New Hearthstone Card Builds Its Own Crappy Deck So You Don't Have To | Gaming

Hearthstone is a game about careful preparation, where you amass a grand collection of cards so that you can build powerful new decks. But this week, in the continuing rollout of its new science-themed expansion The Boomsday Project, Blizzard announced a card that ignores all that, allowing players to build a deck that includes this one card alone.

Dubbed “Whizbang the Wonderful”, the card is an unassuming 4-mana with 4 attack and 5 health. But then there’s the text: “You start the game with one of Whizbang’s Wonderful Decks!”

When you put Whizbang into a deck, your deck is done. Whizbang becomes your hero, and you’re not allowed to add any more cards of your own. When you start a game, you’re given one out of 18 decks built by Blizzard (two per class), which essentially means you get to play Hearthstone on random mode.

In the past, Blizzard’s premade “deck recipes” were blueprints that players could copy so that they could learn the concepts of deckbuilding. They centred around a theme, included a heap of cards that complemented each other, weren’t too expensive to build, and were easy to get the hang of.

On the flip side, they weren’t very powerful compared to custom-built competitive decks that took advantage of the game’s strongest card interactions.

It’s pretty much agreed upon that Whizbang is actually a very weak card. Bringing a random cookie-cutter deck to the ranked ladder will almost always be a disadvantage. If your opponent pulls out a Whizbang deck, it’ll almost always look like a free win, or at least a match in your favour.

But calling a card bad is boring, especially when it does something so damn cool. So in the interest of embracing volatile variables, here are a few hypotheses for what Whizbang might bring to Hearthstone — some likely, others less so.

  • Whizbang will become the first card that players craft, allowing newbies to play the game with decks they wouldn’t be able to try out for months if not years. The game’s lowest ranks will become a graveyard of inexperienced Whizbang players, all playing a game of rock-paper-scissors where the person with the better randomised deck wins.
  • Experienced players will take on “The Whizbang Challenge”, and attempt to reach Hearthstone’s highest Legend ranks with a Whizbang deck. YouTube videos will begin to pop up with titles such as “REACHING LEGEND WITH ONE CARD ONLY??” and will feature a thumbnail of the player with their eyes and mouth as wide-open as possible. One of these videos will make the top post of the Hearthstone subreddit. I may cover it on this very site.
  • “Whizbang” will become a pejorative term used to insult crappy decks. At some point in time, a pro player will face a deck that deviates from an archetype by a few cards, and will then crack the following joke to their stream viewers: “Is this a Whizbang deck guys? Are we facing a Whizbang deck?” The streamer will then proceed to laugh at their own joke, which they find very clever.
  • Whizbang will make its tournament debut, piloted by a player who believes that staying unpredictable takes precedence over bringing overpowered decks. Each game they use Whizbang, they will end up with a deck that just so happens to counter the opponent’s win conditions, and they will ride the card to victory. In 40 years, the esports version of ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentary series will cover this highly unlikely event as one of Hearthstone’s most inspiring underdog stories.
  • Once Whizbang’s novelty has dissipated about two months after The Boomsday Project’s launch, players will face a terrible sense of buyer’s remorse after realising they just spent three weeks’ worth of dust savings on a very bad Hearthstone card.

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