Neptulon has been a Problem in Wild for 1 Year Today!

Multiplayer Discussion
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Today’s a very special day! On June 1, 2022, Blizzard released the Sunken City Mini-set continuing the trend of releasing a mini-set 10 cost minion that has do to an insane amount of stuff to justify the cost (Onyxia, Thaddius). Neptulon has never really seen much play in standard because the standard meta is way too fast and it’s a dead card for the first 9-10 turns. In wild, it’s a different story.
Big Priest has always been a problem in wild (Along with secret mage, wonder if the new mini-set tutor broke that even more!). The deck relies on getting big minions out and endless rezzing them. The only thing blizzard has ever done to nerf big priest is to up Barnes a mana in order to stop the combo he was doing by pulling a 1/1 10 mana Y’sharaaj that would pull more minions from the deck and rez to be a 10/10. Even after the nerf, this deck remained in different forms as it’s a sturdy that that relies on cheating out minions non-stop. When Neptulon was released, the deck switched over to it’s current iteration, which any wild player can tell you is miserable to play against.
This is a sample of the deck currently seeing play:

Priest

Class: Priest

Format: Wild

2x (0) Illuminate

1x (1) Shard of the Naaru

2x (1) Shadowcloth Needle

2x (2) Thrive in the Shadows

2x (2) Spirit Lash

2x (2) Shadow Visions

2x (2) Penance

2x (3) Palm Reading

2x (3) Gift of Luminance

2x (4) Hysteria

2x (4) Eternal Servitude

2x (6) Shadow Essence

2x (7) Lesser Diamond Spellstone

2x (8) Idol of Y’Shaarj

2x (9) Blood of G’huun

1x (10) Neptulon the Tidehunter

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To use this deck, copy it to your clipboard and create a new deck in Hearthstone

After the release of the SC mini-set the deck went over to having just 3 minions: Neptulon, and 2 Blood of G’Huun. Blood is a psuedo-Y’sharaaj, and Neptulon is the finisher. The goal of the deck is to use Shadow essence asap to cheat out one of the minions, which will either be a Neptulon with both its arms, or a blood which will then pull a 2nd blood or will pull Neptulon and both his arms. It’s near impossible to play a board based deck against this as Neptulon’s rush and windfury clear any board with 0 risk to itself, and the bloods quickly overwhelm you. If you kill them, the many rez ways bring them with more stats than before. The deck plays like a control deck with ways to clear and heal on the early turns, until you can pull out one of your minions.
This combo can go off turn 2 with coin if you’re able to use illuminate turn 1 to pull a shadow essence. There is no deck in the game that can deal with these huge minions early. If Neptulon is pulled and you have no way of dealing with it, you WILL be taking 24 face damage the following turn. The problem with Neptulon is every time it’s cheated out, copied, or rezzed, it summons 2 more arms, and every time it attacks, it attacks with ALL arms. A summon win condition is to stick a Neptulon and use Gift of Luminance to summon a 1/1 copy of it, which will then summon 2 more arms, allowing you to hit face for 40 damage in a single turn (This can be done turn 3 with illuminate luck).

So, we’re a year into this, well even a year later, something STILL needs to be done about it. I’ve listed a few ideas below, ideally, they would both happen:

1)Nerfs and bans now, More nerfs after rotation:
First, ban Neptulon from wild until rotation. Next, The infinite blood wall spam needs to stop. Shadow Essence and Blood of G’Huun need to both be nerfed/change where you no longer pull copies of the minions from the deck and instead pull the actual minions. No more infinite minions from blood. This will make it so Big Priest needs to be running more minions to not run out of steam completely. Finally, when Neptulon rotates something needs to be done with it, whether it be destroying the body kills all arms, or the arms having their stats tweaked, or getting rid of the rush/windfury on it. Maybe Neptulon needs to take 1 damage each time an arm hits something.

2)A complete rework of the graveyard mechanic in hearthstone:
This is the elephant in the room that needs to be addressed. The graveyard mechanic has ALWAYS been broken in hearthstone, and we can even see in standard, slime warlock and shadow priest are currently taking full advantage of it. It comes down to 2 problems; reborn and rez duplicates, and endless resummons.
A)Reborn and rez duplicates:
If you play a minion with reborn, it dies, and dies a second time, gets resummoned (with reborn), dies, and dies a second time again, how many copies of that minion are in your graveyard? In any other game, the answer would be 1. In hearthstone, the answer is 4. Same thing goes for basic rezzing. Kill a minion, it gets rezzed, suddenly there’s 2 copies in the graveyard. This needs to be changed where reborns aren’t creating additional copies. If a minion had their reborn triggered, it should not be adding a copy to the graveyard.
b)Endless Rez
Endless rez has always been a problem in the game, it’s what big priest has always thrived on. I’m proposing we end it now with a new keyword “Second Life”. If a minion gets resurrected, it is given this keyword. It can not be silenced off the minion or removed. What this keyword does is making so a minion that dies with it no longer gets added to the graveyard. This makes it so minions can only be rezzed once, ending endless rez abuse which constantly pokes its head back when any type of rez is added.

4 Likes
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This one seems like a no brainer to me, and I think they should do this (temporary bans in wild, then unban/nerf with rotation) more often in general. Wild needs a lot more maintenance/attention than it’s currently getting as a lot of the problems (Neptulon abuse, for example) are pretty blatant examples of bad CCG gameplay IMO.

I’ll come back with more later because I like a lot of what I see here…

3 Likes
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Where’s Love Everlasting?

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So yeah…

Basically as long as Wild has existed people have been subjected to the incredibly redundant play patterns of this deck, and they’ve mostly just gotten more redundant over time…

Yeah, and wild has a hell of a lot of redundancy in terms of priest “resurrection” effects, resulting in the deck effectively playing like 10-20 copies of the same extremely small set of oppressive minions that they then cheat on to the board way too early to be effectively dealt with, then follow that up with infinite copies.

Yup.

Bingo.

Well, Hearthstone doesn’t have a graveyard for simplicity’s sake, but I definitely agree that “resurrection” mechanics in Hearthstone are counterintuitive and lead to static, redundant (ie bad) gameplay.

Honestly, I don’t even think resurrection is the right word to use because really it’s reproduction - “resurrecting” something does not mean repeatedly copying it until you fill your board with minions that never existed in the first place… And Hearthstone is designed to limit the copies you can play of any individual card for a reason, and that reason is generating fun, dynamic gameplay. Big Priest play patterns are the opposite of that.

I’ve wondered before about a keyword along the lines of “epic” or something like that, whereby certain minions simply can’t be resurrected or copied… In MTG they would solve these problems with text saying “if this creature would be put into the graveyard, shuffle it into it’s owner’s library instead” or something to that effect… Thinking cards like Emrakul etc that would absolutely ruin games if you could cheat them onto the board via the graveyard… Which, by the way, is design space (graveyard mechanics) that mtg has struggled with for decades, countless bans in multiple formats etc…

Anyway, I personally think there are lots of problems with basic meta design in Wild and this is only one of them, but the whole Neptulon thing seems really obvious to me… I’m not sure how the deck does at higher levels as I wouldn’t be surprised if all the OTK stuff has a good match up against this deck and I don’t play often enough to hit legend on a regular basis anymore… But those OTK play patterns are also total trash as far as I’m concerned (and the reason I’m playing less) so really not a solution to anything from a design perspective if you ask me…

All IMO obviously.

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Most wild decks are running tight lists due to optimization. Big Priest wants only a few things 1)Tutoring 2)Minion cheating 3)Control tools.
Love everlasting is 3 mana do nothing, there’s turns where you don’t want to be doing anything other than hero powering (discarding the effect), and once you hit your combo, mana usually isn’t a problem anymore. On paper, it sounds like a good card for the deck as you get your combo out 2 turns earlier, but there’s just too many better cards for meeting your goals of staying alive and killing your opponent. It’s a card much better in a machine gun deck where you want to be playing a lot of spells every turn.

3 Likes
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I found lists in both Tempostorm and HSREPLAY with Love Everlasting.

It’s the second best Mulligan card in the HSREPLAY list I found.

It’s sort of weird that a Big Priest hater who claims to tell the history of the deck would so nonchalantly dismiss it.

2 Likes
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Imagine saying to a highroll deck, which relies on highroll and usually don’t do much in the first turns, except discovering spells and hope to not draw their minions don’t need a card to reduce manacosts for 80% of their deck. Baffled.

Funfact your statement isn’t even entirely true, because Big Priest can reduce the costs of Love Everlasting with Palm Reading or Illuminate. You don’t always get Illuminate on your highroll shadow essence.

You are talking about lategame with already 8+ mana and it’s quite a time to get there. Ignoring the early game and be reliant on your highroll is just stupid.

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Kindly link your source. You can do so, without privsd, by methods you are well aware of.

Love Everlasting is not used in BP according to HSR. Not in meta decks anyway.

Source: I have premium access to HSR (i know you dont), card is not found in the popular BP decks found. So share your source.

Finding a list including the card doesnt make that list good. So, yeah, cite your sources. "cos im not seeing what you are, with premium access.

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Will it let me link?

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I mean… still garbage play patterns either way in my opinion lol.

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I see it on HSReplay. You have to make sure you tell the filters to sort last 30 days so you get enough games. That’s one of the issue with Wild on HSReplay is lack of games. A deck could be doing amazing, but because there’s not 500 games tracked it dismisses it.

This usually happens with a new expansion as it takes people in wild longer to craft the correct meta decks because they don’t see the optimized lists as fast as they do in standard because of the small player pool and lack of a pure Wild Meta list in HSReplay.

For example, when Cold Storage was released for Shaman it fit perfectly into Shudderwock. Every Shudderwock deck should be running that card. I ran it immediately and was having way better results. You couldn’t find that card on any meta list because there was no Wild Meta in HSReplay, so the info took longer to get out.

Months later, you finally start seeing it pop up here and there.

That’s the beauty of wild. You can get ahead of people with a new meta list if you’re a decent deck builder and understand combos and other people ONLY run meta lists and if a new list doesn’t tell them to run the card, they don’t run it.

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or maybe stop whining? Neptulon is not a problem, never was. You just suck at this game. As priest /mage player i can confirm this, playing since day 1, exclusively only wild mode.

You just not skilled enough rank 50 player.

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I’ve been harping on this myself, how Hearthstone limits the number of cards of one type you can have, yet still produces cards that enable spamming. The game isn’t fun if it’s not dynamic, and the devs should be nerfing any cards that enable spamming into the ground. Or change the rules(legendaries can’t be duplicated).

1 Like