One of the most exciting things about Blizzard’s popular digital card game Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft is that it is always changing as the developer adds new ways to play. And that can lead to even some of the best players looking a little bit silly when they try to predict the future.
Blizzard just added a few dozen new cards to Hearthstone as part of the Blackrock Mountain single-player adventure that it released over the last month or so. And one of the standout new cards is definitely the Grim Patron. This is a card that, whenever it survives damage, summons another Grim Patron. At this point, you probably know all about it because it is definitely a tough deck to fight against — especially when it is combined with a few other specific cards in a Warrior deck. But while we all know how popular and useful Grim Patron is now, many people — even some of the top Hearthstone players — didn’t realize it when Blizzard first announced the card.
Just check out the critics piling on in the video below from YouTube creator Ian Brock:
In the video above, you can see several of the top minds in the Hearthstone community speculating that Grim Patron won’t have much of an effect. Perhaps most humorously, German Hearthstone pro Ekop — who calls himself the best player in the world — says that Grim Patron won’t work in high-ranked play. As he says that, Brock intercuts a clip of Xixo, another German Hearthstone pro, reaching the top rank in Legendary play with his Grim Patron Warrior deck.
Since then, the Hearthstone community has come to widely recognize that the Grim Patron has completely changed how you have to play the game:
https://twitter.com/Ekop1337/status/596762471005855744
The website LiquidHearth.com, which is a popular resource for players of Blizzard’s card game, now ranks the Grim Patron Warrior deck as No. 1 for constructed play. Of the top 18 decks, it really only struggles against three, and it can easily defeat eight.
Take a look:
The real lesson here is that Hearthstone is a game that rewards experimentation. Now, what is Blizzard going to do to improve Paladin, which barely makes Liquid Hearth’s top 18?