@Beastwolf: A 4/4 for 3 is strong. Now play that against a shaman who now has a 7/7 for 4 because you ramped his card early. Or better yet, his master of evolution now transforms his two drop into a 3 drop. As a rule, it's almost always a bad idea to let an opponent ramp mana.
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3 for 4/4 is trash? The one mana doesnt actually kill you, and due to it not being that large of an advantage it isnt that much stronger
but 4/2 charge do the same thing is a 1 off trade and 4/4 for 3 is very strong, just look at ogre brute.
@Christopher Smithmyer: Ancient of Lore is too powerful as a classic card. As an expansion card it would have been OK, but as an evergreen card it needs to be killed, just like most of the other nerfed cards in this pass.
Between leper gnome and arcane golem, you probably could have had facehunter itself making that call, except I guess it would have looked too much like saying that hunter in general was headed for trash tier.
"We’d like Druid players to feel that other cards can compete with Ancient of Lore" ..... so we're going to nerf this card instead of buffing other cards. Because why make other cards more competitive when we can make one card less competitive. Fuck, I don't even play the game, I just watch Kripp.
Class. Chances are, you've popped a wild growth and have an innervate by turn 4 and can just drop Lore as a 5 drop. Sure, now you're spending 2 cards for your lore, but the tempo swing at that stage of the game is fucking bonkers.
warrior has had new removal options and heavy drops for it's control deck, but druid? Basically the same since beta. How FUN. Again, there is a reason druid was hit the hardest, and that's because it's the most solid class. And on top of that, druid doesn't care if Lore was slow. Druid is the RAMP
Druid got gutted because it NEEDED to be gutted. The standard druid decklist has literally barely changed since HS's release. There was a reason for that, too. Druid cards were just too good to be cycled out for expansion cards. At least Handlock went through phases of demonlock and zoo-hybrids, and
Lore was also incredibly slow, considering that for 7 mana you can throw down a Boom which is much better board-wise than a 7 mana 5/5. Druid just got gutted for no reason - and if your reason was "the card was too good", there's dozens of cards that deserve a nerf too then, but blizz doesn't care.
Lore got nerfed BECAUSE is was too good. Having a 5/5 body for 7 is pretty bad, but when you tack on Arcane Intellect and consolidate that into one card WITH the option to heal instead, it just becomes to fucking good.
No joke, having 2 cards rolled into one is a lot stronger than it seems.
To be fair to blizzard... I think something like 56% of their individual nerfed cards are still played to this day (It was something like 20 still played nerfed cards to 16 nerfed unplayable cards), and that more extreme nerfs typically are there to open up future design space.
