Hearthstone Heroes Of Warcraft / Tropes A to B

Tropes found in Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft
Tropes A to B | Tropes C to D | Tropes E to L | Tropes M to R | Tropes S to Z

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A

• Absurd Phobia: According to Moroes in One Night in Karazhan, murlocs are terrified of balloons.
• Achilles' Heel: Many heroes or specific deck strategies usually have at least one glaring weakness, even if it's a single type of card effect.
  • Legendary minions are usually vulnerable to silences, turning them into cost-inefficient bog-standard minions. Such legendaries are also vulnerable to being copied with Faceless Manipulator or stolen by the opponent using Sylvanas Windrunner's deathrattle (neutral), Mind Control (Priest) or Entomb (also Priest).
  • Strategies reliant on beefing up one minion or dependent on one card's continuous effect can be similarly undone with a silence. Like the above, these cards can also be stolen by the enemy and cause disaster.
  • In addition to being easily undone with silence, buff spells are useless if the opponent keeps your board clear of minions to buff.
  • High-damage cards are vulnerable to single-target elimination spells, including Shadow Word: Death for Priests (5 attack and above), Assassinate for Rogues (any attack level), Polymorph for Mages (turn any minion into a 1/1 Sheep), and Big Game Hunter as a neutral minion with its Battlecry (Destroy an enemy minion with 7 or more attack).
  • Rush strategies are usually impeded by cost-efficient Taunt minions, since these force them to trade two or more minions to get through them if they can't be eliminated through other means. Filling one's board with cheap, weak creatures is also vulnerable to boardclear and AOE spells. Rush strategies can also be undone by running out of steam—no card draw = no way to regain the upper hand.
  • Weapons and weapon-reliant classes like Warrior and Rogue can be screwed over by cards that destroy weapons(I.E. Harrison Jones, Swamp Ooze, Sabotage, Bloodsail Corsair).
  • Taunt minions can force attacks toward them, but they can't do anything about spells or hero powers targeting their allies or their hero. They're also vulnerable to being destroyed by a Black Knight (Battlecry: destroy an enemy minion with Taunt) or being silenced, though at least most minions will keep their stats.
  • Some minions have a drawbacks such as harmful Deathrattles (effect that triggers when the minion dies) and Battlecries, or ones that help the opposing player in exchange for more efficient stats. Silences help here.
  • The warlock spell Sacrificial Pact one-shots a demon. Any demon. Nowhere does it say that the demon has to be a minion. If the enemy hero is JARAXXUS, EREDAR LORD OF THE BURNING LEGION!!, this spell becomes an instant "I win" button. This weakness has been removed due to a nerf to Sacrificial Pact, which now can only target its caster's own demons.
  • Highlander Decks^note No duplicate in deck, an archetype first codified by Reno Jackson are extraordinarily vulnerable to 'Shuffle into enemy deck' effects. While you can tell that the effect won't activate from the lack of glow on the card, it has caught even pro players off-guard. Any odd or even synergy cards that isn't Genn Greymane or Baku the Mooneater also fall under this weakness, as do almost any other deck types that have restrictions on what can be in the deck (a couple such restrictions in actual play are: "No neutral (i.e., usable by any class) cards" and "No minion cards").
• Adaptational Heroism / Adaptational Villainy: As the game went on, several of the playable heroes receive this treatment in regard to lore. Most notable in the Whisper of the Old Gods and Mean Streets of Gadgetzan expansion where almost all of the playable heroes, many of whom are the Big Good in the original game like Anduin, Jaina, Thrall, Tyrande, Malfurion, Khadgar and Magni, seeking assistance from the evil Old Gods in the former (with the exception of the Paladin heroes, Uther and Liadrin, served as the Token Good Teammate) and being recruited into notorious criminal gangs in the latter.
• Affectionate Parody: While Curse of Naxxramas and Blackrock Mountain have shades of this, One Night in Karazhan is a full-blown parody of the raid dungeon it was inspired by. The original raid was a haunted wizard's tower. The Hearthstone adventure is about trying to get the tower cleaned up for a big party!
• Almighty Janitor:
  • Harth Stonebrew, the Innkeeper, is proprietor of the magical inn to play Hearthstone at. And he's the one keeping the peace of the inn, which is visited by undeads, dragons, old gods, and other monstrosities.
  • Heroic Innkeeper has subpar stats for its cost, but with a full board she can turn into a game-ending 16/16 with Taunt. Her artwork also displays her drawing a Cane Sword out of her broom.
• Amusement Park of Doom: The Darkmoon Faire has been a relatively benign place of fun and games in World of Warcraft, but its incarnation in Madness at the Darkmoon Faire expansion has it invoking the power of the Old Gods in its rides and games.
• Anachronism Stew: An in-universe example: some of the heroes would never have met in the original Warcraft timeline - Gul'dan, for example, was dead before Anduin Wrynn was even born. This was even lampshaded in the tie-in comic for Knights of the Frozen Throne, with the crowd scoffing at the Pompous Thespian's story because of this.
• Animation Bump: The trailer for March of the Lich King eschews the "animated still image" look that Hearthstone had been using for years for a 3D animated cinematic. It is quite cartoony and uses 2D assets for things like explosions, but it's still clear that they pulled out all the stops for Death Knight's official announcement.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Hearthstone's mana system is a considerable upgrade from the mana systems found in some other card games. Rather than needing specific cards in hand to extend your mana (like Magic: The Gathering's land cards) or sacrificing potentially useful cards for mana (like the old Warcraft TCG), the game automatically gives you a mana crystal turn by turn (up to a maximum of 10).
  • Unlike other Play Every Day games, Daily Quests don't have to be done that day and up to 3 can be saved and quests can be cancelled to get another one (once a day). If you get a quest to, say, win X games as a hero you don't have a deck for, you have the option to either take your time to build a good deck up or re-roll it and try to get a better one.
    • As the game goes on, quests that demand players to win PVP games are slowly removed so that even the worst or unluckiest players can still complete quests to slowly expand their collection. As of this writing, there is only one quest left (Win: win 2 PvP matches) that demand players to actually win.
  • The game provides alternatives to some cards' effects should their primary effects be rendered inapplicable/useless, although the secondary effects are generally weak.
    • Several Druid spells that give empty Mana crystals like Wild Growth are useless once you have the maximum amount. To compensate, they give you Excess Mana card which draws you another card for free.
    • The Warlock spell Sense Demons randomly picks up two demons from your deck to put into your hand. In case you've run out of demons in your deck, the game will instead give you a 1-mana 1/1 Imp Demon as a replacement for each shortage.
    • The Priest spell Mindgames summons a random minion from an opponent's deck (that is, one that hasn't been drawn yet). In the event that there are no more minions to draw, a 0/1 Shadow of Nothing card is summoned instead ("Mindgames whiffed! Your opponent had no minions left!").
    • Note that your opponent's deck may not have had any minions in it to begin with. Mage in particular can build very effective decks with no minion cards. While you can't really play without minions, you can stock your decks with spells that create minions instead of cards that are minions themselves.
  • A lot of legendaries have effects that trigger on the end of the user's turn, ensuring that you will get that benefit at least once before your opponent will most likely neutralize it if they can.
  • You can turn spare cards into material to craft cards you want. The game even has an option to automatically do this with cards that you have more copies of than you can use anyway (more than two for most, or more than one for legendaries). And if you don't care for shiny, golden cards, you can disenchant them for tons of dust to make multiple non-golden cards.
    • If you click the "craft" or "disenchant" button one too many times and create/disenchant more copies of a card than you intended to, you can undo that action and get a full dust refund. This refund lasts until you leave the crafting interface for that card.
    • Whenever a card is nerfed, for a limited time, all copies of that card can be disenchanted for their full crafting cost, essentially giving a player their dust back if they crafted the card themselves. For cards that have been moved to the Hall of Fame, you automatically gets their full dust value without needing to disenchant the cards, giving an incentive to keep those cards for use in any Wild format.
  • You also get easy access to a Basic deck for each hero, with a few more basic cards being unlocked as you level them to level 10. And you can't lose any of the basic cards so the option to try another hero is always there. With the Basic set becoming more useless over time, in 2020, it was replaced with a yearly Core set, which contains cards from vanilla and previous expansions with much more applicable use.
  • Whenever a "deal X damage to random targets" is cast, the game will avoid overkilling minions and just switch to other ones. For example, casting Avenging Wrath as a Paladin (8 damage to random enemies) will hit that 1-health minion then stop hitting it so that the damage isn't wasted.
  • If your opponent sits for a while without doing anything, a fuse will appear across the middle of the board. If it burns down, their turn ends... and all their subsequent turns start with the fuse, until they actually make an action. This is probably not anti-frustrating for your opponent (especially if said opponent is a turtling griefer, who deliberately want to waste your time so you concede), but since you don't have to wait for god-knows-how-long until they finally play something, you're happy.
    • Unfortunately, griefers can still do the so-called "roping": Deliberately letting the fuse run out without pressing End Turn while still playing cards during their turn, or press End Turn at the last second if there's no card to play, negating this penalty for the ropers and allowing them to drag on the game to annoy the other player.
  • A "pity timer" exists, which increases your chances of pulling a legendary or epic card for each consecutive pack you've opened without one, culminating at a guaranteed legendary or epic every 40 and 10 packs respectively. This timer is modified for new expansions, where you're guaranteed a legendary within the first 10 packs of an expansion.
  • Because of the fact that several Whispers of the Old Gods cards require him, a copy of C'Thun, as well as two copies of Beckoner of Evil, are automatically given to anybody who opens a Whispers pack.
  • In ranked mode, you don't start losing stars upon game losses until you reach rank 20, and it's impossible to go below 20. This makes it relatively easy for anyone to earn the card back reward for a season through sheer persistence. Ranked "floors" also ensure that players who reach ranks of multiples of 5, where they upgrade their seasonal reward, don't go below said rank, encouraging players to climb even if they don't have fully-tuned decks.
  • Legendary cards are rarity-locked, meaning that once you pull or craft a Legendary, you will no longer pull any more copies of that card until you either disenchant it or collect every Legendary from that set. As of the Year of the Phoenix, all other cards have also been rarity-locked at 2 copies, meaning less sifting through mountains of garbage Rares and Epics to get that one card you need.
  • To close the massive gap of available content between new and old players, Blizzard has implemented Ranks 50 to 26 only for new players who registered during and after October 2018, giving them the ability to play around with their low-power decks and learn the game before reaching Rank 25 and contending with the more experienced playerbase. On the way, they also earn several free packs to expand their collection.
  • Elise the Trailblazer shuffles an Un'Goro pack into the player's deck, which yields 5 Un'Goro cards when drawn and used. Unlike most other packs a player would open, this pack is intentionally rigged to contain at least one legendary or epic card, meaning you will at least get some good bang for your buck.^note Whether you get a useless legendary or epic is an entirely different story.
  • In a very specific case which doubles as Developer's Foresight, One Night in Kharazan includes a boss battle where the opponent's hero has taunt, forcing you to ignore any of the several, occasionally random minions he summons. Like normal situations involving two taunt enemies, either can be attacked freely if he summons, say, a Stubborn Gastropod. On the off chance that he summons Mal'Ganis, a demon that makes his controller immune to damage, the hero taunt effect will cancel out entirely until Mal'Ganis dies; ditto for any other case where a character gets Taunt and Immune at the same time.
• Anti-Magic:
  • The mage secret Counterspell immediately negates the next spell an opponent plays.
  • Silencing a card removes any text, abilities, and buffs on it. To eliminate constant board effects granted by other cards, such as the +1/+1 from Stormwind Champion, target the minion providing the buff instead.
  • Polymorph and Hex effectively do the same thing by turning the minion into a entirely different, weak creature (an 1/1 Sheep and a 0/1 Frog with Taunt, respectively).
• Anti Poop-Socking: You get a daily quest where you can earn 40 or 60 gold from (or 100 gold from one quest), but once that's done you can only earn 10 gold by winning 3 games, which is a slow way to farm for gold. You can potentially win gold from the Arena if you win enough matches, but it costs 150 gold to enter (unless you pay with cash). You need to win more than 50 gold in prizes to make a profit if one accounts for the pack of cards (worth 100 gold) that's automatically given out as a prize. There are several achievements that grant gold, but not enough of them to be a reliable source of gold: the only ones that give gold are for unlocking all the heroes, all the basic cards, beating all the expert hero decks on practice mode, winning 100 games, winning 1000 games, and collecting all the cards.
  • There's also a cap of 100 on the amount of gold you can earn through wins per day. Of course, unless you go on a binge, you won't make it that far daily because it requires a minimum of thirty matches to make that much gold. They all have to be wins too.
• Anti-Trolling Features: Player communication during matches is limited to six emotes: Greetings, Well Played, Thanks, Wow, Oops, and Threaten. The Wow emote was notably brought in to replace the Sorry emote, which Blizzard felt too many players were using in a sarcastic way. Players also have the option to "Squelch" the opposing player, effectively muting them, if they feel their opponent is spamming or misusing emotes.
• Apologetic Attacker:
  • Due to "Sorry" being one of the six options on the emote system, players can invoke it to varying degrees. It's specially appropriate (or cruel, depending on your perspective) when you're about to wipe the entire board by casting a Consecration, Lightning Storm or a Flamestrike. The most amusing "Sorry" quote probably goes to Lord Jaraxxus:
    Jaraxxus: JARAXXUS IS... sorry.
  • The Sorry emote was abused by Deadpan Snarker players so often that Blizzard had to replace it with an "astonishment"-styled emote upon the release of Whispers of the Old Gods. (It doesn't seem to have worked - players abuse that emote instead.)
  • Alexstraza also qualifies with her attack quote "I will mourn your death."
• Arc Number:
  • 8 for Ragnaros; he's an 8-mana minion with 8/8 stats, dealing 8 damage to a random enemy at the end of every turn.
  • 5 for Ultimate Infestation, a 10-mana spell that deals 5 damage, grants 5 armor, summons a 5/5 ghoul, and draws you 5 cards. Ghouls in the pipe, five by five.
  • 7 for Dr. Boom, who was a 7-mana 7/7 on release (who also made a couple of Boom-Bots that put him above the basic War Golem) and re-release. His Hero card in The Boomsday Project is also 7 mana and grants 7 bonus armor. His reprint in Rise of Shadows as Blastmaster Boom is a 7-mana 7/7.
• Arc Villain:
  • Kel'thuzad makes his return as the Big Bad of Curse of Naxxramas.
  • Blackrock Mountain has Ragnaros for the first two wings and Nefarian for the adventure as a whole.
  • The League of Explorers has Arch-Thief Rafaam, though mostly he just sits back and lets the heroes play MacGuffin Delivery Service.
  • The Witchwood has Hagatha the Witch, who's responsible for the Witchwood's creation.
  • Rafaam returns as the overarching villain of the entire Year of the Dragon, starting as the Villain Protagonist in Rise of Shadows before becoming a tradition antagonist in Saviors of Uldum.
• The Archmage:
  • For one, there's Archmage Antonidas legendary minion and the Archmage Classic minion card.
  • The playable Mage Heroes are also famous in-universe for their magical prowess, with Jaina being Antonidas' star pupil, Khadgar being apprenticed to Medivh and Medivh being the last Guardian of Tirisfal, the most powerful mortal mage who have ever lived. Can also be invoked by the famous Freeze Mage deck, which is rather light in minions, but aims to devastate the enemy Hero directly regardless of board control.
  • And believe it or not, Hunter also counts with the Spellhunter archetype, which fills their deck with nothing but spells. Predictably, they generate minions through Summon Magic and Deathstalker Rexxar's Hero Power.
• Armor-Piercing Question: During the final battle against Arthas in the Frozen Throne campaign, he will occasionally ask "Who built that deck for you?", likely startling the player if they consulted a walkthrough to beat him.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
  • A common trope in the flavor texts.
  SI:7 Agent: The agents of SI:7 are responsible for Stormwind's covert activities. Their duties include espionage, assassination, and throwing surprise birthday parties for the royal family.
  • Taken almost literally with the Accusation cycle from Maw and Disorder, which targets a minion and destroys it after a condition is fulfilled. The three cards in this cycle are Warlock's Arson Accusation (2 mana and destroys the target after the user takes damage), Rogue's Murder Accusation (2 mana and destroys the target after another enemy minion dies), and Priest's Theft Accusation (1 mana and destroys the target after the user plays a card copied from their opponent).
• Artificial Brilliance:
  • Yes, we're talking about the Hearthstone AI who needs overpowered cards and hero abilities to be a challenge, but long story short, do not play any cards that give your opponent a Spare Part when you're fighting Emperor Thaurissan. If he gets the Time Rewinder, he'll use it on his wife... and use his hero power on you.
  • Another notable one is in the Lich King fight. If you play Majordomo Executus as a Paladin he'll kill it, turning you into Ragnaros and summoning his own Majordomo - then he'll kill his Majordomo off, and use Ragnaros' hero power to one-shot you!
  • Zephrys the Great is Artificial Brilliance that's at your side, as long as you meet his requirement of having no duplicates in your deck. He is programmed to analyze the board and offer you the best cards for your specific situation from the Basic and Classic sets. All too often, you'll wish for a specific card, only to be offered an even better one you didn't think about. That said, he has his limitations; for example, he doesn't understand unique card effects, so he will merrily offer you Taunt minions in a futile attempt to stop Kayn Sunfury^note A demon hunter minion that makes all friendly attacks ignore Taunt.
• Artificial Stupidity: The practice mode AI was never very challenging, but with the Curse of Naxxramas patch it became a lot more obvious that the Hearthstone AI… isn’t very smart. Examples include playing minions in the wrong order so that they don’t gain synergy which they would have otherwise had, making questionable trades, and in the case of Loatheb, using a Faceless Manipulator to clone a Spore. The developers compensated for this by massively buffing the Naxxramas bosses and giving them overpowered cards that aren’t even available to players, which implies they’ve pretty much admitted defeat in getting the Hearthstone AI to anywhere near player level.
  • Arch-Thief Rafaam stands out for potentially being straight-up Too Dumb to Live. If he gets Lord Jaraxxus (this was back when he counted as a Demon while replacing your hero) and Sacrificial Pact in his deck, he will have no qualms about turning into Jaraxxus and then using Sacrificial Pact on himself.
  • In 2022, the single-player AI was supposedly improved, but overall somehow Took a Level in Dumbass instead. All too often you'll see Malfurion calculating how to kill a minion by attacking it with his hero, only to buff, attack, and then use his Hero Power in that order, leaving the minion on 1 health instead; Garrosh straight up doesn't seem to understand that Shield Slam requires him to have armor in order to use it, and will merrily waste a card while he has no armor; and Valeera will often waste Preparation to do nothing and use her hero power while holding an Assassin's Blade, replacing it with a crappy dagger. Additionally, the AI rarely takes its own health into account, meaning that heroes who can attack can and often will opt to ram their face into a giant minion to remove it, taking crippling or even fatal damage in the process. This is even more hilariously sad with Thrall and Illidan, who both have weapons capable of attacking multiple times per turn; they will merrily lose over half their starting HP to destroy a single large minion, often killing themselves outright.
  • The AI of single-player bosses is particularly notable for having been made worse by updates. In addition to generally overvaluing face damage, a few examples stand out in particular:
    • Gothik the Harvester's entire gimmick is that his Unusable Enemy Equipment minions spawn useless 0-attack tokens on the player's side that damage the player every turn. While he previously did the logical thing and ignored them, nowadays he has the bizarre tendency to attack them on sight, basically defeating the purpose of his own gimmick.
    • The Rumble Run's AI would previously make the player's Shrine their primary target; given their powerful effects, this is a perfectly reasonable strategy that the AI completely ignores nowadays.
    • The Collapsing Temple was intended to use its hero power every turn to summon minions that the player has to deal with. However, for whatever reason it no longer does so, making the battle winnable by not playing a single card.
• Ascended Extra: Many minor characters from the main game are treated as equal to lore-important characters by appearing as minions along side them or even as heroes, such as the case of Valeera Sanguinar (the Rogue hero). A more notable example would be the Murlocs: In the game they're basically just nameless Mook tribes, while in this game they have the virtue of being one of the seven tribes that can synergize with each other (sometimes to insane levels; "Murloc decks" are built around this concept). The League of Explorers even has a Murloc as an adventure guide named Sir Finley Mrrgglton while the game later added another Murlocs named Morgl the Oracle as a Shaman playable hero. Though the biggest example? There's this Eredar who is just one-note boss that not even this site lists him amongst the characters of the Burning Legion... then proceeds to not only ascend, but be a Breakout Character. Ladies and gentlemen, you face Jaraxxus, EREDAR LORD OF THE BURNING LEGION!!!
  • Dr. Boom easily takes the cake, though. In World of Warcraft, he was a one-off quest target in the Burning Crusade expansion which most veterans don't even remember existing. In Hearthstone, he was so infamous as one of the most overpowered cards in Hearthstone history that 3 years later he gets an expansion named after him.
  • Tess Greymane is only a minor character in the original game compare to her father Genn. In The Witchwood, she is basically The Hero of the Monster Hunt adventure while her father was severely Demoted to Extra.
  • Madame Lazul is a rare Hearthstone-native example. Her only previous appearance was in the Whispers of the Old Gods trailer as the narrator. 3 years later, she's part of Rafaam's villain crew in the Rise of Shadows expansion.
  • Nemsy Necrofizzle is another Hearthstone-native example. She went from a minor character on Fen Creeper and Bog Creeper (and not the main focus of the cards themselves to boot) to a playable hero of the Warlock class.
  • Several species that weren't playable races are promoted to playable heroes both in term of Alternate skins or PvE heroes. Prominent examples in the alternate skins include: Murloc (Morgl), Mech (Sir Annoy-O), Dryad (Lunara) and Demon (Mecha-Jaraxxus). The Dalaran Heist has playable heroes of Gnoll (Ol'Barkeye for Hunter), Sethrak (Vessina for Shaman), Arakkoa (Kriziki for Priest), Elemental (Rakanishu for Mage), Vulpera^note Non-playable at the time, although they are playable now (Captain Eudora for Rogue), Tol'Vir (Tekahn for Warlock) and Kobold race (Squeamlish for Druid), which means that 7 out of 9 classes are represented by a non-playable race.
• Ascended Meme: Several memes from World of Warcraft have carried over to this game, such as the Raid Leader's summoning response ("Handle it!"), battlecry when attacking ("Hit it very hard!") and flavor text. ("That's a 50 DKP minus!")
  • Not to mention Leeroy Jenkins himself is an unlockable card.
  • Blackrock Mountain has a couple. The Dark Iron Arena encounter has a deck made of thirty legendaries, which was a silly joke deck among the playerbase. The Omnotron Defense System boss has a little Easter Egg: Keep using emotes, and its dialogue will change to the repeated hellos of the Annoy-o-Tron, a card known for its obnoxious quotes.
  • The Grand Tournament takes it further. Wrathguard's flavor text mentions Annoy-O-Tron, Ice Rager's says he's cooler than infamously bad card Magma Rager, and Confessor Paletress's flavor text says that the most common fear is getting the infamously bad Majordomo Executus out of Sneed's Old Shredder. And then there's Polymorph: Boar, which references the infamous Animal Companion summon, Huffer.
  • Whispers of the Old Gods is full of this. One of the set's gimmicks are corrupted versions of existing cards, which includes memetic and darkhorse characters like Annoy-o-Tron or Magma Rager. Then you get to the flavor text, which is clearly directed at the existing playerbase and comments on situations that commonly occurred in the community. An example is Validated Doomsayer's flavor text, which refers to how normal Doomsayer could drop from Piloted Shredder, generally with a major effect on the game.
  • On the Hearthstone subreddit one player told a story about how after they won an arena match, their opponent added them to passive-aggresively rage at them for being a poor jobless loser for playing Hearthstone on a weekday. Conversely, said opponent can afford to play video games because his job is so great and relies on basement dwellers giving him work to do. Or as the opponent put it, "keep feeding the pyramid, roach boy =)". After various quotes and copypastas entered the subreddit's lexicon, Blizzard added Roach Boy to the random names that would cycle by on the queue roulette.
  • The Witchwood continues the trend. Vivid Nightmare's text describes a nightmare where a person accidentally crafted a golden version of the infamously terrible Millhouse Manastorm, Vex Crow's description claims that it often summons Doomsayers (which it actually can), referencing Doomsayer's reputation as the worst case scenario of any RNG-based effect for one of two players, and Dire Frenzy once again brings up Huffer (and Huffer, and Huffer, and Huffer). The Big Bad Hagatha the Witch even gets cross-game memes into the mix with text claiming that she's a Hanzo main, referencing Hanzo's notorious reputation in Overwatch.
  • One of the spells created by The Great Akazamzarak is "Yoggers Poggers", which shuffle three Scrolls of Wonder into both players' decks, and each casts a random spell when drawn. Not only does it reference the incredibly random Yogg'Saron, it also references the PogChamp Twitch emote used for excitement when things unexpectedly work in one's favor (like, for instance, that random spell doing exactly what you need to get out of a pinch).
• Assist Character: In the Dalaran Heist solo adventure, the player is offered the Wondrous Wisdomball, an Oracular Head who offers a variety of effects at random, such as drawing an extra card, casting a second copy of a spell, and Mass Card Removal.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: The general strategy of an aggro deck or a rush deck is to hit the enemy hero relentlessly with charge minions and spells, pausing only to get rid of any Taunt minions that get in the way. The Hunter is particularly good at this, as his hero power lets him keep shooting the enemy hero for 2 damage and can't be mitigated by taunts. The Warlock Zoo Deck is pretty much this taken to the extreme: it consist mostly of cheap creatures, small buffs, and a lot of burst damage. Abusing the Warlock card draw hero power, this deck usually forgoes all non-essential board control and just seeks to absolutely steamroll opponents with tons of small, annoying, efficient minions and burst damage before they can control the board, stabilize and restore Health.
  • Exaggerated by the popular (and also much-despised) 'Face Hunter' deck, a deck so mindlessly aggressive (even Zoo Warlock uses its rush advantage to secure board control) that a bot could play it and is regularly able to secure a turn 5 or 6 kill by simply ignoring EVEYRTHING except the opponent. EVERYTHING GOES TO THE FACE!
• Award-Bait Song: "Hearth and Home", which sounds very Disney-esque and fits more likely with an animated short of the game than with the actual game itself, nonetheless earned a nomination and won the award for "Best Original Song" at the 16th Annual Game Audio Network Guild Awards.
• Awesome, but Impractical: This is the main point of the legendary cards, boasting unique abilities, flashy effects, and act as methods of ending the game. Most legendaries, however, are very specific in their use, have drawbacks, or those flashy effects make them cost more than their non-legendary counterparts; as a result, the majority of Legendaries are often less competitively viable than the 400 dust you get from disenchanting them, but the few that are viable generally become keystone cards. Their power also tends to mark them as prime targets of hard removal spells such as Polymorph and Hex or silencing effects.
  • Millhouse Manastorm is 2 mana, 4 damage, 4 health, which is very difficult to deal with in turn one or two. The catch is that next turn, the opponent gets all spells for free. So, unless you're lucky and manage to get away with it, playing him leads to hilariously disastrous results (such as zero-cost Sprint, Pyroblast, Blessing of Kings, Mind Control...).
  • King Mukla is 3 mana, 5 damage, 5 health. Played on an empty board, he's an impressive threat (especially early in the game). However, playing him means giving the opponent two Bananas, which can be used to buff minions by 1 damage and 1 health for 1 mana per card. So you're essentially giving the opponent extra buffs to use anytime, which can backfire later on...
    • However, it turns out that King Mukla's effect can be used to devastating potential in mill decks, where the goal is to force a loss by filling up your opponent's and and making them overdraw, burning powerful cards or taking extra fatigue damage. Since the two Bananas are separate cards, playing Mukla right before another card that draws your opponent cards means two fewer spaces for cards in their hand. This is especially effective when comboed with Coldlight Oracle, which draws both players two cards, Naturalize, which destroys an enemy minion for 1 mana but draws your opponent two cards, and Sap or Vanish, which return one or all minions to their player's hand - destroying the card if there isn't room for it.
    • The entire game plan of the Mecha'Thun combo deck is to empty the hand, deck, and board, and then play a few cards to summon Mecha'Thun and then kill it right away for an instant victory. Mukla screws up this game plan at the last minute by putting Bananas in their hand. Since the combo usually takes exactly 10 mana to execute, they need to spend another turn expending the Bananas... usually on your minions, if they've been trying to keep their board clear.
  • Bolvar Fordragon, a 1 attack, 7 health minion for 5 mana with the unique ability of gaining one attack in your hand every time one of your friendly minions dies and is the proud owner of a ridiculously badass entry animation. If held in hand for a while he can have an eye-melting 21 attack, more than enough to overkill every minion in the game, which can be instantly nullified by the opponent with a simple silence. Additionally, he is a dreadful card to draw when topdecking, because of how unbelievably inefficient his base stats are compared to his cost. At the very least, he can soak a silence instead of the similarly susceptible Tirion Fordring.
  • Mimiron's Head, a 4/5 mech for 5. If you control Mimiron and at least two other mechs at the start of your turn, they combine into the V-07-TR-0N, a 4/8 with charge that can attack four times a turn. Needless to say, V-07-TR-0N very quickly ends the game. The being said, Mimiron's Head has poor stats, and can easily be killed off by your opponent. If they can't kill Mimiron, they can usually kill a few mechs at least, nullifying his effect until they can kill him. At least he has an awesome animation.
  • Deathwing, in terms of raw stats, is the single most powerful playable minion in the game (along with his Dragonlord version). He has 12 attack and 12 life, meaning he can one-hit kill nearly any other minion in the game, and survive. When played from your hand, he destroys ALL other minions on the field, clearing all immediate threats instantly. But he costs ten mana, and playing him means discarding your entire hand, so while he makes an incredibly powerful entrance, you are relying on top-decking for the next few turns, and likely unable to defend him, especially from spells that remove any minion regardless of stats. (Of course, if you actually top deck him when you're in a bad situation you have nothing to lose, and he can quite possibly single-handedly win you the game.)
  • Majordomo Executus, a 9/7 for 9 with a deathrattle which replaces your hero with Ragnaros, who now has the most powerful hero ability in the game^note Deal 8 damage to a random enemy, which is his effect as a minion, but has a pitiful 8 health. Additionally, he's also coded to remove any armour you've built up and his 8 HP is now your maximum life so you can't recover from it ^note unless you target yourself with Alexstrasza on the next turn, setting your HP to nearly double at 15). Executus is widely considered the worst legendary in the entire game as a result, since he will regularly cost you the entire match on the turn after you play him (it's WAY too easy for most players to simply one-shot him with hard removal then kill your pasty 8-HP ass). Naturally, players have attempted to make combos involving Ragnaros's hero power, and on the rare occasion that it works (read: they don't immediately die when Executus triggers), it is glorious.
  • Whispers of the Old Gods invoked this with Blood of The Ancient One. Blood of The Ancient One is a 9 mana 9/9 with no effect, except when you control second Blood of The Ancient One. If you control both, they fuse together at the end of your turn, becoming The Ancient One - a 30/30! The fusion can't even be interrupted by your opponent since it happens on your turn. However, playing any 9 mana minion keeping it both alive for a turn is very difficult, and the extreme cost makes it nearly impossible to combo with cards that cheat out a second one on the same turn. In addition, The Ancient One himself is basically never going to die to minions, but can still get destroyed by hard removal, or even just a minion with Taunt. It's also usually better to have two 9/9s rather than one 30/30 unless you're going for the OTK, since that gives your damage more flexibility. Still, the sheer Rule of Cool of this thing has led to a lot of people creating joke decks that summon him.
  • Journey to Un'Goro introduced Quests for each of the classes - Legendary spells that give you an overpowered card after you complete certain objectives. Paladin got the short end of the stick, however. Their quest, The Last Kaleidosaur, requires them to buff six friendly minions (a task requiring at least 6 spells, minions to stay on your board, and a few turns of set-up). The reward is Galvadon, a 5 mana 5/5 that Adapts five times^note Choose one of three random effects, generated from a list of ten. Repeat five times. In theory, you could make a 14/5 Windfury with Stealth, or a 5/14 Taunt that can't be targeted by spells. In reality, you will rarely create your dream Galvadon. The randomness ensures that you'll end up making some kind of half-breed of effects, and you get a lot of useless repeat options (ex: two Windfuries do nothing). Also, Galvadon is just a minion, and there's no Charge adaptation. If you didn't get Stealth or set up an OTK, he'll just get removed.
    • The Warlock quest Lakkari Sacrifice falls into the same category. It requires them to discard 6 cards - a task that required at least 9 cards (6 discards, 3 double-discarders), but usually more. The reward is a LOT stronger than Galvadon - an indestructible portal that spawns two 3/2 imps for you every turn, but it's a value play rather than an OTK, it comes out too late to have enough impact, and the time to complete the quest is inconsistent because you can always end up discarding other cards with a discard effect. They had to print a 4-mana card that discarded your entire hand to make it any good.
  • Rin, the First Disciple Zig Zags this. On paper, just by looking at what cards she generates tells, anyone with experience with card games how squarely it falls under this trope. She has a Deathrattle which gives a spell called "The First Seal". Using it summons a 2/2 demon for a whopping 5 mana and gives you "The Second Seal", also costing 5 mana. "The Second Seal" summons a 3/3 and puts "The Third Seal" in your hand, which summons a 4/4, and so on, until you reach the fifth card — "The Final Seal", and that gives you a 6/6 and finally gives you the ultimate reward: "Azari the Devourer", a whopping 10-mana 10/10 demon that destroys your opponent's deck. So for a whopping 31 mana, you get a 10-mana minion that doesn't do anything to the board when it's played, and by the time you can play it, assuming you haven't died, your opponent has likely drawn at least a half to two-thirds of their deck. This takes several turns of effort to complete and is horrible for tempo^note Keeping a "lead" on the board, but in practice, control Warlock has so much insane defensive cards, healing, and board clears (but no burst damage) that forcing the opponent to go into fatigue works as a win condition for them.
  • The Darkness is a 20/20, which is enormous for any playable minion, let alone one that costs a mere 4 mana. The catch is that it starts out dormant - it can't attack or be attacked, and it's unaffected by any other effects, so you spent that 4 mana just to clog up your board. Its Battlecry shuffles 3 Candles into your opponent's deck, and The Darkness can only awaken and start attacking if your opponent draws all three, and that's a pretty big if. And if your opponent happens to overdraw a Candle or discard one directly from the deck? Tough luck, because The Darkness is now stuck in its dormant state for the rest of the game. And even if the third candle is drawn (which will most likely be on the opponent's turn), The Darkness dies to hard removal just as easily as any other minion.
  • Astral Communion is a 4-mana spell that instantly maxes out your mana crystals, letting you accelerate your mana growth by up to 6 turns. That's the "awesome" part. However, the trade-off is that casting the spell also discards your entire hand, and having that much mana isn't very useful if you have no cards to use it on. You'll also be relying completely on top-decking for the next few turns, hoping to get something that can capitalize on Astral Communion before the opponent manages to either catch up in mana or just straight-up kill you because you couldn't draw anything good.
  • Emeriss is a very powerful minion... stuck in the worst class it could possibly be in. Doubling the stats of the minions in your hand is an extremely powerful effect, but Hunters have a very hard time making good use of it. Hunters traditionally have not been a good control class and have one of the worst card draw among any class, so by the time you can play Emeriss, you will likely not hit enough minions to make her Battlecry make a big enough impact to win the game over a long run. There's also the issue that it's a 10-mana minion with no immediate board impact, so it's a late-game value play more than anything else.
  • On his own, The Lich King is a perfectly solid 8-mana 8/8 with Taunt that adds a Death Knight card (renamed Lich King cards when Death Knight became a class) to your hand at the end of the turn, giving you solid value in just about any situation. While said Lich King cards are all powerful for their mana costs, some of them fall into this category with various drawbacks.
    • Obliterate kills any minion with no questions asked for a minuscule 2 mana, but it also causes backlash damage to your hero equal to that minion's health; depending on your class, this can range from inconsequential to potentially detrimental, and is generally not good for killing things with very high health. The collectible version of Obliterate lacks this problem as the self-damage was fixed to 3 points, making it almost entirely better than the one the Lich King gives you.
    • Doom Pact destroys every minion on the board for a relatively cheap 5 mana, but also has the steep cost of discarding a card from your deck for each minion destroyed. As such, it's usually saved for when you're in fatigue already and thus ignore the drawback or you're one turn away from losing, but even in the latter case you may risk throwing away your own win condition.
    • Army of the Dead is easily the Death Knight card most dependent on the Random Number God. It's a 6-mana spell that discards the top 5 cards of your deck and summons any minions among them. Great if it generates a huge board swing in your favor, not so good if it ends up milling 5 spells (or even worse, your hero card). It's also the Death Knight card that's most dependent on your actual deck, as it's obviously much worse in a spell-heavy deck than a minion-heavy one.
  • Duskfallen Aviana makes the first card you play each turn cost 0 mana, which is obviously a pretty good effect. The problem is that it also applies to the opponent, and because you usually have to play Aviana to get her on the board, they get to use the effect first. This usually results in the opponent using Aviana's effect to get any one card for free and then destroying her so that you can't do the same, resulting in you giving them the advantage without anything to show for it.
  • Hakkar, the Soul-Flayer has a Deathrattle effect that shuffles a Corrupted Blood into each player's deck; when drawn, it damages the holder and then shuffles two more copies of itself in, meaning that the Corrupted Blood will eventually spread far enough to kill the player. But because it's a Deathrattle effect on a 10-mana minion that takes time to ramp up to critical mass and depends on your opponent drawing a specific card, this effect is horrendously slow and can be dismantled by a transform or silence effect. Hakkar himself also has god-awful stats to begin with and doesn't do anything the turn he comes down, giving your opponent a free turn to wail on your face.
    • The one deck Hakkar does find use in, however, is in mill-based Druid combo decks, who's capable of pulling out Hakkar and killing him on the same turn. Considering how Corrupted Blood works, Naturalize is extremely synergistic with it, and compared to Togwaggle Druid, Hakkar Druid is better at killing the opponent directly.
  • Marin the Fox summons a Master Chest for your opponent when played; if you then destroy the chest, you get one of four fantastic treasures with powerful effects like filling your hand with copies of a drawn card or summoning two copies of a Legendary minion. The problem is, the Chest has 8 health, and Marin sits at an awful 8 mana 6/6 statline. Without external assistance, it takes three turns for Marin to break the chest, and that's without considering that sinking 8 mana into a minion that does nothing when it comes down and has horrid stats is pretty much equivalent to giving your opponent a free turn. Further more, your opponent is free to buff the chest and use it to smack you around (especially Priests, as giving a high-health minion to the class with Divine Spirit and Inner Fire is practically handing your opponent a loaded gun and sticking your face in front of it). You could play Marin while you have other minions on the board and use those to break the chest, but let's face it - if you have that much board control, you're probably winning even without Marin's treasure and are thus better off going for the face instead.
  • Rivendare, Warrider shuffles the other three Horsemen into your deck with his Deathrattle, and after all four of them die, you instantly win the game. However, Rivendare and the other Horsemen are all 6-mana 6/6 minions, meaning that actually putting them on the board is a pretty hefty investment, and that's not to mention the further investment required to even draw out the other Horsemen buried in your deck. While the other Horsemen at least have keywords, that only bumps them up from bad to mediocre for their cost, and the sheer amount of mana or minion-cheating effects required to bring out all of them and have them all die makes Rivendare by far and away one of the clunkiest win conditions in the game.
  • In general, any minion that costs a significant amount of mana (usually 8 or more) that doesn't do anything on the turn it comes down is usually considered not worth playing, no matter how good its stats are, as they almost always make very inviting targets for enemy removal, potentially rendering your mana investment moot. This is the main difference between cards like Gruul (whose +1/+1 every turn is potentially devastating but also quite slow to get going), which saw almost no play, and Ragnaros the Firelord (whose end-of-turn effect either kills a minion or deals a hideous amount of face damage), which was good enough to be kicked out of Standard. Exceptions are made for minions with powerful, game-winning effects (like Malygos), which tend to get played in dedicated decks with ways to get around their prohibitive mana costs.
  • It's possible to become Immune with Demon Hunter for 0 mana via Blur, then play Yogg-Saron, Master of Fate, which has a chance to cast Rod of Roasting, which cast Pyroblasts until a hero dies, and since their hero is Immune, only the opponent can ever take damage from Pyroblast, guaranteeing a win. However, this is wildly impractical considering that Yogg only has a 5 percent chance of selecting Rod of Roasting, making it very unlikely that the combo could actually be pulled off.
• A Winner Is You: As amazing as Mechazod is, many players have wished that he received a death sequence when you defeat him during the Tavern Brawl, rather than just going straight into the "Victory" screen. Later Tavern Brawls fixed this issue though, seeing the following co-op Tavern Brawl boss, Nefarian, dies in a spectacular fashion.

B

• Backbench-Hitting Attack: When you play Gunslinger Kurtrus, he can deal damage to minions in your opponent's hand instead of minions in the battlefield.
• Badass Adorable: Some cards have rather cutesy name and/or artwork (Lil' Exorcist, Wee Spellstopper, Pint-Sized Summoner, to name but a few), but this doesn't stop them from being effective in combat. Special mention to the Annoy-o-Trons, which have been known to tank TWO Deathwings at once, and the Whirling Zap-o-Matic which can end you in THREE turns if left unchecked.
• Badass Boast: A few of the lines from the heroes and minions. Also from the Witchwood trailer: "We are the beasts that monsters fear!"
• Bad Boss: It's one thing to send your minions to die, it's another thing to actually destroy them directly with your own cards. Do note that killing or damaging your own minions can be advantageous- one feasible strategy is to smack an Enrage minion with a nominal amount of damage in order to get their attack sky-high quickly.
  • Judging from his name, Abusive Sergeant would seem to be one but it doesn't really reflect in gameplay since he actually boosts the attack of a minion. Cruel Taskmaster, on the other hand, actually damages a minion when he is played (although he can also use his effect on an enemy minion, which has obvious applications with things like Execute).
  • Lampshaded with the Void Terror's ^note destroys friendly minions on either side of it to add their total attack and defense to its stats flavor text:
    If you put this into your deck, you WILL lose the trust of your other minions.
  • Being a Bad Boss and pinging your own creatures is the main shtick of the Grim Patron deck, as Grim Patrons summon yet more Grim Patrons if they take damage and survive.
  • Frost Lich Jaina can invoke this as well: Her hero power deals 1 damage, and if that damage kills a minion, she will get herself a new Water Elemental. Nothing prevents you from killing your own minion to 'upgrade' it into a Water Elemental.
• The Bad Guy Wins: The League of E.V.I.L.'s Dalaran heist in Rise of Shadows goes off without a hitch, as evidenced by their Hostile Show Takeover of the Midsummer Fire Festival and the trailer of Saviors of Uldum.
• Bad Luck Mitigation Mechanic: The developers have stated that on average they expect a player to receive one legendary card for every 20 card packs they open. However, when a new expansion is released, there is a guaranteed legendary somewhere in the first 10 packs the player opens. Additionally, if a player opens 39 packs without a legendary, the 40th will be guaranteed to have one.
• Bait-and-Switch Boss: The battle with Flikk in Trial by Felfire appears to be a straightforward fight...until a Rusted Fel Reaver, the real boss, shows up and crushes him.
• Bar Brawl: Invoked and simulated by the Grim Guzzler encounter and the card you get from it. Invoked even more specifically with the Tavern Brawl game mode.
• Barrier Warrior: Paladins cards are able to give a minion Divine Shield and have synergy effects based around them.
• Battle Cry: Cards with the trope name cause an effect whenever played through normal means. From dealing damage, to summoning creatures, to silencing minions, or, in the case of Jaraxxus to replacing your hero. Most legendary cards also enter to a battlecry of their choice.
  Tirion Fordring: Put your faith in the Light!
• Better to Die than Be Killed: Players can "concede" if they are certain they will be defeated, which is effectively a suicide option, saving time for everyone involved and denying the opponent the chance to get the killing blow.
  • Garrosh's "I choose death!" is even more interesting when you realize that his game-opener line is "Victory or Death!"
  • It's also quite common for beaten players to commit suicide with their cards instead of choosing "concede"—with style points for showy or elaborate suicides (e.g. buffing an enemy minion, attacking the minion to take damage, then being cherry tapped by the minion's deathrattle).
• BFS: A lot of Paladin weapons fall under this. The Truesilver Champion heals him as he attacks, the Sword of Justice buffs minions he summons at the cost of durability, and the Ashbringer (equipped when Tirion Fordring dies) is just a really big, really tough sword. Old Gods introduced the Rallying Blade, which gives all Uther's minions with Divine Shield an extra +1/+1
  • Instructor Razuvious of Naxxramas has his Massive Runeblade, which deals double damage to heroes. In Heroic, it has 10 base damage.
• Big Ball of Violence: The visual effect of using the Warrior's Brawl card.
• Big Damn Heroes: This is the main flavour of the Paladin Secrets. Whereas Mage, Hunter, and Rogue Secrets are all about traps and trickery, Paladin Secrets are about heroes bursting in to save the day out of nowhere, as well as the occasional act of divine intervention. The classic example is Noble Sacrifice, where a soldier gives his life to protect another minion, but there's also Galloping Savior (a horse charges into the battlefield to defend you), Getaway Kodo (a minion is rescued right as they're about to die), and Judgment of Justice (an enemy minion is restrained and weakened right as they're about to attack).
• Body Horror: Plus And I Must Scream, but overall Played for Laughs with the flavor text of Devolve. The art even shows the Big Bad Ensemble of the expansion pack (Don Hancho, Aya Blackpaw and Kazakus) being turned into Murlocs.
  Ragnaros looked down. He looked like some kind of War Golem. "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME," he yelled. But all that came out was a deep grinding sound. He began to cry.
• Boring, but Practical
  • Weak but cost-efficient cards for their effects. Yes, it's intimidating to have a Deathwing on your side of the field, but remember that the costly 10 Mana and hand-wiping card can just be undone instantly by a Big Game Hunter (Battlecry: destroy one minion with more than 7 attack) costing only 5 mana. Similarly, possessing a cheap Silence card can topple enemy strategies contingent on a single minion's effect, which can go a long way toward winning.
  • Basic cards for each class are usually not enough to make crazy strategies or decks from, but they are solid cost-efficient cards that you can always depend on. They're easy to make an effective deck with, even by beginners, but careful play by an expert can trump any number of fancy strategies. It's a commonly-cited fact that several of Hearthstone's top players have made it to Legend rank (the highest tier in ranked play) multiple times over using purely basic decks to prove a point. Unfortunately, Power Creep eventually set in, making this much harder as time goes on and more cards that outperform their Basic counterparts are released, until they were retired for the Core set.
  • The Boulderfist Ogre and Chillwind Yeti, available for all players, don't have any card effects but were the kings of stat-to-cost value back in the early days, often forcing your opponent to trade 2-for-1 or burn an expensive removal card to get rid of them.
    Boulderfist Ogre's flavor text: ME HAVE GOOD STATS FOR THE COST
  • Bloodmage Thalnos is infamous for this. With spell damage +1 and "Deathrattle: Draw a card", Thalnos is merely a mashup of two common cards, Kobold Geomancer and Loot Hoarder. However, having both effects on a single card is very useful, and Thalnos is used in a wide variety of decks. This doesn't stop players from putting off crafting Thalnos and prioritizing flashier legendaries.
  • Some of the Neutral card-drawing cards, such as Loot Hoarder and Novice Engineer, may not be as amazing as some of the flashier card-drawing cards or combos, but their cheap cost, relatively reliable self-replacing effects, and the fact it puts stats on the board can do wonders in getting your actual game-winning cards to use later in the game.
  • The Mage's Flamestrike is a basic card, meaning it's common and everyone has one. But it's one of the most powerful enemy-only-targeting board clear spells in the game, and it set the gold standard to judge others. A single application of this spell at the right moment can completely reverse the tempo of the game.
  • Ancient Watcher (which has the same stats as Chillwind Yeti for half the cost but can't attack) is a great card if you can give it either taunt or silence it so it can attack (or, if you're a Warlock, use it with Shadowflame as an improvised Flamestrike). Of course, without either, it's almost completely useless.
  • For decks, there are zookeeper and the much-maligned 'Face Hunter' deck. Both decks rely on cheap, low mana cost minions, with zoolock focusing in cost efficiency and good trades, while face hunter simply attacks the enemy character with everything it has, and are extremely powerful, with zoo gaining fast board control, and face hunter quickly whittling down the opponent, unless an effective counter is found. Zoo was one of the top decks during Spring and Summer of 2014, while face hunter has been one of the strongest from Spring 2015 to today.
  • Dr. Boom, one of the most broken cards in the game to the point where even the devs admit he was made too strong, is also fairly straightforward; he's a 7/7 for 7 mana that summons 2 1/1 Boom Bots that deal damage to random enemies on death.
  • The main appeal of C'Thun and his cultists is that they're effectively Hearthstone's starter deck, and as such they're designed to be pretty easy to use together and play with. Basically, the cultists are cost-efficient minions that trade standard effects for the ability to buff their master C'Thun, or activate powerful yet straight-forward effects if C'Thun has enough attack. The Old God himself has a pretty simple ability as well, dealing damage split amongst all enemies equal to his own attack.
  • Pyroblast, despite being an epic, is merely a 10 mana spell that deals 10 damage. It's not flashy, it's a little more dust intensive than it ought to be, and it's less efficient than Fireball, but it also only consumes a single card slot while dealing a third of the opponent's health, so it works just fine.
  • Compared to the other Old Gods (and most 10-cost minions in general), Y'Shaarj is nothing spectacular, merely summoning a minion from your deck at the end of each turn, and is usually deemed the weakest of the bunch. There are two key differences between him and his competition; he has some of the highest raw stats of any minion in the game, being a 10/10 by default (Beaten out only by the 11/11 Thaddius and the 12/12 Deathwing and equal to the Faceless Behemoth) and summoning more stats with each turn, and he has no deckbuilding requirements, meaning that if you lack the support cards of the other 10-cost cards Y'Shaarj can be slapped into a minion-heavy deck and be happy to do his job. Y'Shaarj would later get a popularity boost with the release of One Night in Karazhan's Barnes. Barnes can summon a 1/1 copy of Y'Shaarj from your deck...which could then pull out the actual Y'Shaarj from your deck.
• Black and Nerdy: The Judicious Junior paladin card from the Scholomance Academy expansion is a smart black teenage girl. Her art shows her carrying a huge book, her summon quote shows that she actually enjoys test-taking, and her attack quote is "Aced it!"
  • Becomes Harsher in Hindsight when it's revealed that this card depicts Tamsin Roame before she died and became a Warlock.
• Boss Battle: Aside from the actual bosses from the adventures, Hearthstone follows the card game trend of psychotically powerful yet hard to summon monsters capable of ending games by themselves, much like the tried and true formula of a boss fight.
  • The Warlock card Lord Jaraxxus is easily the most famous of these. Upon summoning, he replaces Gul'dan with himself, equipped with a 3/8 weapon, 15 HP, and a hero power that summons a 6/6 for 2 mana. Lord Jaraxxus can end games ridiculously fast thanks to his raw damage output, and is all but unbeatable without burst damage or an existing board. His exclusive emotes are a plus.
    • Majordomo Executus, though less useful, fulfills a similar niche as a neutral card, being a 9/7 for 9 mana by default who replaces his hero with an 8 HP Ragnaros the Firelord on death, with the hero power of dealing 8 damage to a random enemy. Again, the emotes are awesome.
  • Anub'arak, exclusive to Rogues, is a 9 mana 8/4 who summons a 4/4 Nerubian on death and then cozily places himself back into his owner's hand. While he dies very easily, the fact that he can't truly be killed without silencing or stealing him makes his health a non-issue as long as his owner is willing to pay for his hefty mana cost, and his gigantic attack makes him too threatening to leave alive. His only real issue was being given to Rogue, a class without any good Control deck tools outside of Anub'arak himself. He would later be buffed to make him more threatening by making the Nerubian token immediately summon Anub'arak again on death, waiving the need to keep spending mana on him.
  • The Golden Monkey is a 4 mana 6/6 with taunt who replaces every single card in your hand and deck with legendary minions, such as Ragnaros the Firelord, Dr. Boom, and just about every other card on this list. Actually getting it is fairly hard however, as it requires you to play Elise Starseeker, who shuffles the Map to the Golden Monkey into your deck, draw that, play it so it shuffles the Monkey into your deck, then draw the Monkey, and then finally play it when you know you won't be needing your other cards anymore.
  • C'Thun starts out as a measly 10 mana 6/6 who deals his attack damage randomly split amongst all enemies, but he boasts his own archetype of cards that either boost his stats or gain bonuses if he has at least 10 attack. With enough buffers, he can easily reach an attack and health of over 16/16, making him all but unkillable without hard removal and able to wipe out the entire enemy board on summoning.
  • N'Zoth is a 10 mana 5/7 who summons every single friendly deathrattle minion that died that game, a list which includes monstrously powerful, high-cost cards like Tirion Fordring and Sylvanas Windrunner. A sufficiently large, durable N'Zoth board is effectively unbeatable without a complete board wipe like Twisting Nether or Deathwing. It gets crazy when he can access older formats, where he can revive the bulky Sludge Belcher and the sticky Piloted Shredder.
  • Raid Boss Onyxia is not only a 10 mana 8/8 with Rush, she fills that board with 2/1 Whelps that also have Rush and she's Immune while any of her Whelps remain on the board. Just like a boss fight, you have to carve your way through her mooks before you can challenge the boss.
• Boss in Mook Clothing:
  • The Giant cards. Their effects lower their mana costs based on particular aspects of the match (Sea Giant costs 1 less per minion on the board, Mountain Giant costs 1 less per card in the owner's hand, Clockwork Giant costs 1 less per card in the opponents hand, Molten Giant costs 1 less per owner's health missing, and Frost Giant costs 1 less for every time the owner used their hero power), meaning they can come out fairly early, with the Molten Giant and Sea Giant having the capability of costing 0 depending on the circumstances. They also have 8/8 stats, making them on par with the 8 mana Ironbark Protector.
  • Edwin VanCleef, who starts as a 2/2 for 3, but gains +2/+2 for every other card played within the turn before he is summoned. Proper play can result in a 12/12 as early as turn 5, a set of stats matched by the 10 mana Deathwing.
  • The Priest's Divine Spirit + Inner Fire combo can make any high-health minion frighteningly powerful by doubling its health and then boosting its attack to the same amount. This can turn something like the lowly 1/7 Mogushan Warden into a 14/14. For the same reason, letting a Paladin keep anything on the board for one turn can be dangerous with the sheer number of minion buffs they have.
  • Shamans got a particularly nasty one in Kobolds and Catacombs. Lightwarden, from Classic, is a piddly 1/2 that gets +2 Attack each time a character is healed. Doesn't sound too bad... until you let it survive a turn and the Shaman casts Healing Rain, which heals random friendly characters 12 times.
• Break the Haughty: So you're winning this game since the start. Board control, card advantage, everything, and your advantage keeps on mounting. Then you start to gloat your superiority.... and the Random Number God decides to side with your enemy, as your Laser-Guided Karma.
• Breather Episode: One Night in Karazhan was intentionally made Lighter and Softer following immediately after Whispers of the Old Gods, which was surprisingly dark by Hearthstone standards.
  • Ditto Kobolds & Catacombs, a whimsical tribute to classic dungeon crawls following right after Darker and Edgier Knights of the Frozen Throne.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory:
  • It's a Collectible Card Game, so this is unavoidable since a rich player can buy lots of booster packs, but there are some mechanics in place to mitigate it: You can earn cards (more slowly) through regular playing and completing daily challenges, and you're limited to no more than two of any particular card per deck. As it stands, money can only buy booster packs, whose contents are determined randomly anyway, and easier access to the single-player Adventure wings, though these are also purchasable with gold and the card rewards have to be earned anyways. So while money can get you options, it can't directly buy you power.
  • Averted with Arena mode, where players must choose from 3 random heroes and construct their decks from a pre-set list of cards, eliminating any advantage from grinding or paying for great cards for fairness' sake. The only advantage a player can get is through experience with the game (and a healthy dose of sheer dumb luck).
  • Reinforced with "Adventure Mode" however. Each adventure consists of several 'wings' with card rewards for completing each fight in that wing. But unless you're willing to fork out cash to buy the adventures all at once you're in for a lot of grinding to unlock all the wings of the adventures. Twenty-five dollars for the whole adventure or 700 gold PER WING. 700 gold represents about a week of grinding, at the very least. Oh and those card rewards you get for playing through? Very powerful cards that CANNOT BE CRAFTED. You have to earn them through adventure, many are mandatory in most decks. These are arguably one of the most "Pay to win" aspects of the game.
  • Worth noting is that, as stated under Boring, but Practical, it's possible to actually make a pretty decent deck with the cards you start out with. Essentially the neutral Basic collection is full of simple, no frills cards with easy to understand effects, whereas Expert cards are more situational and strategic. People can (and have) made competitive decks using only Basic cards, but they don't tend to have any complex strategies or combos like the Expert level decks do.
  • In Battlegrounds mode; one can buy 'Perks'. These mostly provide non-advantageous benefits like emotes and stat tracking, but also allow you a choice of 4 Heroes instead of only 2. This makes it much more likely that someone with Perks can roll a hero seen as high-tier; or one with a power that synergises with the minion pool that game. Tavernkeeper Bob will also somewhat frequently encourage players to buy perks to 'take their strategy to the next level'.
• Brick Joke: In the April Fools' Day 2022 "patch notes," one of the changes was that Dinosize, an 8-mana Paladin spell that sets a minion's stats to 10/10, would be changed to set the target's stats to 7/14 instead, the same stats as Ultrasaur. A bit over a year later, when a number of Journey to Un'goro cards received buffs, they did just that (and buffed it to 7 mana).