Yeah this card is insane. I’m cool with the taking 10 permanent health away from your opponent, but when it becomes a 20 point life swing that makes it impossible to kill your opponent if you don’t win before they get it into their hand, it’s just dumb. It’s basically the Sif mage problem where mage fought really well for board to actually get Sif off except much better because warlock is just a much better class that plays for board and puts pressure down.
This card needs to stop putting warlock out of lethal range. Just take the 10 health from your opponent or deal 10 damage with lifesteal. The current design is actually ridiculous.
Just to be clear I decided to skip this expansion in part because I heard Snek would do this and was like nah I’m out. So haven’t seen the thing resolve yet, and probably won’t outside of a YouTube video
I played the deck early on and legit got bored with it after a few games. The best version I’ve seen is basically get the 4th excavate ASAP. 5 bounce cards (Zola and two copies of both brewmasters), some early lifesteal/board control, all the Excavate cards and you can basically win around Turn 8 against anyone. I know it’s the first day and easy to overreact, but I can’t imagine this card doesn’t get nerfed soon.
The entire Excavate and Bounce package is like, 13 cards. 12 if you don’t run Zola. You can absolute go full-on Control Warlock to counter Aggro with Defile, Drain Soul, Thornveil Tentacle, etc. Not to mention the ever-amazing Forge of Wills, and Smokestack itself. And if somehow your snake gets disrupted you can also fit in Sargeras and Darkhan + Reverb as always.
That’s the million dollar question. Dirty Rat? Not guaranteed to hit anything useful. Go aggro? Like you said, they have a ton of tools to deal with aggro while healing. Midrange? It’s midrange versus midrange and warlock is probably doing it better. Control? Azerite Snake beats control.
So if you have 10000000000000 armor and you get 3 snakes played on you, you die with 0 health and 10000000000000 armor.
There’s no way around it. Just having 1 played on you is pretty harsh because you’re stuck at 20 max. If you get 2 played on you, pray you never take damage again.
Nature OTK is way too inconsistent and too slow in the early game to compete with any relevant deck. That and now it’s just blatantly not dealing enough damage even with full combo against warrior (meta deck) and warlock.
Oh I created a thread about this didn’t realize it’s called the azerite snake… Yes I’m at a loss as to where this game is headed.
I saw so many board centric cards being printed I was pretty excited for this expansion thinking that maybe, just maybe they finally realized most players like to play for the board not otks and damage from hand, turns out boy was I wrong.
Don’t think they ever printed a more unfun from hand card than this.
Azerite Snake is probably going to be nerfed in a week or 2 to increase its mana cost and change its battlecry to:
“Deal 10 damage to the enemy hero. Increase your hero’s health by 10.”
That change will allow players to at least mitigate the damage with armor and effects like Solid Alibi. It is aburd at the moment.
It will steal 10 health. Your max health goes down by 10, warlocks goes up by 10. Its also not lifesteal meaning it doesnt care about your armor. You.can have a million armor and still die because snake bypass armor and leaches the health.
The second time its played youre at 10 health. And then dead.
Yes its a problem when its bounced and copied because you need about 70 health to not die. Also have fun never getting hit by the board because chip damage also matters.
This thing needs:
A) mana cost increased by alot.
B) lifesteal instead of steal
C) Make it deathrattle. But it would probably kill the card.
I expect the Snake will be nerfed and I agree that it probably should, but I also begrudge that the majority of players aren’t doing anything to even attempt to beat it before complaining. I’m absolutely convinced that this deck can be hard targeted. I haven’t given this any serious thought yet but off the top of my head, consider that a Control Priest has the following advantages.
Prince Renathal slows the win condition down by one Snake play.
Silence on the 4/5 slows the excavation process down.
Identity Theft can take a copy of the Snake (one Snake negates one Snake) and we can create more with Power Chord: Synchronise. Just keep tabs on their excavate count and ID Theft is easy to time.
Dirty Rat can pull the Snake and end the combo. The Warlock has to excavate another one. We can also Synchronise it before we kill it to put them further behind.
Theotar can break the combo as well, and gives us a Snake to play.
There are plenty of options available to a deck as slow as Control Priest that has next to zero lethality. I’m sure other late game decks also have options.
That’s BS. You’re talking about it like I can devote half my deck to defeating this one ridiculous trash card.
don’t pretend like you can ignore cards on board and spells while you’re trying to counter the snake. there are plenty of excavations and symphonies that deal direct damage to your face, so even at 20 or 10 max, it’s a problem
you don’t get to play your control priest just vs warlock and even then, you need all the right cards in hand to try to counter, which you still really can’t, because they never leave the snake out
*i’ve tried dirty rat, theodar, even gave TNT and orge a chance to destroy it, and it’s still very unlikely to be able to pull it
None of the options are reliable. in legend rans I’m 2-10 against warlock with different classes that are actually interesting to try. the only wins were control priest where I was able to steal and play snake 1 to 1, but even then I lost 2 other games where I didn’t pull snake out with rat and didn’t get synch because they never left it on board.
even aggro doesn’t work with 7/7 taunts and 4/5 excavation taunts in the way, and +10 health every turn. This is shuddwerwok level of stupid.
I named mostly cards Control Priest would play anyway tbh but that’s not the point. The point is that we are less than 17 hours into the expansion and people are demanding nerfs to an autocomplete deck without letting the format cook for a single day. As I said, I agree that the Snake will probably need to be nerfed, but people are screaming “there’s no counter” and “nothing beats this” but haven’t given it A DAY let alone a week. Players need a bit of patience and to try and find answers to the problem before demanding it be made easier.
Problem with any of this is you need time. Time you dont have. Snake can enter hand turn 6 and its against a class using lifetap, infinite heals/clears and has symphony. Its also like snake isnt the only minion in hand and if rat ever becomes played people will be holding tour guides, armor vendors and other garbage until the end of time. Snake is available turn 6 ready to start bouncing and copying.