Introduction
When I was playing Magic: The Gathering years ago, one of the most fun experiences I had with the game was creating custom cards. My older brother found some program that allowed to do it and downloaded it (it was back in 2005, mind you). We went ahead and designed tons of cards, then printed and played around with them. Cards were terribly imbalanced – some of them were too weak, others were completely broken, but the fact that we could create the cards ourselves was amazing.
Creating custom cards in Hearthstone is also relatively popular. There is a big “Custom Hearthstone” community on reddit and I’ve been following it for a while. It’s a very active subreddit, where people share their own Hearthstone cards – lots of them. Let’s just say that the majority of them aren’t noteworthy, but then there are some really great, interesting, well-balanced cards that I would just love to play around with in the actual game.
I’d like to take a look at some of those well-made custom cards. I’ve browsed hundreds of submissions from the last month (I wanted to keep things fresh) and picked the best ones. Of course, everything is subjective and you might not like those as much as I do, so if you want to take a look at all the custom cards yourself, just check out the link above.
Custom Cards
Power Trip
In case of this card, it’s not even about the effect itself – it’s about the idea. All Quests that were released with Un’Goro had a downside at first (you start with one less card, you have to spend turn 1 playing the Quest) with a big upside as the reward. But Quests can also be tackled the other way around – you start with an upside and when you finish the Quest, you get some huge downside. This card illustrates that idea really well.
Once you play it, all your minions have +1/+1, which would be amazing in pretty much any deck, but mostly in the Zoo-like, minion-centric decks. A permanent buff like that is very, very powerful. Sure, you still start with one less card, but let’s compare that to Mark of the Lotus which might actually also see play in Zoo deck (and this card is hundred times better). But if you reach 10 mana crystals, you lose the game. So your opponent wouldn’t even have to kill you – he would just have to stall the game long enough.
On the other hand, you could use the seemingly “negative” cards like Felguard to stay alive longer. Making such a build would be pretty interesting. Admittedly, this one would probably be too strong, because majority of the Zoo games don’t last until turn 10 anyway. But that’s not the point – Quest mechanic can still be explored and it would be really fun if some of the Quests would be a bit different.
Gob’has the Quickdrawer
Created by /u/BuffwingComboLord
This is a pretty cool design. Not some crazy, situational, complicated effect. Simple and effective. You would want to play this in a tempo-oriented deck, especially if you’re going to draw multiple cards on that turn. Let’s say that you play this + Whirlwind + Battle Rage with some other minions on the board, that’s a pretty standard play in the Tempo Warrior. On top of getting multiple cards, you’re also equipping a weapon – if it’s something more expensive like Arcanite Reaper, then the tempo gain is insane.
The card is definitely not overpowered, because it you’re not planning to draw multiple cards, it’s just a 4 mana 3/5. Even if it stays on the board for 1 or 2 turns, the chance that it will actually proc is not too high. But that might be the thing I don’t like about this card most – the high variance. There is no “in between” scenario. Well, maybe getting a small weapon like Fiery War Axe, but that’s still good. Most of the time this card is either great and buying you tons of tempo or it’s really bad and only a vanilla 3/5 minion. But I’d still probably test it out in some kind of Midrange/Tempo Warrior, as it is the deck it seems to fit most.
Lord Skaduzzle
It’s a Legendary that changes your Hero Power on the Battlecry… but now your new Hero Power is one-time use. However, instead of being worth like 0.5 mana, now it’s worth… 3 mana on average. So it’s a 2.5 mana tempo gain the next time you use your Hero Power. While the Hero Powers themselves would need to be toned up or down a bit (it seems that their value varies between 2 and 4 mana) the idea of having a one-time Hero Power that you lose completely after casting is quite interesting.
It’s a big downside in the long run, but it’s a huge immediate tempo boost. Let’s say Hunter. It’s like casting 3 Hero Powers in 1. You spend 2 mana instead of 6. But after you’d press that Hero Power button for the 4th time, this would be a downgrade rather than an upgrade.
The card seems good in two cases. First – as a kind of finisher, e.g. it’s a 4 damage for 3 mana for the Hunter, but you can also opt to use it a bit earlier to get a 4/3 body out to curve out better. Second – in the decks that generally don’t plan to use Hero Power anyway. For example, if you play some kind of Aggro/Tempo Rogue or Paladin, then you really don’t want to press that Hero Power too much. But instead, you get a one-time burst of power while losing the long-term value instead. Since you wouldn’t want to press that Hero Power 3-4 more times anyway, this card most likely gave you a nice burst of tempo for almost no cost.
It would also be pretty broken with Sir Finley Mrrgglton if you could manage to play it after you’ve destroyed your Hero Power. You would have an overpowered Hero Power, you would blow it up and then you would replace it with another one. Similarly, things that replace your Hero Power like Lord Jaraxxus might also negate the downside, although Finley is way more flexible.
Clumsy Servant
I really love this idea. The effect is incredibly powerful – 2 mana 2/2 that discovers a spell is like a much better Dark Peddler, a card that was already incredible. But the card gets discarded at the end of the turn. So what does that mean? Basically, if you play it on turn 2, it’s most likely only a 2 mana 2/2. But when you play it later in the game, when you can actually play that spell right away, it’s amazing. So the card has great late game scaling. But that’s not all. We need to remember that discarding something is not always that bad. Let’s take the Warlock’s Quest as an example. This card would give the +1 to the Quest if you didn’t use the spell. Finishing Lakkari Sacrifice is really hard, because you actually need to have that 6 cards you can discard. While you’d have to play a 2 mana 2/2, which is slow, it would guarantee +1 for the Quest at no cost. It’s a bit similar to the Darkshire Librarian in that matter, Librarian is probably even better, but it’s a nice alternative (because later in the game you can actually play the card instead of getting rid of it if you prefer).
At the same time, there are some spells that benefit from discarding them. Right now we have only a single one – Fist of Jaraxxus – which is Wild already, but there might be more spells like that in the future. That’s also the reason why this card would have to be balanced pretty carefully. I mean, discard mechanics in general are very hard to balance, because they’re very swingy one way or the other. Let’s say that you have Soulfire, Doomguard and Silverware Golem and you decide to play Soulfire first (let’s say that you’re desperate and you have to deal that 4 damage). That 50/50 roll can decide between having a 5/7 with Charge on the board or not having it.
Kelena Ashford
But.. why? Why summon a minion to kill it right away? Well, for the sake of Deathrattles of course! If you’re playing a quite dedicated Deathrattle deck, it means that you’re running a lot of them. That’s also the reason why most of the Deathrattle decks play Barnes – it’s just so good when you pull that juicy minion that gets value on death. This is a bit similar, but has better stats and works multiple times. But it also has a chance of failing, because the 1/1 doesn’t stay on the board – if you pull something that doesn’t have a Deathrattle, well, nothing happens.
The dream is, obviously, to get something like Cairne Bloodhoof – then you get a 3/7 + 4/5 for 5 mana, which is already way more than enough to play it. That’s a high roll, but it would happen sometimes. Good thing about this card is that the stats don’t completely suck even if you don’t pull anything good. 3/7 for 5 isn’t amazing, but it won’t make you lose the game if it fails.
One more thing is that it makes the quick N’Zoth better. Pulling a Deathrattle, even pretty small, is always +1 for N’Zoth. In some matchups you really want to drop that card as soon as possible, but you often didn’t kill enough of your own Deathrattles for it to work.
Even though it’s a kind of low roll vs high roll card (it can work wonders, but it can be pretty useless), the variance isn’t THAT high. Most of the Deathrattle cards in your deck won’t have a big effect and even getting something big probably won’t immediately win you the game. It might be worth to run in Deathrattle decks, but it wouldn’t likely break the game.
Fel Addiction
2 mana for 2 cards seems pretty broken, right? And you get more copies of this card, what? Yeah, it seems great, but the more you play it, the harder it will be to stop. Playing it for the first time will probably be good, because you’re not likely to draw those 2 cards soon and there are lots of decks that don’t mind 2 cards being destroyed (like Zoo). But what if you draw one of the copies? If you play it, now you will have 3 copies of that in your deck after destroying 2 more cards, so the chance that you draw one will be more likely. You will end up with more and more in your deck, up to the point that you will draw them all the time. But when you’re that far, you just have to play another one to dig to the actual cards in your deck.
It’s a pretty interesting concept, because you’d always have to ask yourself a question – where do I stop? Do I play one more and risk putting too many copies into my deck? Or do I just ignore it after some point, have a few dead cards and pay the price of cheap draws? I would love to experiment with such a card.
Elemental Skeptic
Elemental? What Elemental? Oooh, I love this design. It’s a great counter-card without being a complete hate card like the Crabs. This has solid stats (you might call a 3 mana 3/4 playable to some degree even without its effect) and the counter-effect is not as punishing + it requires some thought. When it comes to the Hungry Crab, it usually goes like this: you see a Murloc, you eat it. This one is different. You’d want to play this before the key turns, like the Blazecaller turn or Kalimos, Primal Lord turn. It’s often obvious what your opponent is setting up for and making their big Elemental plays just a vanilla minion is a huge, huge hit to the Elemental decks.
Of course, right now the card would be unplayable, because Elementals aren’t too strong. But it would be a cool card to have in the game as a potential counter, or a side-board choice (come on, tournament organizers should finally introduce some kind of small sideboards).
Faerie Whelp
One of the biggest problems of buffs is the fact that they are too easy to counter with spells. You play a minion, you put 2 buffs on it… Hex, Polymorph or even stuff like Execute or Shadow Word: Death can easily get a 3 for 1. One of the best ways to prevent that would be making your minion immune to Spells, but that’s not easy. Right now it’s pretty hard to do that, not to mention the fact that you wouldn’t be able to put more buffs afterwards. And this minion would be a nice solution to that problem.
On your turn, it’s just a 1 mana 1/1, a sort of blank canvas you can put your buffs onto. But on your opponent’s turn, it would have the “It can’t be targeted…” tag, which means that they wouldn’t be able to make the crazy swing turns with a single removal (sure, there would still be somethings that counter it like Deadly Shot, but those are in the minority). In a dedicated buff deck, it might be a great minion. And the best thing is that you could put more and more buffs on it without really worrying that they will be countered with one simple removal.
I still don’t think that buff decks would be great, but hey, A for effort!
Professor Mrrgglton, PhD
I really don’t know why this was made as an ongoing effect instead of a one-time Battlecry that works for the rest of the game. It would keep up with the spirit of the original Sir Finley Mrrgglton and be better. In that state, it’s not really good. But if the effect was permanent, well, that’s another story. It STILL might not be good, but would definitely be an option if Discover-heavy decks.
1 more option might not seem like much, but the main power of Discover cards is that they let you pick from the pool of 3 cards. Having 1 more card to pick from increases the chance of getting exactly what you need. In some cases, quite significantly. If you’re pulling out from a relatively small pool of cards (like Primordial Glyph or Raven Idol for the spell), getting 1 more chance to get exactly what you need would make a huge difference. But even pulling from the completely random cards would decrease the chance of getting 3 bad options.
Would it be broken? Definitely not. Would it make an impact on some games? Yes, yes it would. But the current design, I really don’t like. You can’t realistically count that a minion with an ongoing effect will survive for more than a single turn, and it’s hard to combo multiple Discover cards with 4 mana minion immediately.
Journey to Un’Goro
And last, not really a “new card design”, but how the Un’Goro Quests should look like. Instead of having a Legendary for each class, one Neutral Legendary that just gives you the Quest of the class you play would be much better.
I really love the new expansion, but I hate one thing. Quests, which are one of the main selling points of Un’Goro, are just so unaccessible. If you want to play Quest for each class, you need to pay 14.4k dust for the Quests only – not to mention the decks that support them. It’s just impossible unless you’ve spent hundreds of dollars on packs. This card would at least partially fix the problem and would let nearly anyone play the Quests they want after paying just 1.6k Dust (or opening this, it could have let’s say 2x higher chance to be in a pack than the other Legends).
It could also mean that Blizzard could add more Neutral Legendaries, because we’ve only got 4 this expansion. To be honest, it would probably still hurt their business a bit (people wanting to test different Quests early in the expansion spent A LOT of money to buy packs and then Dust to craft them), but it would be much fair for the players. With 3 expansions per year, they’re already looking to boost their profits significantly, but if they become too greedy, it might bite them back.
Closing
That’s all folks. What do you think about those cards? Would you like to see some of them in the game? Or maybe you have other favorite custom Hearthstone cards that you’d like to share?
If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comment section below. And if you want to be up to date with my articles, you can follow me on Twitter.
Good luck on the ladder and until next time!
