Some thoughts on Catrina Muerte

General Discussion
1

Just played a couple of games against Resurrect Priest running Catrina Muerte. For starters, this is not a complaint. I think the card is cool and although I’m a tad tired and annoyed of the whole Resurrect/Big Priest thing, I’m not riding the hate wave.

I was playing Roffle’s Reno Mage, which heavily tech’ed against Big Priest, Odd Paladin and Jade Druid. As far as Big Priest goes, it runs:

  • Polymorph: Boar
  • Potion of Polymorph
  • Tinkmaster Overspark
  • Polymorph

Plus Kazakus that can do some stuff…

My experience against Catrina Muerte is that if one Catrina dies and the next Catrina resurrects it, it snowballs and it snowballs bad. I think the reason for it is that the resurrect pool starts having more and more Catrinas. And with this the board grows and if you deal with it, you are just adding more Catrinas to the pool.

I’ll rethink how I handle the matches against it but I was wondering what’s everyone’s thought about the snowball effect and if there was a better way for resurrect pool and resurrect mechanics to be implemented.

Cheers.

2

Mad Summoner.

Resurrect would feel more fair if each minion could only get resurrected once. Give resurrected minions a non-silencable debuff: “Resurrected: minion gets removed from the game when it dies.”

1 Like
3

Mad Summoner is not a bad idea actually. May even feed Jaina later on.

4

I’d rather they were the same minions that died, so you can only have one Ragnaros on board at a time and latter on from resurrect if only one died, Barnes makes a copy so you could ahve double the legendaries, shadow essence too

5

The one drop 2/3 that summons a 0/3 taunt as a death rattle is a pretty solid card.

Maybe the 3 mana 3/4 that summons a 2/2 for both players? Didn’t seem awful in an arena run I had of late.

Or there’s always the weasel machine gun for the full hate lol.

1 Like
6

This is why a graveyard is needed. So you can’t summon a minion that has already returned and still in play. Blizzard need to add graveyards also to improve discard for warlocks.

7

Let’s first look at the lore of resurrection effects in fantasy novels and movies, and in games such as Dungeons and Dragons. (I don’t know WoW so I don’t know if resurrection exists there and if so, how it works).

When you want a dead team mate resurrected, you bring their body to a high level priest, they do some crazy difficult incantations that take a lot of time and some very expensive ingredients, and then life returns to the dead body. That’s at least how it works in the D&D versions I know of.
In novels and movies, the effort and price of resurrection may be different but they, too, always return the soul to the dead body and revive it. No dead body means no resurrection.

What all these effects have in common is that no copies are made. Once you are back in this life, you cannot be resurrected again - at least not until your next death. And that also makes sense from a linguistic point of view, the roots of the word show that a dead body is returned to life, not that a new body is created.

So what does this mean for the game? I think that resurrect would be both more logical from a lore and linguistics point of view AND more balanced if it was implemented by moving a minion from the graveyard zone back onto the board, instead of copying a minion from the graveyard as it does now.

The effect would still be pretty strong. You can still force me to kill Ragnaros again and again, turn after turn. But at least you cannot get two or more copies of Ragnaros, or of Catrina Muerte - at least not by resurrection alone.
You would still be able to generate copies in a different way. And once there are two copies of Ragnaros on the board and I kill both, there are two copies in the graveyard, so now you can also resurrect two in a single turn (but not three).

It would be a nerf to all resurrect cards, and it would be hard to defend doing this without granting full dust refund on all resurrect cards. Which is why I think Blizzard will be hesitant to do this. But on the other hand, they prove expansion after expansion that they really like the resurrect mechanic for the Priest class, and this small change would probably allow many more interesting interactions and designs without breaking game balance too much.

My biggest problem with Resurrect Priest as an archetype in general is that it is a very binary draw-dependent archetype. Coining Barnes turn 3 to pull Y’Shaarj to pull another big boy with one or two resurrect spells in hand wins you the game. Drawing all big minions in your opening hand and finally finding Shadow Essence turn 7 to get a 5/5 Barnes on the board loses the game. It feels like there is no middle ground. The game will (almost) always result in one player feeling there is nothing they can do to stop the onslaught, and the other player getting a win without doing much effort.

In other words: the problem with Resurrect Priest is not game balance related, it is that it saps the fun out of the game.

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8

In WoW you can either run from graveyard to your dead body or pay a price and be resurrected right on the given graveyard. Also, some classes can resurrect a dead player, returning him back to life mostly with a reduced health (35% or 60% most of the time I believe). You made a valid point that it would be more logical to “move” a dead minion from graveyard instead of “copy” him from graveyard while using resurrect effects. What I think is one of the reasons this is not the case in HS is that graveyard is basically whole new mechanics. Once in a game, you would suppose cards like “choose a minion/spell from your graveyard with a cost XY and put it back to your hand” and others. It opens the opportunity to add a whole new system to a game and I personally don´t think HS needs that.

9

Just because a graveyard would make such cards possible doesn’t mean that Team 5 will (want to) start printing those cards.

Sounds better for the Priest than my idea. Probably also better for balance…

10

I wrote “I think”, so yeah.

11

I read that, just wanted to point out that the possibility of such cards should not be a ground for Blizz to stay away from a proper graveyard mechanic.

2 Likes
12

Rez this

Class: Mage

Format: Wild

2x (1) Gravelsnout Knight

2x (1) Magic Trick

2x (1) Saronite Taskmaster

2x (1) Weasel Tunneler

2x (2) Primordial Glyph

2x (3) Counterspell

2x (3) Flight Master

2x (3) Marsh Drake

2x (3) Polymorph: Boar

2x (3) Potion of Polymorph

1x (3) Tinkmaster Overspark

2x (4) Hungry Dragon

2x (4) Polymorph

1x (5) Leeroy Jenkins

2x (6) Hungry Ettin

2x (6) Mad Summoner

AAEBAf0EAq8EugQOTXHrEe4T2bsC5bwCmMQCiNQCgugC9/MC7IwDzJ0D1p0D/50DAA==

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

Times I got destroyed, all but 1. Number of Rez Priests faced 1.

Still worth it :joy:

2 Likes
13

14

@BigHugger, I was trying to avoid the lore discussion, to be honest. However I think you make very good points, hence I won’t avoid it anymore. As much as I would like this to be a gameplay and strategy discussion, deep down, I agree with your assessment that, in the end, this is also a philosophical discussion that has an effect on gameplay. Let me give you an example.

I have a Big Priest deck that runs Stalag and Feugen, plus Barnes and Y’Shaarj. Now think of the current gameplay with that deck and what the gameplay would be if a graveyard mechanic worked like you mentioned. It would be, for me at least, way more difficult but also tremendously more rewarding. It’s even possible that I would build a deck differently because of it.

I’m trying my best to be positive about this, but maybe I’m just whining in a more civil way. In the end, gameplay and potentially card design seem to be more restricted with this.

15

@Nonlocality (And also @FireGhouL I guess) - Just for clarity, the graveyard is not a new mechanic. It has always existed in the game. It is not visible, but it is there. Every minion that dies gets moved there, and resurrection uses the minion pool in the graveyard already.
The only change I propose would be to move instead of copy the minion from the graveyard on resurrection.

@Vlad - I have no problem with fun decks such as the one you are describing. But if a card has a potential to be abused, then far more people will play the decks that abuse it, and only a minory tries to get creative.
(And no, this is not a “thou shalt not netdeck” rant, I understand why people choose to copy successful decks, it is reality, and it has to be taken into account when designing and balancing the game)

I am not really sure why you feel that my proposed change would make your gameplan harder to pull off. I think that once both Feugen and Stalagg die at least once, you really don’t need multiple copies of them; every resurrect that finds either Stalagg or Feugen or Thaddius directly contributes to your plan.
(The only thing I can think of is that you try to increase the odds for the random resurrects by having only one Y’Shaarj and only one Barnes, but multiple Stalaggs and Feugens in the graveyard - but I think that by the time that happens you actually already have won the game)

Restricted in the sense of “things one might pull off with the current card set” … yes. Just the original post in this topic already shows that. Having Catrina die once, then resurrect her and her resurrected copy resurrects another copy of her (and then if I don’t kill them you can get even two extra the turn after) … that would not be possible after my proposed change.
And the same goes for playing Ragnaros, getting him killed, and then playing a few cost-reduced spells to resurrect a full board of Ragnaros’es.
Both interactions would not be completely impossible, but a lot harder since you now need to find another way to get extra copies.

But that being said - restricting the things a card or (in this case) a mechanic can do simultaneously opens the door for the game designers to print new cards and new creative ideas. If I were on the design or balance team of Hearthstone, I would shiver at the sheer thought of creating a new card that resurrects stuff. I don’t say I would flat out refuse, but I would be very careful about balance. And I wish I could have been privy to the discussions around Catrina when her design was first proposed.
Even after my proposed change, Resurrect is still pretty powerful. You can still cheat out stat-reduced copies of expensive cards, and then keep resurrecting them until your opponent is out of removal. Just … not multiple copies. And that change, that power reduction of the effect, paves the way for new cards that would have been too strong with the current resurrection mechanism.

</soapbox>

16

just a simple question from a simple man, why do you care so much about lore that you use it as a pillar when in this game 5 Kobolds can kill any old god. Don’t you think there are greater wholes you’re missing when you say “We should change this mechanic cause it’s inappropriate by lore”

17

BigHugger: I would not call it graveyard in HS case. At least with cards like Mass Resurrection it definitely is not a proper graveyard thing. I played only one card game before HS, it had proper graveyard mechanics, therefore I wrote it could lead to completely new system in the game, because it really leaves you a lot of fun options.

Sheercold: We just did it to highlight that resurrection in general works differently, and more logically, outside of HS.

18

Appreciate the reply, BigHugger, just want to comment on this:

I was going to reply to this with possible in game situations and the fact is that nothing would change, in fact this deck has less variance in resurrects because it runs less minions. It’s impossible to miss either Stalag and Feugen and Thadius after the first Thadius dies. Also, resurrect wise, I depend a lot more of Twillight’s Call then on the other resurrect spells. Twilight’s Call followed by Spirit Lash is just a monster play.

19

Twilight’s Call creates copies of minions that died, so you would have 2 Stalaggs and 2 Feugens in your graveyard after your twilight + lash.

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20

I don’t really care about lore.
I do care about game balance and about the game remaining fun. I think the current behaviour of resurrection is bad for wild, was bad for standard last year, and has the potential to become bad for standard again.
My suggestion fixes that. At least, I like to believe so. I’ll use whatever other arguments it takes to get people to support that idea.

With hindsight, I guess it would have been clearer if I had started my messages with the arguments related to balance and fun, and then added an “oh yeah, there’s also this” to include the arguments about consistency with resurrection in other fantasy settings.