It’s perhaps a testament to the positives of Hearthstone’s latest expansion that most of the community’s ire is focused on a single card, and even that one doesn’t elicit the usual white-hot rage as some of the truly egregious offenders did in the past. However, it does feel like Giggling Inventor is crying out for a nerf as it seems to have found a place in almost every single archetype in the Standard format while being a premium choice in Arena, the game’s limited mode as well.

Hello

Imagine this scenario: you’re playing an aggressive deck and you’ve built up a good advantage in the early game. You’ve reached the fifth turn, setting up a crushing attack. Most premium board clear tools are still out of sight and your opponent has no meaningful minion presence on the field. It’s looking good. Normally, this would be close to a guaranteed win over the next two turns. Then you hear the dreaded ‘hello’s and the game takes a significant turn for the worst. Hearthstone’s The Boomsday Project has been released earlier this month to great community acclaim. It brought along a varied Constructed experience, an interesting single-player mode and a healthy metagame in the Arena as well. Most fears of runaway overpowered archetypes appear to be unfounded at this point as not one specific deck managed to completely crush the rest of the pack. However, there is one card that seems to be a bit too good to be true: it’s called Giggling Inventor, and it’s quite a blast from the past. Back in Goblins versus Gnomes, the game’s first proper expansion pack, a neutral minion called Annoy-o-Tron was introduced. It gives you a 1/2 body with Taunt (meaning your opponent has to attack it) and Divine Shield (meaning it won’t take damage the first time it gets hit). Its name was very appropriate: the low attack and health meant that it never really did anything meaningful on the board, but it soaked up two attacks, taking up valuable time from your enemy. It was never on the forefront on the metagame but it was a fun and memorable card – mostly thanks to its “Hello! Hello! Hello!” sound effect on summoning – with the occasional fringe application in some very specific decks. Now it’s back, better than ever.  

Hello hello

Giggling Inventor is a five mana neutral card from the new expansion, a 2/1 minion that summons two Annoy-o-Trons alongside itself when played, saying “Hello” before the two Annoy-o-trons throw out their signature battlecries in a beautiful cacophony. On paper, it should be perfectly fine: it gives you exactly five mana’s worth of value for the price. However, the specificities of the card make it so effective that it’s become a useful tool almost regardless of the archetype you’re playing. Under normal circumstances, it takes four separate attacks to get past the Taunts – an obscene amount by Hearthstone’s standards where you can’t even have more than seven on the board and there’s a specific tech card to punish you for having at least four at the same time –, which means that it buys a lot of time for the player hiding behind the little robots. It works just as well as a stall tactic as a way to solidify an existing lead on the board – and the most, well, annoying part about it is that the Divine Shields protect the taunts from most spell-based solutions as well. The card is almost guaranteed to eat up more time and mana that it cost to initially cast and its token-y nature (summoning three separate minions with one card is fairly rare) can also be a boon for aggressive decks. Giggling Inventor is close to omnipresent in the metagame. Aggressive decks can bank on having a board lead by the time the card is playable, using it to protect their existing advantage while combo and control archetypes can use it to buy time until they find their win condition and answers respectively. As per the latest Vicious Syndicate report, a highly respected community-driven data analysis project for Hearthstone,

“Internally, we joked around that the process of deck refinement in Boomsday can be measured by the rise of Giggling Inventors because the correlation was staggering. This card is the #1 nerf candidate for the next balance patch. Do not dust your extra copies.”

The card is also a prime choice in Arena, the game’s draft-based format for the very same reason as its incredible flexibility and “stickiness” is perhaps even more relevant there than in the constructed modes – and the card has become so popular that it single-handedly catapulted Mossy Horror, a six-mana tech option to a top pick (and a very viable card choice in Standard as well) mainly because it is one of the few options to cleanly deal with a Giggling Inventor.  

Hello hello hello

One has to wonder how the card made it through the playtesting process this way. Even many of the (usually quite wrong) pre-release card reviews by professional players have pegged the minion as way too powerful, comparing it with Spreading Plague, another very effective stall option available to the Druid class that was nerfed fairly early on – notably, class-specific cards are always meant to be stronger than their neutral counterparts, but Giggling Inventor’s effect is at least comparable to Spreading Plague’s despite costing one mana less. Originally, Spreading Plague also cost five mana but its nerf bumped it up to six, which hasn’t decreased its playability at all but shut down some of the more degenerate combos in the late-game. It's quite likely that this will be the fate of Giggling Inventor as well, judging by the developers’ preferences in this regard: they’ve gone on record multiple times that protecting a card’s “identity” is of utmost importance to them, and it’s only the most egregious cases where they actually adjust its effect instead of upping its price. This would make a lot of sense in the case of this particular minion: a slightly more costly set of “Hello!”-s would still be very strong in slower decks – and it would notably make it unplayable in a certain Warrior archetype that is restricted to odd-cost cards only – while removing its utility from more aggressive strategies that can no longer “lock in” their early advantages on the board. Team 5 are notoriously unwilling to share their nerf-related plans in advance, so don’t expect any concrete statements on the matter for a while – the void created by their silence will have to be filled by thousands of “Hello!”-s every minute for the time being. ___ YelloRambo is a Legend-ranked Hearthstone player. If you liked this content, follow him on Twitter at @Luci_Kelemen.