There’s no need to apologize man. If someone is just looking at winrate stats it doesn’t give off the full extent of what’s really happening.
So here’s the funny thing…I just told a friend the other day that the Snake didn’t surprise me because they seem to always push Warlock as a griefing class. And as a WoW player who’s 2nd main was a Warlock Gnome named Fizzlepuff, I have to agree. If you think about it, it’s what Warlocks do. They are diabolical. It’s not just recent expansions…it’s been this way for awhile.
Think about it. Some of the worst player interaction cards in history have been Warlock ones.
Tickatus and the entire idea of burning your opponent’s library. This has been the case with deck burning curses. This has been the case with the hand discarding hound.
Then there’s curses themselves.
In the past we had Rin destroying your opponent’s ENTIRE deck.
The new Rin designed to destroy more cards in deck and hand.
Immolate destroying cards in hand.
Demon Seed Quest completely griefing your opponent with miserable game play so much it had to be nerfed over and over and now sits as one of the most annoying decks to go against in Wild.
In early HS history you had a card that could literally make your hero immune completely.
This Snake stealing health makes so much sense because all of Warlock’s existence is about being diabolical and doing things to the opponent no other class does.
Griefing is part of the class identity in my opinion. If you like playing Warlock, I think that’s something you have to embrace. I know I do when I play Warlock in HS as its one of my top 3 most played classes. I know I did in WoW. Warlock was easily the most annoying class in WoW, especially as a mage. Their Felbeast could literally solo the best geared Mage on the server while the Warlock player just sat by and afk’d.
If you play Warlock, you sort of have to embrace this. It’s what makes Warlock what it is. They get this special diabolical game plan that no one else gets.
At first I thought they should wait a week or so before nerfing this new deck. But, the biggest problem I see is that counters you think should be counters are not counters. If you ask people what the counter is, they will say Dirty Rat, Theotar, copy it and play it yourself to negate the effect, etc. But none of that is true. If Dirty Rat, Theotar and copying the snake were counters, then Control Priest would have some amazing win rate against it. It doesn’t. Snakelock completes rolls over that supposed counter.
So of the few decks that do counter it, most are hyper aggressive aggro decks that likely might get nerfed themselves. Any combo deck that only really has hyper aggro as the counter usually gets nerfed. And if they nerfed those aggro decks, this deck would even be more disgusting. In reality, there’s no real good counter to the deck. It needs to be slowed down a bit to allow for counterplay that should be counterplay. I’m interested to see what direction they decide to go. I’d still make it at end of turn. That way, you at least get some chance to counter the minion itself by killing it.