where would Helbrim fit in? Generating cards is almost like drawing cards, but he costs too much, and is too random.

Think of the great card draw Rogue has. 1 mana draw 4, 2 mana draw 2, cutting class possibly costing 0 drawing 2. Now, Helbrim is a 4 mana draw 2 random cards. That you can’t discount with preparation/blackwater cutlass. And you don’t get the 2nd card til a 3/2 dies.

To solve the random part, he could say “Battlecry: Discover a poison from your deck, add a copy to your hand. Deathrattle: Add another copy.” Now Helbrim can hand-pick a poison you want, and not RNG give you an unusable Nitroboost or your 3rd Silverleaf Poison with a full hand. You could argue this would be too consistent, since Poison Rogue only runs 3 poisons, but he’s still not that powerful. You could also draw him after you draw all your poisons, but if you’ve drawn all your poisons, you can’t be hurting for more that hard, right?

He would probably still need a mana buff to be competitive, but that’s kinda obvious. It’s hard to discuss mana cost buffs, because you just go “I want weak card cheaper,” and people go “Yeah,” or “Nah.” Not much of a discussion, eh?

So, how would you buff Helbrim? Would he be playable with his current effect, but at 3 mana? Would he find play at 4 mana if you can choose the poison? Do you think he’d need both buffs, or would he become too powerful? Or do you disagree with buffing him at all?

2

The only rogue interested in poisons already has enough of them to setup lethal turn 8 and doesnt need it. The only weapon to put poisons on is the shank and poison rogues have better things to do than spend mana on this thing.

1 Like
3

I think the only real buff can be reduced stats and reduced mana. Right?

4

i think he had to just apply the poisons instantly to the weapon without adding further cost so you get some tempo in exchange for the RNG.

Because poison rogues do always want more tempo, they don´t care about value. It´s just a total failure on the designers side, apparently not understanding Rogue at all.

4 Likes
5

Could just lower his mana cost and make him a good tempo play 4 mana 3/2 is kind of godawful even if he is a +2. You can’t make the change you suggest then he stops working with deathrattle stuff, and I think he has potential there.

Could even just up his stats. He’s just such bad tempo, and the poisons are too low value to be worth it. The pool is also pretty erratic.

6

maybe doesn’t need a buff right now? all the draw options you name are rotating in a couple months that might open up space for helbrim. if not then maybe a buff would be in order.

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I feel like Poison Rogue would have to become a completely different deck after rotation for Helbrim’s deathrattle tag to be relevant. But, Poison Rogue as it is now doesn’t exist after rotation anyways, with all the card draw and Cloak of Shadows rotating.

Blizzard would need to push really hard for Deathrattles to make sense, like how an all-spell Mage deck wouldn’t have made sense until 2 mana Incanter’s Flow said “Draw this card and you win the game.”

At least the poison pool gets better with rotation, since Nitroboost Poison goes away.

8

In a tempo rogue deck, the poisons are all pretty good. And the Deathrattle stuff isn’t really deck-specific. The whole point of it is that it doesn’t require significant deck investment because one of the cards is a strong tutor.

The deathrattles are just generally too slow for what that type of deck wants. The tutor itself is too expensive.

9

Like when they gave the most tempo relient class with no aoe’s, no heals or class taunts the worst tempo jade cards and also only 2 cause shadowrager was more important…

And that they though 9 mana valeera the hollow would be gamebreakign but thought nothing of anduin + raza in standard or guldan when they knew what was coming in kobolds and catatombs…

10

I would make it similar to palm reading, actually.

Discover a poison. Reduce the cost of poisons in your hand by 1.