@@Stikarii The worst offender of that was Enrage. They literally retroactively deleted the keyword from existence on a whole bunch of cards for no apparent reason other than wanting to print more words on the cards.
I think inspire would've been an awesome keyword if the cards that originally had it factored in that they'd essentially cost 2 more mana than usual and made the effect reflect that. Like make them good minions for the stats and make the ability something worth paying 2 mana for instead of just a slight stat bump or a pettily speck of damage. Phase stalker and dragon's bane were excellent examples of it.
This, inspire cards need to be a GOOD play both on cost and at cost + 2. This was basically never true. Things like synergies, and being repeatable literally only matter if you are already snowballing, so that's entirely irrelevant unless the inspire cards can get you to a position where you can have 3 on board or survive multible turns. But they were generally below par played on either cost.
@Jay Jay And that is why they were worthless, the idea of triggering multiple, or turn after turn, very much win more scenarios. But you don't want to actually run win more cards, you want cards that either A) help you take control in an equal situation B) help you recover from a bad situation C) CLOSE OUT a game entirely Inspire basically needs to be thought of as a fancy "Pay 2: Hero power plus battle cry", and if someone gets multible inspires....well they are generating value via deck synergy rather than comboing out the game, and their opponent has tons of ways to interact with that advantage.
Yeah this is what I think the sentiment was around the time that this mechanic was released. Like a 7 mana 5/4 Confessor Paletress was just... you would never play that card on turn 7. The inspire needed to either be extremely powerful OR be a bonus effect on top of the minion. So like a 4 mana 3/6 with an inspire effect that was pretty decent might have actually seen play. Instead, they ended up giving stats to these things like their inspire effects were guaranteed triggers when they just weren't. It was like they didn't even factor in the cost of the hero power in most of these cases, or I guess they were afraid of the value that would be generated from repeated uses but that just isn't really the case in most situations. When is a 5 mana 3/3 that summons 2 1/1s ever going to be powerful and/or have a chance of remaining in play more than a turn? It's just gonna die to a 2 drop lol.
I actually once won a game against big priest thatnks to gurubashi chicken - he was spamming the 3/9 taunts and I got a gurubashi chicken from FDoS. So I put a blessing of authority on the chicken and got it's attack to like 25 because I kept overkilling the 3/9s
Tbh overkill is a super neat mechanic, it just sucks that it was only printed on cards that didn’t do much damage. It would also be neat to see cards whose overkill scaled based on the excess damage dealt, since that creates a super neat tradeoff for you to consider. Also a minion with both overkill and poisonous would be such a cool design and I’m really sad that nothing like it was made
Arcane overflow for mage is what overkill should have been. It can be still be useful regardless of if you get the excess damage, but it becomes great when you can get a big overkill
Oondatsa says hi. Anyone remember that Big beast Druid with the highroll of cheating out Oondasta with the spell summoning a beast and rushing in and getting a free 12/12 Tyrantus on like turn 5. Good times.
Inspire kinda returned with dragonbane and the stalker for hunter. Dragonbane dealt 5 damage after you used your hero power and the stalker put secrets from your deck.
As someone who has played since release, I think all keywords (Words that are thick in card descriptions) were well made, before new introductions. Enrage, Stealth and Taunt are basic, yet cool concepts that enables strategic aspects to the game. I never understood why "Can't be targeted by spells or hero powers" didn't have a keyword, but in my hs friend circle we just ended up calling it "liquid" because of the adapt name :p. Inspire was a cool feature, but revolved around things that wasn't the card itself, which is a contrast to stealth, enrage ect.. Frenzy is cool, but I hope they stick more to the keywords that already exists. :D edit: Yeah, fuck overkill.
i remember Galakrond expanxion where they made like 5 cards called 'Evasive something' that had this effect (cant be targeted by spells or hero powers) and it really showed that they wanted to make this effect into a keyword 'Evasive'. But something prevented them from making it lol.
I'm a high school student, and its always refreshing to open RUclips before a busy day and see your videos. Keep up the great work, and congrats on 40k!
It seems to me that the only way a keyword can REALLY be flawed is in its execution. On a mechanical level, a keyword like Honorable Kill is a very GOOD thing because it incentivizes you to manipulate things to hit that exact amount instead of saying HAHA BIG NUMBER GO BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR. The only question is if the reward is worth that. Which was kind of the problem with Overkill. A lot of the times, the reward wasn't worth the trouble. You look at Baited Arrow and would ask yourself "Is the Overkill effect worth paying extra over Flanking Strike?" and your answer was No. Of course, imagine if the reward HAD been worth it and how people would have moaned about it. I wonder how Baited Arrow would have been if it had been the SAME cost as Flanking Strike - then it simply becomes a matter of "Guaranteed 3/3 vs. Conditional 5/5" But paying EXTRA for the conditional effect would have killed it.
@@WavemasterAshi Makes sense, Spell Hunter fell off around then since they lost KaC. But Baited Arrow was still run in Zul'jin Unleash the Beast lists which were competitive but not top tier.
Dealing exact lethal when killing a creature? "Rarely happens." Dealing more than exact lethal? "One of the hardest things to do in Hearthstone" I guess creatures almost never die in Hearthstone, then.
Inspire is a great keyword, because it recontextualizes one of the games most basic mechanic. Doesn't matter how bad the batch of cards in grand tournament was
When it comes to keywords there are 2 types. Ones that do things and ones that are a condition. For example Adapt gives a minion an Adapt buff so it's a keyword that does something, and Battlecry triggers an effect when a minion is played from hand so it's a keyword that's a condition for an effect. A keyword that does something can be very flawed inherently thanks to whatever it does making a particular interaction broken, but a conditional keyword is only bad in execution as there will always be ways to make it work with the right card design. Overkill/Honorable-Kill both are condition keywords that have a hard activation requirement for the most part. So there are 2 main ways of making it work. Either make a decent card with a secondary over/honorable-kill effect that isn't necessary but is nice... or make a card that lives or dies on the over/honorable-kill effect but the effect is so good it's worth to at least try to take the risk. Inspire is probably the biggest "In Hindsight we probably made a bad assumption" in terms of game design as it was a mechanic balanced around hero powers being once per turn and costing 2 mana. Demon Hunter had a decent way of abusing inspire a little bit, but was surprised Raza + shadowreaper anduin wasn't mentioned considering it broke both assumptions with a hero power costing 0 and being able to be used several times in a single turn.
Honestly I dont think its much of the keywords that made them bad rather than the cards themselves... Except for lackeys, random into random was such a bad design
Silver hand regent is actually pretty good if you have silver hand synergy, it basically makes your hero power summon 2 1/1s. I don't think it's bad by design. Though I think it's kinda weird to have it neutral.
Its funny that everyone say that honorable kill is too hard to use, but everyone also say that overkill is verry hard to use. But every kills are over or honorable 😂
Yeah, way too many overkill cards were like, 3 damage or less, making it really hard to get it to trigger. Wasn't the hunter rush Rhino with overkill piercing popular because it could actually trigger it's overkill?
While I don't mean to throw shade it's really weird that he goes from "honorable kill is bad because killing something with exact damage never really happens" followed by "overkill is bad because doing more damage than it's heath is really hard to do" I feel like both of these things can't be true at the same time
I mean... I'll say that Recruiter is actually bonkers in priest, specifically DK Priest, as each HP gives a 1 mana 2/2 on board that refreshes your hero power, allowing 10+ damage off of one card, plus decent board presence, without sacrificing your hand. I also liked it in old buff pally, back before decks became too bonkers for something so greedy lol.
Mechanics are bad if they are not immediate, if the value is too low, or if the condition is out of your control. Having to trigger an effect without it being too counterproductive in its cost is why many of the bad effects don't work. Inspire was bad not because the mechanic was bad, but the cards themselves were. TGT was also a major contrast in power level to GvG and Naxxramas, which were heavily powercrept and more synergistic overall. Dragonbane and Phase Stalker are good examples of how Inspire should have been: already solid for its cost stat wise with an effect that made the payout even better at the cost of using your hero power. The hero power itself is already undervalued, so using it is not ideal unless you have no choice. To the exception of DH, Hunter, and Warlock, the basic Hero Powers weren't meant to be used as a primary strategy. Baku, Justicar, and Genn changed that because the value changed from undervalued to heavily valued.
I think inspire was a great mechanic and it was fine even if it was a bit underpowered, weak power does not make it a bad mechanic. It was a natural extension to an existing mechanic (hero power), it a lot of cool stuff, offer a lot of flexibility*, had lots of internal synergies, and it makes sense flavor wise that when your hero does something it makes the subordinate be better. It really is something I would like to see made evergreen and explored more as it had a lot of design space and now that there are many ways to buff hero power they make great payout as they are value-oriented. *Like silver hand regent could be drop as kinda weak 3 mana 3/3 in a pinch or as a 5 mana 5/5.
A card is broken when 9 out of 10 decks are using it. I love kazakusan but that is too much. Playing 3-4 dragons seems to be a good way to nerf that card a little bit
Demon Hunter makes any mechanic that relies on Hero power usage broken on neutral cards because they would just be strictly better in DH than any other class. The whole creation of DH in Hearthstone was a huge mistake from a game design standpoint, because of the 1-mana HP and the fact that the class just feels like a mix of "me go face" Hunter, weapon Rogue and Drawlock. The class has very little uniqueness to its identity (which is something they managed to avoid for Paladin and Priest), and feels terrible to play against.
@@Ceracio Yeah :D I was wondering recently why they didn't make another class yet (monk or deathknight would be the obvious choice). But then I realized just how broken demonhunter was and basically still is.
@@LordKeram Tbh I would really like a Monk or Death Knight class, because I feel like they could make something thematically interesting and not too broken, but it seems that they don't really want to, seeing how they handled DH.
@@Ceracio Yeah I have the same though process. But I was thinking what hero power you could give them and it's kind of hard. Unless you just say fuck it and give them like a 3-4 cost hero power that is. But yeah I agree you could do some interesting stuff with both.
@@LordKeram Maybe give Monk a Hero Power along the lines of "2: Return an allied minion to your hand, it costs 1 less" to go towards a handbuff/battlecry mechanic. Maybe give them a Legendary that keeps its buffs between board and hand, so you can handbuff it, play it, buff it on board, return it to hand, etc. and it would keep its stats. Depending on how the did it, it could be either fun and quite interactive, or utterly broken. Death Knight I can't really think of a mechanic except maybe killing minions and reanimating them as (weaker) allies, but I've no idea how that would work for a Hero Power.
Rarran please make a video in the future regarding the future of HS and the 1 year rotation. Right now we are on the last exp and to get back to HS atm is useless since it will all be rotated in around 2 months according to Kibler. He said that the best time to get into HS is in 2 months if you are thinking of coming back. Considering this I think that I will come back at that time and spend like 300 dollars at least to get a lot of shit and for real get back into HS. Please make a video in regards to this. I think a lot of us would like it. Bless u and you look fantastic!
Your content is AMAZING! You have a sublime knack for story telling and your video quality is progressing very well. I look forward to watching your channel progressing into perhaps content outside of Hearthstone perhaps applicable to larger audiences outside of HS. Keep it up Rarran!
I have a theory Overkill is from a list of keywords from the design phase of Vanilla they replaced another mechanic with when they wanted to power down after kobolds and catacombs and surrounding sets. Like they had to know HS is so tempo centric a keyword having to wait a turn id baaaadddd
So it's difficult to overkill and difficult to get an honorable kill? Something ain't right here. The only option left is underkill and that ain't a good one either.
Honorable kill and Overkill are literally the worst designed mechanics ever printed, maybe except the deal random amount of damage thing, but it wasn’t a keyword. These just feel like Blizzard had no ideas as to what mechanic would fit the expansions well and they just dropped some random shit, which doesn’t even feel like a unique mechanic…
On the topic of "Damage Variation" from Goblins Versus Gnomes: Lightning Storm also used to work this way too, and it was actually cursed. It would deal 2-3 damage to all enemy minions. There were some situations where your opponent had a board of 3 health minions, and somebody was going to walk away feeling cheated by Lightning Storm no matter the outcome. Also Imp-losion is probably just about the worst designed card. The variance on damage is bad enough, but whoever decided that the number of imps summoned by this thing should directly correlate to the damage it dealt was surely on some kind of drug. Probably dopamine caused by the idea of gambling for your wins. You basically won two high rolls at the same time lol. I also gotta say that it's pretty funny how they introduced "Overkill" saw how hard it was to kill an enemy with more than enough damage and then decided to release Honorable Kill which was just as difficult to trigger. Effects that rely on your opponent playing minions of specific values or types are not good for a general mechanical sense. They're tech cards at best. Things like the crab that eats murlocs and the ooze cards are good because they're one-of-a-kind cards with specific intended purposes. Imagine if the next expansion comes out and the newest keyword is "Goopy-boi" where the card with the "Goopy-boi" keyword can eat any weapon to gain the bonus effect. Wow, nobody would play weapons and the entire keyword would be useless lol
The problem with cards that have either the overkill or honorable kill keyword is that they’re useless half of the time, so what I think they should have done is have both of them released at the same time and be used on the same cards. Honorable kill would give you a solid bonus effect while overkill would give you a slightly more powerful version of that same effect. That way your overkill cards aren’t useless if you kill a minion honorably and vice versa.
Overkill feels like a self defeating prophecy. The effect has gotta be strong to bother printing it, but if the effect is strong, the stats are going to be lowered, making it harder to actually get an overkill on the opponent because you’re going to be playing weaker minions than them all game for the same mana
I think the blast wave is a pretty valid card. If you can get some spell damage against a deck spamming a lot of minions, then you can get a whole lot of spells.
It's really fun to watch your videos, it gave me back the fun of watching Hearthstone content ✨ and your fantastic narration makes it so much more entertaining
Would love to see a vid where he ranks all the single expansion gimmick mechanics. based on the impact they had on their current metas and how long they saw play even after being no longer printed. Echo, Overkill, Honorable Kill, Dredge, Recruit, Spellburst, Adapt, Corrupt, Colossal, Frenzy, Inspire, Invoke, magnetic, Reborn, Tradeable, Lackey, C'thun, Jade Golems, Joust, Twinspell. I think that's all of them. That's a total of 20 different keywords and mechanics that were only supported as printed cards in a single expansion. Would love to see him go through each one and rank them and maybe see which ones deserve to come back. Personally i really liked the Corrupt mechanic , the Spellburst mechanic and i'm also loving Dredge currently. Those would be my top 3.
Questlines hands down the worst mechanic from a design perspective. Since quests will give you an objective that is completed by a singular method it makes games feel a little samey. This isn't my problem with the cards, however, as older quests usually had distinct downsides, or less powerful effects, to make up for that ( aside from the Un'Goro Mage Quest which was so good it had to be nerfed for Wild. ). You had to start the game with -1 card and while it's always a turn 1 play it wouldn't generate you value nor play for Tempo. They also used to force you to run suboptimal packages/cards to complete your goal. By giving them incremental rewards that compensate for the loss of a potentially better opening hand you remove an inherent weakness to this mechanic. And since most Questlines are hypersynergistic you aren't forced to put in less powerful cards to make you think creatively. But to put insult to injury and the thing that really bothers me to this day is the lack of counterplay. Even in Wild, where cards such as Loatheb and Dirty Rat exist, it didn't matter as a semi-decent player would off on their Quest completion until they were able to play the reward without getting punished. The only way this was solved was by power creep and slight nerfs which didn't address the main issue.
The worst part about the overkill cards is that they weren't even great in the best case scenario. If it's hard to activate, but worth the effect it would have been fine.
1:49 I see two good reasons to play Silver Hand Regent. Edit: Hey, have you considered doing best/worst duels passives & treasures? I'd like to see someone throwing shade at "Draconic Dream: After you summon a dragon, shuffle a Dream Portal into your deck that summons a dragon". Dragons have a high mana cost, so you won't be playing them in early game. When you summon them, the shuffled cards might be the last of your deck. When you summon a dragon, it might be a small one. If you summon a big dragon, it might still be bad because you lose the battlecry.
Unpopular opinion: jade goldem is a great mechanic that was ruined by jade idol being ridiculously broken. For example jade rogue had to do interesting plays to get max value, like Brann, raptor, card bounces, etc. Meanwhile druid just played the same card a bunch of times...
Correction: Murlock knight was busted. There were builds that just broke the game if you played extreme agro Pali Murlock in the grand tournament. I would love to see inspire to make a come back. Makes more balance sense then colossal insta value in my opinion.
There is overkill and honorable kill, next they will make a line of poisonous cards with underkill. Which will give you special thing if you do less damage than needed to kill a minion.
Gurubashi chicken is just an hommage to angy chicken, and it's more of a card that's for people who go "can I win with this" than to be competitive. I don't think it's fair to blame it for being bad when it's purpose is being bad.
But crackle was amazeballs. What I liked about it was actually the lack of consistency. SOMETIMES ya get the W and sometimes it's a hard no. I miss that randomness of shamans. Sure it's not a good meta idea, but it sure was fun
Inspire is one of my favorite keywords ever honestly. I just wish there were better cards to go with it My fav keywords from all the sets are probably Inspire, Overkill, Honorable Kill, Corrupt, Spellburst, Tradeable, Frenzy, and my favorite is definitely Discover
Spare parts were terrible because they were terrible. Piloted Shredder was a great example because of his very rare but brute high- and lowrolls. At his time they should have released him as a 4-2 and he still would've been great, nowadays he wouldn't even see play in Standard anymore.
Why were TGT cards and mechanics discussed with the saviors of ulduum trailer showing in the background? And witchwood and RR playing while honorable kill cards are up? Scholomance's trailer behind spare parts?
Tourist is probably my least favorite, followed by odd/even, Highlander, titan, quest/sidequest, then honorable kill. I actually like the other keywords.
In my opinion honourable kill is a great keyword, balanced and takes skill. If I had to pick a worst key word it’s dormant. I’d explain but no one reads long comments.
Hey Rarran, please reboot disgusidetoast's old video series "card origins," about character lore from wow. You do a great job telling history stories about the game, and this seems to slot into that type of content. Many hearthstoners never played wow, so it makes hearthstone more fun knowing who it is we're seeing on the battlefield.
Let me say what I think it's the worse mechanic we've ever got: magnetic why? well, you could be playing perfectly but not able to kill one 1/1 minion that spawned from a deathrattle, which then would turn into a 14/14 behemoth with lifesteal, divine shield and taunt, it made you have to sink resources into killing every mech on board every turn, and if you so missed 1 1/1 on board then you had to deal with a gigantic minion which, considering you couldn't deal with a 1/1 then you also probably didn't have how to deal with a 11/11 or 14/14 if overkill is bad because rastakhan had bad cards, then magnetic is bad because of the opposite, magnetic cards could hold up decently by themselves but would be extremely unfun to go against the option to build different types of board was pretty neat, but it only turned this problem worse, specially down the line with SN1P-SN4P when you could force different kinds of removal because of echo, which exausted the resources the opponent had to deal with your finishers
Objectively, the worst is by far ECHO. Because they keep using it over and over and over again... WITHOUT USING THE KEYWORD THEY MADE SPECIFICALLY FOR THAT MECHANIC.
The issue with some of the "bad" keywords is the cards are bad and it isn't the keywords fault. Cards like Oondasta were actually good and playable with the Overkill mechanic because he wasn't horrendously understatted and had an impactful effect. What 90% of Overkill, Frenzy, and Honorable Kill minions have in common is they are understatted and pretty much all have low attack and high health. The mechanics would've been better if they were premium statted with a chance at an upside.
In my opinion, the worst keyword/mechanic is joust. A mechanic that is simultaneously RNG and a build-around does not lend itself well to very good or interesting card design. The joust payoff can't be too strong or else it threatens to swing the match based off something that's too uncontrollable, but because the joust payoff can't be too strong it can never be worth building your deck around. The only good joust cards were cards that were already reasonably playable when you lost the joust that just happened to get some incidental value when you did win. From what I've heard, joust was apparently envisioned as a way for slower decks to punish aggro for only running low cost minions, but a lot of the joust cards aren't even designed that way, like the 4-mana 5/3 that gains charge. Overkill gets memed on all the time, but I think it could have been a good mechanic if so many of the cards weren't intentionally powered down.
I don't agree with Honorable kill. It is one of the easiest keywords to pull of, early and mid game. Most of the honorable kill cards usually deal 2 or 3 damage, and those HP are the most common ones. + you always have material to work out the enemy minion's HP for a hk. Honestly, every time I'm up against Korrak, I kill him in one shot.
Corrupt was horrible. It always gave you the idea you had a potentially good card but you usually had to wait 3 turns longer to be able to play it with corrupt, which was not a great feeling, I think manathirst is a much better version of the same idea. Yes, you play it later than at the normal manacost but you don’t have to actually play more expensive cards first without really wanting to play those.
How can overkills and honorable kills both be niche, rare things that don’t happen often enough to be useful? Minions dying is like the least rare thing in hearthstone, and they either get overkilled or honorable killed outside of “destroy” effects
lol, hold on, how can both honorable kill and overkill be hard to achieve at the same time? It's impossible to not do at least one of these when killing a minion.
Discover is the WORST keyword ever introduced into the game! Why? Because the opponent can just get card after card out of nowhere and they always have a full fucking hand because they discovered 10 cards during the game.
One thing I learned from watching hearthstone streamers such as Trump and even you is to look at a card as all the aspects tied to its effect. In that regard, Inspire was basically having a minion that costs 2 more mana for their effects, over many turns, because else they are vanillas. And lackeys aren't lacking in anything because as far as I remember, the lackeys that evolved a minion and the one that gave +2 health and taunt were the "worst" because they depended on having another minion around and did nothing else, the +1 attack and haste one was way better specially for rush decks at the time, and by god, what were they thinking with dragon and spell lackey? Access to every spell in the game, with no restrictions, for 1 mana. Those two were overloaded
As a Magic player I look at Hearthstone cards and I think k everytime how good would that be in Magic EDH (Commander for those who have heard about it) and honestly Siphon Mana would be amazing in Magic a 2 mana bolt that reduces the cost of all spells with an exact damage even if it was till end of turn it'd still be amazing
The worst keyword that is not a keyword is definitely "Can't attack" Like, c'mon, people. It's right in front of you. You are playing a minion for which (most of the time) you need another card to use effectively as a normal minion. It's ass.
For me the worst keywords were the ones that weren't turned into keywords, like joust and the spell immune effect (ex. faerie dragon).
Yup, and the ones they decided to stop using despite new cards having the same effect (echo -> "repeatable this turn")
@@Stikarii The worst offender of that was Enrage. They literally retroactively deleted the keyword from existence on a whole bunch of cards for no apparent reason other than wanting to print more words on the cards.
@@Stikarii echo and repeatable this turn aren't the same, but inspire and after you use your hero power are
@@Ledros Not anymore, but they used to be the same ;) Also there is no reason for any of the "repeatable this turn" cards not to become "echo"
@@Ledros
How exactly are echo and repeatable this turn not the same thing?
I think inspire would've been an awesome keyword if the cards that originally had it factored in that they'd essentially cost 2 more mana than usual and made the effect reflect that. Like make them good minions for the stats and make the ability something worth paying 2 mana for instead of just a slight stat bump or a pettily speck of damage. Phase stalker and dragon's bane were excellent examples of it.
This, inspire cards need to be a GOOD play both on cost and at cost + 2.
This was basically never true.
Things like synergies, and being repeatable literally only matter if you are already snowballing, so that's entirely irrelevant unless the inspire cards can get you to a position where you can have 3 on board or survive multible turns.
But they were generally below par played on either cost.
@Jay Jay
And that is why they were worthless, the idea of triggering multiple, or turn after turn, very much win more scenarios. But you don't want to actually run win more cards, you want cards that either
A) help you take control in an equal situation
B) help you recover from a bad situation
C) CLOSE OUT a game entirely
Inspire basically needs to be thought of as a fancy "Pay 2: Hero power plus battle cry", and if someone gets multible inspires....well they are generating value via deck synergy rather than comboing out the game, and their opponent has tons of ways to interact with that advantage.
Yeah this is what I think the sentiment was around the time that this mechanic was released.
Like a 7 mana 5/4 Confessor Paletress was just... you would never play that card on turn 7.
The inspire needed to either be extremely powerful OR be a bonus effect on top of the minion. So like a 4 mana 3/6 with an inspire effect that was pretty decent might have actually seen play. Instead, they ended up giving stats to these things like their inspire effects were guaranteed triggers when they just weren't. It was like they didn't even factor in the cost of the hero power in most of these cases, or I guess they were afraid of the value that would be generated from repeated uses but that just isn't really the case in most situations. When is a 5 mana 3/3 that summons 2 1/1s ever going to be powerful and/or have a chance of remaining in play more than a turn? It's just gonna die to a 2 drop lol.
This is why the hunter 2/1 was pretty much the only that saw play
I actually once won a game against big priest thatnks to gurubashi chicken - he was spamming the 3/9 taunts and I got a gurubashi chicken from FDoS. So I put a blessing of authority on the chicken and got it's attack to like 25 because I kept overkilling the 3/9s
Tbh overkill is a super neat mechanic, it just sucks that it was only printed on cards that didn’t do much damage. It would also be neat to see cards whose overkill scaled based on the excess damage dealt, since that creates a super neat tradeoff for you to consider.
Also a minion with both overkill and poisonous would be such a cool design and I’m really sad that nothing like it was made
Arcane overflow for mage is what overkill should have been. It can be still be useful regardless of if you get the excess damage, but it becomes great when you can get a big overkill
Oondatsa says hi. Anyone remember that Big beast Druid with the highroll of cheating out Oondasta with the spell summoning a beast and rushing in and getting a free 12/12 Tyrantus on like turn 5. Good times.
Overkill should either grant bigger bonuses the bigger the overkill is or it should just be “after this kills a minion” keyword.
It's funny how shit overkill was compared to hk.
Inspire kinda returned with dragonbane and the stalker for hunter. Dragonbane dealt 5 damage after you used your hero power and the stalker put secrets from your deck.
With those you would pay two more mana for the effect anyway
It's hard to do exact damage.
It's hard to do excess damage.
What?
It’s hard to kill things?
Building your deck around one or the other happening is far too inconsistent.
As someone who has played since release, I think all keywords (Words that are thick in card descriptions) were well made, before new introductions. Enrage, Stealth and Taunt are basic, yet cool concepts that enables strategic aspects to the game. I never understood why "Can't be targeted by spells or hero powers" didn't have a keyword, but in my hs friend circle we just ended up calling it "liquid" because of the adapt name :p.
Inspire was a cool feature, but revolved around things that wasn't the card itself, which is a contrast to stealth, enrage ect..
Frenzy is cool, but I hope they stick more to the keywords that already exists. :D
edit: Yeah, fuck overkill.
i remember Galakrond expanxion where they made like 5 cards called 'Evasive something' that had this effect (cant be targeted by spells or hero powers) and it really showed that they wanted to make this effect into a keyword 'Evasive'. But something prevented them from making it lol.
I'm a high school student, and its always refreshing to open RUclips before a busy day and see your videos. Keep up the great work, and congrats on 40k!
Exact same here X
It seems to me that the only way a keyword can REALLY be flawed is in its execution. On a mechanical level, a keyword like Honorable Kill is a very GOOD thing because it incentivizes you to manipulate things to hit that exact amount instead of saying HAHA BIG NUMBER GO BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR. The only question is if the reward is worth that.
Which was kind of the problem with Overkill. A lot of the times, the reward wasn't worth the trouble. You look at Baited Arrow and would ask yourself "Is the Overkill effect worth paying extra over Flanking Strike?" and your answer was No. Of course, imagine if the reward HAD been worth it and how people would have moaned about it. I wonder how Baited Arrow would have been if it had been the SAME cost as Flanking Strike - then it simply becomes a matter of "Guaranteed 3/3 vs. Conditional 5/5" But paying EXTRA for the conditional effect would have killed it.
Baited Arrow was one of the only good Overkill cards though
@@EpixGaminginc But did you really see it often? Maybe my memory's faulty, but I don't recall seeing it much.
@@WavemasterAshi every spell hunter and their mother ran it if my memory isn't too faulty
@@zalanmarkus4939 I mean, you may very well be right...I was only playing a bit during this set, I became more active starting with Rise of Shadows.
@@WavemasterAshi Makes sense, Spell Hunter fell off around then since they lost KaC. But Baited Arrow was still run in Zul'jin Unleash the Beast lists which were competitive but not top tier.
Dealing exact lethal when killing a creature? "Rarely happens."
Dealing more than exact lethal? "One of the hardest things to do in Hearthstone"
I guess creatures almost never die in Hearthstone, then.
Inspire is a great keyword, because it recontextualizes one of the games most basic mechanic. Doesn't matter how bad the batch of cards in grand tournament was
When it comes to keywords there are 2 types. Ones that do things and ones that are a condition. For example Adapt gives a minion an Adapt buff so it's a keyword that does something, and Battlecry triggers an effect when a minion is played from hand so it's a keyword that's a condition for an effect. A keyword that does something can be very flawed inherently thanks to whatever it does making a particular interaction broken, but a conditional keyword is only bad in execution as there will always be ways to make it work with the right card design.
Overkill/Honorable-Kill both are condition keywords that have a hard activation requirement for the most part. So there are 2 main ways of making it work. Either make a decent card with a secondary over/honorable-kill effect that isn't necessary but is nice... or make a card that lives or dies on the over/honorable-kill effect but the effect is so good it's worth to at least try to take the risk.
Inspire is probably the biggest "In Hindsight we probably made a bad assumption" in terms of game design as it was a mechanic balanced around hero powers being once per turn and costing 2 mana. Demon Hunter had a decent way of abusing inspire a little bit, but was surprised Raza + shadowreaper anduin wasn't mentioned considering it broke both assumptions with a hero power costing 0 and being able to be used several times in a single turn.
Honestly I dont think its much of the keywords that made them bad rather than the cards themselves... Except for lackeys, random into random was such a bad design
Silver hand regent is actually pretty good if you have silver hand synergy, it basically makes your hero power summon 2 1/1s.
I don't think it's bad by design. Though I think it's kinda weird to have it neutral.
7:01 wait really? the minion designed as a joke ala angry chicken sucks? what a surprise !!!!
Its funny that everyone say that honorable kill is too hard to use, but everyone also say that overkill is verry hard to use. But every kills are over or honorable 😂
Problem with overkill cards is the too low damage that it can deal, every single one of them.
Adapt was my favourite. Despite you having only 3 options to choose from, you could get good effects on your minions that could have won the game.
Hot take:overkill is better then honorable kill because it's easier to proc, but the overkill cards were underpowered so it made the keyword feel weak
Yeah, way too many overkill cards were like, 3 damage or less, making it really hard to get it to trigger. Wasn't the hunter rush Rhino with overkill piercing popular because it could actually trigger it's overkill?
The fact that Overkill didn't trigger on your opponents turn was SO DUMB!
Guribashi chicken is great to get when making a zombeast. Trash in every other circumstance
While I don't mean to throw shade it's really weird that he goes from "honorable kill is bad because killing something with exact damage never really happens" followed by "overkill is bad because doing more damage than it's heath is really hard to do" I feel like both of these things can't be true at the same time
I mean... I'll say that Recruiter is actually bonkers in priest, specifically DK Priest, as each HP gives a 1 mana 2/2 on board that refreshes your hero power, allowing 10+ damage off of one card, plus decent board presence, without sacrificing your hand. I also liked it in old buff pally, back before decks became too bonkers for something so greedy lol.
Mechanics are bad if they are not immediate, if the value is too low, or if the condition is out of your control. Having to trigger an effect without it being too counterproductive in its cost is why many of the bad effects don't work.
Inspire was bad not because the mechanic was bad, but the cards themselves were. TGT was also a major contrast in power level to GvG and Naxxramas, which were heavily powercrept and more synergistic overall. Dragonbane and Phase Stalker are good examples of how Inspire should have been: already solid for its cost stat wise with an effect that made the payout even better at the cost of using your hero power. The hero power itself is already undervalued, so using it is not ideal unless you have no choice. To the exception of DH, Hunter, and Warlock, the basic Hero Powers weren't meant to be used as a primary strategy.
Baku, Justicar, and Genn changed that because the value changed from undervalued to heavily valued.
I would love if inspire and corrupt were present in a couple cards each expansion if they fit the theme.
I think inspire was a great mechanic and it was fine even if it was a bit underpowered, weak power does not make it a bad mechanic. It was a natural extension to an existing mechanic (hero power), it a lot of cool stuff, offer a lot of flexibility*, had lots of internal synergies, and it makes sense flavor wise that when your hero does something it makes the subordinate be better. It really is something I would like to see made evergreen and explored more as it had a lot of design space and now that there are many ways to buff hero power they make great payout as they are value-oriented.
*Like silver hand regent could be drop as kinda weak 3 mana 3/3 in a pinch or as a 5 mana 5/5.
A card is broken when 9 out of 10 decks are using it. I love kazakusan but that is too much. Playing 3-4 dragons seems to be a good way to nerf that card a little bit
To be honest the fact that Demon Hunter exists actually makes the inspire keyword a broken mechanic and means it will probably never be used again.
Demon Hunter makes any mechanic that relies on Hero power usage broken on neutral cards because they would just be strictly better in DH than any other class. The whole creation of DH in Hearthstone was a huge mistake from a game design standpoint, because of the 1-mana HP and the fact that the class just feels like a mix of "me go face" Hunter, weapon Rogue and Drawlock. The class has very little uniqueness to its identity (which is something they managed to avoid for Paladin and Priest), and feels terrible to play against.
@@Ceracio Yeah :D I was wondering recently why they didn't make another class yet (monk or deathknight would be the obvious choice). But then I realized just how broken demonhunter was and basically still is.
@@LordKeram Tbh I would really like a Monk or Death Knight class, because I feel like they could make something thematically interesting and not too broken, but it seems that they don't really want to, seeing how they handled DH.
@@Ceracio Yeah I have the same though process. But I was thinking what hero power you could give them and it's kind of hard. Unless you just say fuck it and give them like a 3-4 cost hero power that is. But yeah I agree you could do some interesting stuff with both.
@@LordKeram Maybe give Monk a Hero Power along the lines of "2: Return an allied minion to your hand, it costs 1 less" to go towards a handbuff/battlecry mechanic. Maybe give them a Legendary that keeps its buffs between board and hand, so you can handbuff it, play it, buff it on board, return it to hand, etc. and it would keep its stats. Depending on how the did it, it could be either fun and quite interactive, or utterly broken. Death Knight I can't really think of a mechanic except maybe killing minions and reanimating them as (weaker) allies, but I've no idea how that would work for a Hero Power.
Spellburst is the best. It’s been a mainstay in the game since release. Thanks for another great video rarran and congrats on the subs!!!
Rarran please make a video in the future regarding the future of HS and the 1 year rotation. Right now we are on the last exp and to get back to HS atm is useless since it will all be rotated in around 2 months according to Kibler. He said that the best time to get into HS is in 2 months if you are thinking of coming back. Considering this I think that I will come back at that time and spend like 300 dollars at least to get a lot of shit and for real get back into HS. Please make a video in regards to this. I think a lot of us would like it. Bless u and you look fantastic!
Honestly, as an arena player, I enjoy the honorable kill mechanic quite a bit.
I think honourable kill is one of the most balanced keywords for arena, where health points are so impt
exactly, it's a really great mechanic. It makes you think and strategise really hard.
Your content is AMAZING! You have a sublime knack for story telling and your video quality is progressing very well.
I look forward to watching your channel progressing into perhaps content outside of Hearthstone perhaps applicable to larger audiences outside of HS. Keep it up Rarran!
I think soon I will do a movie list video
I have a theory Overkill is from a list of keywords from the design phase of Vanilla they replaced another mechanic with when they wanted to power down after kobolds and catacombs and surrounding sets. Like they had to know HS is so tempo centric a keyword having to wait a turn id baaaadddd
So it's difficult to overkill and difficult to get an honorable kill? Something ain't right here. The only option left is underkill and that ain't a good one either.
As mentioned somewhere below in Arena all these keywords make so much more sense and as an arena player i really used all those cards
Honorable kill and Overkill are literally the worst designed mechanics ever printed, maybe except the deal random amount of damage thing, but it wasn’t a keyword. These just feel like Blizzard had no ideas as to what mechanic would fit the expansions well and they just dropped some random shit, which doesn’t even feel like a unique mechanic…
If MTG has taught me anything over nearly two decades is that there are no bad keywords just terrible applications of those keywords.
On the topic of "Damage Variation" from Goblins Versus Gnomes: Lightning Storm also used to work this way too, and it was actually cursed. It would deal 2-3 damage to all enemy minions. There were some situations where your opponent had a board of 3 health minions, and somebody was going to walk away feeling cheated by Lightning Storm no matter the outcome.
Also Imp-losion is probably just about the worst designed card. The variance on damage is bad enough, but whoever decided that the number of imps summoned by this thing should directly correlate to the damage it dealt was surely on some kind of drug. Probably dopamine caused by the idea of gambling for your wins. You basically won two high rolls at the same time lol.
I also gotta say that it's pretty funny how they introduced "Overkill" saw how hard it was to kill an enemy with more than enough damage and then decided to release Honorable Kill which was just as difficult to trigger.
Effects that rely on your opponent playing minions of specific values or types are not good for a general mechanical sense. They're tech cards at best. Things like the crab that eats murlocs and the ooze cards are good because they're one-of-a-kind cards with specific intended purposes.
Imagine if the next expansion comes out and the newest keyword is "Goopy-boi" where the card with the "Goopy-boi" keyword can eat any weapon to gain the bonus effect.
Wow, nobody would play weapons and the entire keyword would be useless lol
I actually quite like honerable kill, because it incentivizes you to make smart trades, and makes you pay more attention to the numbers on the board.
The problem with cards that have either the overkill or honorable kill keyword is that they’re useless half of the time, so what I think they should have done is have both of them released at the same time and be used on the same cards. Honorable kill would give you a solid bonus effect while overkill would give you a slightly more powerful version of that same effect. That way your overkill cards aren’t useless if you kill a minion honorably and vice versa.
Overkill feels like a self defeating prophecy. The effect has gotta be strong to bother printing it, but if the effect is strong, the stats are going to be lowered, making it harder to actually get an overkill on the opponent because you’re going to be playing weaker minions than them all game for the same mana
I really loved the adapt mechanic, I miss these days of ungoro
I legit wasn't aware of Farraki Battleaxe being a card, and I must have 2 copies of it due to duplicate protection!
I think the blast wave is a pretty valid card. If you can get some spell damage against a deck spamming a lot of minions, then you can get a whole lot of spells.
Gratz on 40k!
Thank you so much 😀
I was so hopeful for inspire I added more value to the hero power, something that had been in the game forever
It's really fun to watch your videos, it gave me back the fun of watching Hearthstone content ✨ and your fantastic narration makes it so much more entertaining
I honestly didn’t know any overkill cards besides, baited arrow. It was a nice refresher
Would love to see a vid where he ranks all the single expansion gimmick mechanics. based on the impact they had on their current metas and how long they saw play even after being no longer printed.
Echo, Overkill, Honorable Kill, Dredge, Recruit, Spellburst, Adapt, Corrupt, Colossal, Frenzy, Inspire, Invoke, magnetic, Reborn, Tradeable, Lackey, C'thun, Jade Golems, Joust, Twinspell.
I think that's all of them. That's a total of 20 different keywords and mechanics that were only supported as printed cards in a single expansion. Would love to see him go through each one and rank them and maybe see which ones deserve to come back. Personally i really liked the Corrupt mechanic , the Spellburst mechanic and i'm also loving Dredge currently. Those would be my top 3.
Questlines hands down the worst mechanic from a design perspective.
Since quests will give you an objective that is completed by a singular method it makes games feel a little samey.
This isn't my problem with the cards, however, as older quests usually had distinct downsides, or less powerful effects, to make up for that ( aside from the Un'Goro Mage Quest which was so good it had to be nerfed for Wild. ).
You had to start the game with -1 card and while it's always a turn 1 play it wouldn't generate you value nor play for Tempo. They also used to force you to run suboptimal packages/cards to complete your goal.
By giving them incremental rewards that compensate for the loss of a potentially better opening hand you remove an inherent weakness to this mechanic. And since most Questlines are hypersynergistic you aren't forced to put in less powerful cards to make you think creatively.
But to put insult to injury and the thing that really bothers me to this day is the lack of counterplay. Even in Wild, where cards such as Loatheb and Dirty Rat exist, it didn't matter as a semi-decent player would off on their Quest completion until they were able to play the reward without getting punished.
The only way this was solved was by power creep and slight nerfs which didn't address the main issue.
+1 attack for Weapon makes sense with the one epic which uses atk instead of durability for attacks.
The worst part about the overkill cards is that they weren't even great in the best case scenario. If it's hard to activate, but worth the effect it would have been fine.
1:49 I see two good reasons to play Silver Hand Regent.
Edit: Hey, have you considered doing best/worst duels passives & treasures? I'd like to see someone throwing shade at "Draconic Dream: After you summon a dragon, shuffle a Dream Portal into your deck that summons a dragon". Dragons have a high mana cost, so you won't be playing them in early game. When you summon them, the shuffled cards might be the last of your deck. When you summon a dragon, it might be a small one. If you summon a big dragon, it might still be bad because you lose the battlecry.
bro delete this LOL
bro delete this LOL
Silver hand regent was made for arenas. They used to make cards for arena.
Unpopular opinion: jade goldem is a great mechanic that was ruined by jade idol being ridiculously broken. For example jade rogue had to do interesting plays to get max value, like Brann, raptor, card bounces, etc. Meanwhile druid just played the same card a bunch of times...
Correction: Murlock knight was busted. There were builds that just broke the game if you played extreme agro Pali Murlock in the grand tournament.
I would love to see inspire to make a come back. Makes more balance sense then colossal insta value in my opinion.
I can fix honorable/over kill.
Slap the together call it bonty kill or something.
When you kill a minion trigger effect.
The only reason Overkill is worse than honorable kill is that the Overkill had worse effects.
Recruiter did see a tiiiiiny but if play in razakus priest as the 0 mana repeated pings giving you 1 mana 2/2s to get more pings was surprisingly good
Spare parts were insane becouse of antonidas, the reason mage decks played the mech gnome.
There is overkill and honorable kill, next they will make a line of poisonous cards with underkill. Which will give you special thing if you do less damage than needed to kill a minion.
Gurubashi chicken is just an hommage to angy chicken, and it's more of a card that's for people who go "can I win with this" than to be competitive.
I don't think it's fair to blame it for being bad when it's purpose is being bad.
But crackle was amazeballs. What I liked about it was actually the lack of consistency. SOMETIMES ya get the W and sometimes it's a hard no. I miss that randomness of shamans. Sure it's not a good meta idea, but it sure was fun
Inspire is one of my favorite keywords ever honestly. I just wish there were better cards to go with it
My fav keywords from all the sets are probably Inspire, Overkill, Honorable Kill, Corrupt, Spellburst, Tradeable, Frenzy, and my favorite is definitely Discover
Nice informational vid
Spare parts were terrible because they were terrible. Piloted Shredder was a great example because of his very rare but brute high- and lowrolls. At his time they should have released him as a 4-2 and he still would've been great, nowadays he wouldn't even see play in Standard anymore.
hi rarran, i`m really enjoying your channel
your vids are pretty nice, thank you !!!
Why were TGT cards and mechanics discussed with the saviors of ulduum trailer showing in the background? And witchwood and RR playing while honorable kill cards are up? Scholomance's trailer behind spare parts?
Tourist is probably my least favorite, followed by odd/even, Highlander, titan, quest/sidequest, then honorable kill. I actually like the other keywords.
In my opinion honourable kill is a great keyword, balanced and takes skill. If I had to pick a worst key word it’s dormant. I’d explain but no one reads long comments.
Blizzard never got what was “good” RNG and what was “bad” RNG. From the Beta until now, they just don’t get it.
Hey Rarran, please reboot disgusidetoast's old video series "card origins," about character lore from wow. You do a great job telling history stories about the game, and this seems to slot into that type of content. Many hearthstoners never played wow, so it makes hearthstone more fun knowing who it is we're seeing on the battlefield.
one might in the works :)
yeah i agree, overkill sucks. the only halfway decent thing I've seen with is is the linecracker druid thing.
At least the Farraki battleaxe has a very good flavor text.
Let me say what I think it's the worse mechanic we've ever got: magnetic
why? well, you could be playing perfectly but not able to kill one 1/1 minion that spawned from a deathrattle, which then would turn into a 14/14 behemoth with lifesteal, divine shield and taunt, it made you have to sink resources into killing every mech on board every turn, and if you so missed 1 1/1 on board then you had to deal with a gigantic minion which, considering you couldn't deal with a 1/1 then you also probably didn't have how to deal with a 11/11 or 14/14
if overkill is bad because rastakhan had bad cards, then magnetic is bad because of the opposite, magnetic cards could hold up decently by themselves but would be extremely unfun to go against
the option to build different types of board was pretty neat, but it only turned this problem worse, specially down the line with SN1P-SN4P when you could force different kinds of removal because of echo, which exausted the resources the opponent had to deal with your finishers
Objectively, the worst is by far ECHO. Because they keep using it over and over and over again... WITHOUT USING THE KEYWORD THEY MADE SPECIFICALLY FOR THAT MECHANIC.
The issue with some of the "bad" keywords is the cards are bad and it isn't the keywords fault. Cards like Oondasta were actually good and playable with the Overkill mechanic because he wasn't horrendously understatted and had an impactful effect.
What 90% of Overkill, Frenzy, and Honorable Kill minions have in common is they are understatted and pretty much all have low attack and high health. The mechanics would've been better if they were premium statted with a chance at an upside.
In my opinion, the worst keyword/mechanic is joust. A mechanic that is simultaneously RNG and a build-around does not lend itself well to very good or interesting card design. The joust payoff can't be too strong or else it threatens to swing the match based off something that's too uncontrollable, but because the joust payoff can't be too strong it can never be worth building your deck around. The only good joust cards were cards that were already reasonably playable when you lost the joust that just happened to get some incidental value when you did win. From what I've heard, joust was apparently envisioned as a way for slower decks to punish aggro for only running low cost minions, but a lot of the joust cards aren't even designed that way, like the 4-mana 5/3 that gains charge.
Overkill gets memed on all the time, but I think it could have been a good mechanic if so many of the cards weren't intentionally powered down.
I really wanted to love Murloc Knight and tried so hard to make it work :(
Taunt is the worst
- every aggroplayer ever
I don't agree with Honorable kill. It is one of the easiest keywords to pull of, early and mid game. Most of the honorable kill cards usually deal 2 or 3 damage, and those HP are the most common ones. + you always have material to work out the enemy minion's HP for a hk. Honestly, every time I'm up against Korrak, I kill him in one shot.
Corrupt was horrible. It always gave you the idea you had a potentially good card but you usually had to wait 3 turns longer to be able to play it with corrupt, which was not a great feeling, I think manathirst is a much better version of the same idea. Yes, you play it later than at the normal manacost but you don’t have to actually play more expensive cards first without really wanting to play those.
Best cards with overkill and inspire are from hunter and don't have the keyword, only the mechanic.
Overkillimg your opponent and summoning that Devilsaur though. 👏 Optimal Value
How can overkills and honorable kills both be niche, rare things that don’t happen often enough to be useful? Minions dying is like the least rare thing in hearthstone, and they either get overkilled or honorable killed outside of “destroy” effects
lol, hold on, how can both honorable kill and overkill be hard to achieve at the same time? It's impossible to not do at least one of these when killing a minion.
inspire appeared in grand tourment, not in old gods
Rarran, I think for your vids, you need your little guy to have an emoji of it sipping tea whenever you say a little snide thing. lmao
Discover is the WORST keyword ever introduced into the game! Why? Because the opponent can just get card after card out of nowhere and they always have a full fucking hand because they discovered 10 cards during the game.
And then to the most successful non-basic keywords, I think none other than Discover.
Something really irks me is that Overkill and Honorable Kill can be combined into a single keyword and maaaaaaybe then it would be decent.
One thing I learned from watching hearthstone streamers such as Trump and even you is to look at a card as all the aspects tied to its effect. In that regard, Inspire was basically having a minion that costs 2 more mana for their effects, over many turns, because else they are vanillas. And lackeys aren't lacking in anything because as far as I remember, the lackeys that evolved a minion and the one that gave +2 health and taunt were the "worst" because they depended on having another minion around and did nothing else, the +1 attack and haste one was way better specially for rush decks at the time, and by god, what were they thinking with dragon and spell lackey? Access to every spell in the game, with no restrictions, for 1 mana. Those two were overloaded
Inspire and honorable kill are likely the worst.
As a Magic player I look at Hearthstone cards and I think k everytime how good would that be in Magic EDH (Commander for those who have heard about it) and honestly Siphon Mana would be amazing in Magic a 2 mana bolt that reduces the cost of all spells with an exact damage even if it was till end of turn it'd still be amazing
2 mana shock :P its 2 damage not 3 :)
@@alexashton6501 Shock is 2 damage
@@drachir7146 yeah siphon mana deals 2 damage, thereby in your comparison its a 2 mana shock, but you said it was a 2 mana bolt
@@alexashton6501 oh I thought I said shock sorry
bro murloc knight if it summoned another murloc knight, gg
The worst keyword that is not a keyword is definitely "Can't attack"
Like, c'mon, people. It's right in front of you. You are playing a minion for which (most of the time) you need another card to use effectively as a normal minion. It's ass.
inspire is the worst for me since you are limited to only playing your hero power once a turn
I think your reaction to the gurubashi chicken was unwarranted. It was clearly a joke card that was making reference to angry chicken.
Gurubashi chicken is part of a series of chickens with keywords they can't use, its a joke, not bad game design.
Overkill was just Bad because the Cards that Had them don't Do much damage
Pretty sure silver hand regent has actually seen play in silver hand recruit decks
Possibly just in wild