Why these? Here is the official rationale for the nerds

Blizzard, on Thursday night, unexpectedly announced that after the December breakout of the NF, it would soon weaken the new cards at Hearthstone. On February 5th, the NFs will receive a total of 5 cards: Cold Blood, Flemish Language Totem, Equality, Hunter Mark, and Small Emerald Stone. Why did they choose these? Here are the official justifications!

"We believe that Hearthstone is the most entertaining when strategies change constantly. When new cards are released, our goal is to have old decks receive new items and propose new concepts. When Basic and Clbadic cards are so effective (whatever the solution), the same decks are always viable, it is difficult to achieve this goal. "

"As mentioned before, these cards can become problematic if all the other strategies are less interesting. However, this does not mean that Basic and Clbadic cards should not be strong. It is also important to have stock cards that can be useful in many situations and types of packages. "

"We finally changed these cards because they were too dominant, regardless of the popular strategies or cards used with them. When a basic or clbadic map becomes so omitted, the decking possibilities are reduced, as is the variety of decks. "

"The purpose of the following changes is to create cards rather than" mandatory "cards that fit well with certain strategies and show their strength in the decks that focus on that."

Most of the criticisms were made by the weakening of equality – mainly because of the change of 2 mana 4 mana suggesting that odd mechanics is a major problem and that Bakou / Genn might have had to start. However, according to the designer of Dean "Iksar" Ayala, this is not the case.

"The fact that equality has not ended with 3 mana is totally independent of the existence of Odd Paladin. The Clbadic and Basic cards, which are so powerful that they appear in all decks for all accessories, are completely faced with the goal of making the post-add-on meta new and new. Based on the tests, the three-man tie would not have solved this problem. The improvement of 4 manas seemed very interesting, but we wanted to try it in current and future environments. Based on these matches, we finally estimated that 4 mana would remain a realistic option for control decks, but much less for aggressive decks. This is the ideal situation we want to achieve with each card, so we stayed with the 4 mana. "

The only non-basic / clbadic card that changes with Emerald Spellstone is what Blizzard said about it.

"We want Emerald Spellstone to be an effective threat in mid-term and late games. So it's a mana that increases the cost of not badigning early play as an aggressive tempo option. With this, and with the weakening of Hunter's Mark, we want to mitigate Hunter's dominance, while the cards remain usable in the future. "

Iksar also commented on things here.

"When pages change, it's less of the current environment than what Hearthstone will be after the changes. If we approach it statistically, Secret Hunter was the strongest deck of the game and almost the most popular deck. We thought that there would be no major long-term negative impact if we changed a map we were going to build on and Wild would have a better chance of getting stronger over time, while protecting Secret Hunter from the field.

The above changes will take effect next week, February 5th.