Hearthstone nerf reverts: Which nerfed cards will get back to their original state

Over the long history of Hearthstone, the game has undergone numerous balance changes whenever the meta felt too stale or some deck/class was particularly dominant.

And while during the era of ex-game director Band Brode the team was hesitant to change cards, that philosophy has changed in recent years, and we are seeing almost constant balance updates, with both nerfs and buffs.

Many iconic Hearthstone cards from the Classic/Basic sets were nerfed at some point, due to their overwhelming presence in almost any Standard meta, up until Blizzard decided to introduce "Hall of Fame", a place were Classic/Basic cards were sent to retirement, due to their huge popularity in Standard. Hall of Fame cards could have been used only in Wild.

Ancient of Lore was an extremely popular card in the early days of Hearthstone (Picture: Blizzard)

Even that solution wasn't enough and Blizzard finally realised that they need to make some huge changes, and those changes were introduced in a form of Hearthstone's Core Set.

This opens up space not just for more freedom in the design of future cards, but also for some previously nerfed cards to be "unnerfed" and reverted back to their previous state.

Many of those nerfed cards were once strong, but now even in their original state, they won't be particularly competitive, so fans are happy to see them back in their full glory.

It's important to note that these reverted cards won't be playable in the Standard format, but only in wild, as they will not be a part of the Core Set.

• Keeper of the Grove: Back to 2/4 from 2/2.
• Ancient of Lore: Now have a choice to draw 2 cards, instead of 1 again.
• Starving Buzzard: Back to a 2 mana 2/1 with the same text.
• Flare: Now costs 1 mana.
• Dinotamer Brann Now: Back to 7 mana cost.
• Hunter's Mark: Now costs 1 mana. It is still not a full revert which would be 0 mana cost.
• Mana Wyrm: Now cost 1 mana again, but it has 1/2 stats, instead of 1/3.
• Conjurer's Calling: Now costs 3 mana again.
• Dragoncaster: Back to the original cost of 6 mana.

Due to Mana Wyrm changes, Wyrm Weaver will see changes as well, and it will now cost 4 mana with a 3/5 stat line.

When someone on Twitter asked if some of these cards could be brought back to Standard one day, Hearthstone's senior game designer Alec Dawson explained their philosophy behind these changes.

"Could a card come back into Standard? We chose to softly revert those, as we'd like to avoid cards shifting between two costs or statlines each year," he tweeted out. "This will be the case for cards like Mana Wyrm or Flametongue Totem. They'll be back one day!"

Keeper of the Grove nerf was a big blow for Druid at the time (Picture: Blizzard)

He also explained that a strong factor behind these reverts was "the level of positivity a revert brings to the Wild environment", as they wanted to strengthen some currently weak decks while trying to avoid adding power to already dominating archetypes.

• Read more: Hearthstone's planned burst nerfs postponed until patch 20.0 arrives

Hearthstone nerfs reverts are slated for release along with the 20.0 patch, which should be released near the end of March. In the coming weeks, we can expect to see more nerf reverts being announced.