The System might have been interesting if they hadn't doubled, tripled and quintupled down on Rainbow decks. It was a meme at first, but now it seems like the only thing Blizzard wants you to do with DK.

Blizzard: we are going to focus on 1 rune per expansion Blood Decks: *dies* to literally NO support ever

Most of the rune restrictions are completely unessasary. Would the Headless Horseman really be too good without a rune requirement? You would only ever run it in a slow strategy anyways. Cards like the Primus, Mining Casualties, and Chillfallen Baron are some of the best DK cards and yet they don't have any runes and thats never been a problem.

They need to add a core legendary that transforms one rune into a death rune. In WoW, a death rune would allow you to use it as any other rune; for Hearthstone it basically allows it as a 4th potential rune for deckbuilding. Double Blood + Death? Now you can run triple blood, 1 frost, and 1 unholy cards. Running 1 blood, 1 frost? Now you can run double blood, double frost, and 1 unholy cards. They could even add 3 core legendaries that each make a single rune a death rune, and just put a penalty for running them. -5 health on this one, the first minion you summon has summoning sickness (so no charge hero power as your first minion), the first card you cast each turn costs +1 mana, up to 10 mana.

Similar to Zilliax's design, I think they should print DK cards where you decide which and how many runes you want to attach to the "custom" card and based on YOUR choice you'll get certain reasonable effects/mechanics or something crazy if it's a Legendary.

The rune sistem would be ok if you have mechanics like rainbow seamstress, if you have 1 frost rune freeze, if you have 2 frost runes freeze and draw a card, if you have 3 freeze draw and deal dmg

They shouldn’t remove rune system. They should buff the double and triple rune cards much more

I honestly wanted to see any pure 3 rune cards they would release. Unfortunately they haven't thought of printing new pure cards

As much as I like Rainbow DK, I don't want it to be the ONLY way to play the class

I miss a lot triple bood dk on standard

Honestly, I think that Runes were a cool idea in theory but once they started putting them on cards to superficially limit deckbuilding I just kinda checked out I mean, is Headless Horseman really so strong that it needs a rune requirement and can't be generic?

They've all blended into a brown rune class now.

Everyone knew this was gonna happen from the start, and what we got now is not being able to play every card in the expansion because of the runes and even cant do combos with those limitation, personally they should scrap the rune system and rework the class.

I really like to see runes getting removed. Death knight still has a unique mechanic(corpses).

If they made a bunch of the single rune cards double rune, and made other ubiquitous ones like mining casualties runeless, death knight would be cool again.

We had only triple rune decks last year while rainbow was unplayable until Badlands, so now they want to push that archetype for a year and next year they'll probably return triple rune decks and keep switching between those archetypes

The only way to work, DK would need to have like 30 cards per expansion lmao

I think a solution could be that instead of rotating all DK cards they only rottate some (and maybe bring some back), it will make the card pool bigger, but the total amount of cards you can put in your deck is the same as other classes because of runes.

One thing I’ve tried to do on r/customhearthstone is to create triple rune cards that only delve into 2 rune types (So runes like BBU, BBF, BFF, etc) so that they could actually be powerful cards to the non Rainbow or Pure Triple rune combinations. Otherwise they’re just softly buffing Rainbow and giving pure triple rune support to archetypes that don’t exist in standard. With triple runes not being discoverable or randomly generated, they should arguably be OP to allow for DK to run them over any other combinations. Otherwise Blizzard is just shooting themselves in the foot if they don’t explore what the rune system can deliver.

Climactic Necrotic Explosion works really well as an overly flashy meme win condition and I truly believe it should have remained among the V-07-TR-0Ns, Norgannons and Highkeeper Ras of the world. It’s really cool and funny when it goes off, but it fundamentally doesn’t work as a reliable win condition. Despite that, Blizzard seems to be convinced that it is Death Knight’s strongest endgame option by far, which in a way they aren’t wrong, because DK completely lacks any other way of ending matches.

I think to make it a little less awkward when building DK decks is that they need to keep triple rune cards in standard to support those other archetypes. If they want other decks to flourish in standard they must have a lot more triple rune cards remain in standard for maybe double the rotation cycle. They could even switch out the triple rune cards with new introduced ones. But in my opinion they must have triple rune support at all times for it to seem even worth being one specific rune.

I'm on the side that says cards may be part of one rune, but their effects become stronger the deeper you commit to the rune. So say you have patchwerk: 1B: Destroy a random minion in your opponent's hand and deck 2B: and one on the field 3B: Destroy two of each instead

maybe if there was some kind of hero power pay off for the different runes in the deck still "dying at end of turn", RGB: current hero power with current upgraded, RRR: 2/1 rush lifesteel; upgraded goes to charge, GGG: 1/2 charge reborn upgraded goes to 2/2, BBB: 1/1 charge freezes minions upgraded can freeze the enemy hero. "no runes" start of game discover an upgraded triple rune hero-power (though this would mean printing more "no rune" cards or having it be resigned to neutrals.

Yep, noticed a year ago that they were moving everything over to rainbow. If they wanted the system to work, they really needed to dump a bunch of free cards during rotation to replace the rotating cards for each triple rune.

The problem with doubling or tripling up on a rune is that is greatly limits your options, even in the first form of death knight, there were way more single and double rune cards than 3 rune cards, meanwhile in rainbow, you have a massive selection of cards, where you just get to pick your favorites from everything. Triple and double rune cards need to be significantly stronger to offset the restrictions of having less card options for your deck.

Or maybe they can start to print extremely overpowered triple run cards. Like that Slipper Slope can be freeze all enemies for 2 turns and be a triple frost rune card. Or like a powerful control oriented triple blood card, that siphons health from all enemies to increase your hero's maximum. A triple Unholy weapon that sends a card from your opponent's hand back to their deck every time you attack.

Great take on the rune issue!

It's funny, when Sindragosa was first released, it was a frost and a blood rune and didn't see any play at all thanks to the triple runes decks being so much better, so the blood rune was removed and it became just a single frost rune and say plenty of play in triple frost and then later in plague. I assure you, that if she was released with her original rune requirement of one frost and one blood, she would see plenty of play in rainbow. Funny how that flipped.

In hindsight, if they really wanted to do the rune system, they probably should've doubled down and printed 4-5 cards for each rune type each expansion. Things could change if they printed new triple rune payoffs starting next expansion after PiP, but boy is it gonna take a few expansions to really fix it.

I will not have this lowering of expectations. This can be fixed with a change in direction, better quality of cards and perhaps moves like DK having more basecards that don't rotate than any other class to facilitate them working on certain archetypes throughout the year. AKA they have a base of double frost, double unholy double blood and a payoff card for tripple rune. etc

The rune system would work better if each card belonged to a single rune and instead scaled based on how many of these runes your deck was based on. For example, this Slippery Slope card could freeze 1 character/draw 1 card if you had just 1 Frost rune in your deck, 2 if you had 2 Frost Runes and 3 or even 4 if you had an all Frost deck. This would incentivize players to not only make decks that have a single type of rune, but also motivate them to try all shorts of different builds to test the effectiveness of each card. And it makes sense that the rainbow deck would have the most variety, but it would also mean that it would get the weakest version of each card used.

Great video Zeddy, next one like this should be about the horrid state that Shaman is perpetually in 😢

BBU seems promising, the closest I can get to BBB. Probably worse than Rainbow, but definitely better than BBB, because the Unholy rune works really well to fuel Corpse Explosion. Also, you get more cards that help your deck, like Maw and Paw.

I feel like most expansions only support one or two archetypes for each class anyways, so they could probably get away with higher rune cards. But I still like runes because there's no harm done. It's a balance tool always at their disposal if they need it for powerful cards.

I think the rune system is fairly easy to solve: you pick your runes before adding cards defining your play style, then you add cards, and in game your cards will have different effect based on what rune combination your deck runs, simple, a lot of coding, but a simple and elegant solution, this also solves the problem of discovering bullshit cards from runes you couldn't fit as the cards themselves would gain effect of your picked runs. Easy.

The issue with DK is that all the good triple rune legendaries rotated to wild and there's no reason to go anything but rainbow/plagues. They need new powerful legendaries with runes as follows frost, frost and not frost. And the same for blood and unholy to push different archetypes and until they release more rune heavy cards, rainbow will be pushed more and more

The death knight class must discover the three rune cards Back again

When festival of legends came out and I got both legendary cards for DK I was pretty bummed to discover they can't be in the same deck

Rainbow DK and Plague DK. I’ll come back to the class when anything except those two decks exist.

Are there even any triple rune cards left in Standard?

I would like them to scrap the runes too, but the sunken cost is so high.

For the rune system to even have a chance to work, they need to define what each rune (and rune amount) can and cannot do, and stick to it 100%. Threads of Despair should be double blood. Eliza should be at least double unholy (no frost, and definitely no blood). Mining Casualties and Crop Rotation should both be double unholy. Plagues should probably have been either Frost and/or Blood (they are unholy from a thematic point of view, but from a mechanical point of view it makes no sense at all). If the runes are arbitrary, then devs will just fit everything they want to see play into rainbow.

i mentioned it on twitter but i think with the runes they should make cards that just change effects depending on your rune layout. like card does this if you have mostly this rune type an then have it be differently if its a rainbow.

I want them to add more of the Frozen throne DK cards to the core set, just enough to build some basic decks for each triple rune version

Would it be too strong to give dk 4 runes? Like keep blood unholy and frost, but allow a slot for a 4th rune selection? Maybe it's too strong, but it allows playability for double rune cards.

I agree with everything you say in the video. The Death Knight got an issue with normal legendaries too. All of the Death Knight decks i see in standard are identical to one another because the normal legendaries together with Death Knight’s plague cards gives him some insane survivability. I never see any fun necrotic runes or blood runes.

After actually seeing the runes exist for a few expansions if they really wanted us to have *viable choices* or even passingly viable ones in different runes they either have to print X% more cards in DK, or the cards would have to be enough power outliers to justify the rune requirement as a design constraint (ie reno compared to something like soulsteeler)

Scrap the room system on the cards and make it attach to the hero power. That way you can build a hero power based on what your deck wants to do. It's either that or give us a fourth rune slot

It feels really like the only way to keep the rune system is to have cards that they want to have more than one rune on them have multiple forms based on the runes you play. Maybe make it like Devotion in MTG? Better effect for more pips of a certain colour?

I wish there was more blood cards like vampiric blood and Mograine. It really felt like its own identity.

Im ready for monk class now.

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I still think that all rune requirements except for triple runes should be deleted. They can keep the extra powerful cards to runes so they can’t interact, but nothing else is anywhere strong enough to justify it. Or just delete runes in general and bump up the mana cost of the current triple tune cards by 1 or something if they really think they are that big of a deal

i wish they just released more death knight cards per expansion to be able to support double/triple rune cards

It would be interesting to have them split in 3 different classes. You can still play rainbow but you have extra cards per class to get this dk concept going

I agree. It hasn’t worked over time. Feels like more of a disadvantage.

I think they should of me put the power in double frost or unholy or. Blood cards. That would allow for lots more experimentation.

It was pretty obvious from the get go that it would be weird to support all possible combinations

My hope is that for the 3rd expansion they actually print a triple rune card for blood, frost, and unholy. Since it would be the last expansion of the year, it would spend the least amount of time in standard, so they could buff the power level (think Alterac Valley hero cards). Other than that, Death Knight needs a much bigger core set. Maybe rotate their core set cards per expansion to keep it fresh? The class is so much fun to play, but needs to feel diverse again.

I predicted this video in the comments last video.

I think a good way to do the rune system is having a year dedicated to the runes. So for the next core set they could put all the triple blood cards back and theme the dk cards for that year as blood runes then the following year they change it up to another rune. At least then the class will be forever evolving

Not surprised

SOLUTION: instead of rotating DK cards to WILD every 2 years, instead rotate every 6 (2x3) years.

fix ideas: 1: have core set cards that allow you to 'raise the dead' of past expansions, giving you access to the multi-rune cards of the past to maintain deck diversity. also could branch out into similar cards to pull from past expansions. shouldn't be legendaries so that people can access them. 2: have runes transform existing cards so that triple rune decks can access other cards but with different power levels, costs, or effects.

undeads and corpses is more than enough theme for death knight

When are we gonna see warrior cards?

I don't Runes should be removed but the restriction should be. That way, you can still have cards like: "Draw a Blood-Rune card." And maybe they could release cards like: "Start of Game: If your deck has only Unholy-Rune cards, [do something]." so that you could still remember the times where restriction were a thing.

Honestly I think one solution could be to give death knight more core set cards than any other class, specifically 2-3 rune cards. By doing this they can insure that every pure 3 rune deck has enough pay off to give them a basis every year

My idea for the rune system is make it not affect deck building and instead affect battle and example making vampiric blood one blood rune and have the text “for each blood rune you have, spend 3 corpses to give your hero 5 health”

that was clear from day 1

The problem, as you pointed out, is that they would need 200% more cards for DK than for other classes taking runes into account. I don't see that as ever happening, basically killing the rune system and forcing rainbow in one way or another. Note also that Triple Rune Cards need to be really powerful, as you're commiting yourself to a single rune, reducing drastically you deck-building options. As we've seen, they're reluctant on going that road too. So we're left with a system that just goes nowhere interesting and just hampers deck building or makes it less interesting.

Good job, Zeddy, for picking up this topic to cover up! Rainbow DK is good, yet why you should have triple blood or other triple-cards in your collection if you can`t use them the way Zeddy described?! Perhaps Blizzard had something in mind when creating this option! Anyway, they should re-balance something not to upset their product users who willingly spend their money to make this game better.

They could change the rune system is to have the amount of runes of a type to empower your hero power somehow.

The rune system is something i have felt was a good idea but without a longterm plan for how to sustain it. Its acuttaly quite scary to see how bad Blizzard is at having good longterm plans for anything in hearthstone.

The key is the core set. The DK core set would need to have more double and triple rune cards of the same rune that are actually meta-relevant and even potentially win conditions. Right now, the best legendaries of DK are either runeless, triple rainbow runes or double rainbow runes. There is literally no reason to go another way than rainbow (or plagues maybe). So yeah, triple and double rune cards should be in core and they should be better than rainbow cards to see play. You sacrifice a lot when you commit to one rune, so there has to be a reason to do so

Maybe some of the Rune support cards and the triple cards should be in the base set and not get rotated out.

Great video.

I said it when they released Death Knight: they need to make more cards that do different things based on your runes

I don't think that it's inherently unsustainable with the current number of cards. It's just that the devs got lazy IMMEDIATELY after the class released and just went all out on Rainbow (Extra reinforced by all the rune changes they made upon rotation, where instead of keeping the iconic double/triple rune cards they instead just removed runes to make everything more Rainbow friendly) Like, normal classes will get an archetype with their card releases, plus a few extra cards alongside this archetype. There's no reason why DK can't be the same, getting a rune combination, plus some extra cards of various runes (Take for example, the Plague archetype. That uses all of 6 cards. Thus there's 7 remaining cards that can be devoted to other things within an expansion) All they need to do, is make sure the payoffs for alternate rune decks also utilize their 3 respective runes so they can't be utilized in triple rune decks or Rainbow which already have their own payoffs (I.e. Helya would need to be UUF. Handbuff would need a payoff that would be BBU etc). This would allow them to not only support the main triple rune decks (BBB, FFF and UUU) but also they can still make other rune combinations work without them simply devolving into being "Bad Triple/Rainbow deck" or having their cards just get absorbed by the triple decks like we saw with things like handbuff (Where we now have Rainbow handbuff because outside of Helm the only rune requirement for the entire handbuff deck is BU).

i mean it was vclear that it will fail. I mean you get technicali a lot less cards per expasion for dethnight as for the other classes. I mean sure technicly you have the same number per expansion. But whats different is to other classes you cant use all. That mean technical you get less crads per expansion for deathknight as for other classes. Only you can fix that when you get per expansion the same number of rune cards for the 3 types in each expansion and also more cards overall as for the other classes. The ide was good in the beginning, it was something new but it was clear in the beginning that this system is in long term bullshit

It works for me I wish they would make triple rune cards. I had fun and it’s challenged to make triple rune DK decks

What the class needs is to have a legendary for every triple rune combination in the core set with enough support for it.

Zeddy predicting another failure. I actually remember the vid mentioning this issue and agreed back then, hate that they couldnt make it work 😢

Is this the death of the death knight?

I was sooooo sold on triple blood DK control. I’ve played since the release of KnC in 2017 and even made my first microtransaction for the game to get the mega bundle/path of arthas thing in 2022. Festival of Legends was cool with the rainbow support and I even got CNE as my free set legendary. I took a break after that and came back last month to see it’s just rainbow now which is pretty disheartening.

You can't do deck building with only 1/3rd of the cards per expansion on average for anything that isn't rainbow, plus the few runeless cards inbetween. The system failed the moment they decided DKs get the same amount of cards as other classes while having huge integrated deck building restrictions and it only worked at first with the larger core set + Path of Arthas and it fell off immediately.

I really like the class, but I feel very limited, the decks have almost no variety due to this system. And when I decide to play wild for example, there are a lot of cards but in the end the decks look the same, just changing neutral cards or some new ones that the rune system allows...

Double and triple cards are meant to be noticeably stronger - you take a cut to deck versatility for specific powerful cards (like highlander decks). The issue isn't the system it's the power of the cards printed for those archetypes. If dk had three broken cards next set but they were all different double or trip,e rune requirements then it wouldn't be broken because they can't all be ran in the same deck. We saw this early on with cards like mograine and frostwyrms fury - powerful effects which people love but are balanced as the rest of the deck suffers card quality. Same reason highlander is popular.

The main card game I play has color restriction. There 12 different colors/shades/houses. You can choose up to 4 of them to complete your own unique deck. It is really cool, there obvious synergies, but you can make some unexpected combos working! Anyway, runes are cool ideas, but poor execution. - btw dks had their own rune systems in WoW that is where it came from.

Getting DK cards who's effects adapt to your Rune setup, instead of the other way around, would be a good way to fix the system alltogether. Blizzard doesn't have to scrap the runes alltogether and all gameplay styles get supported

I think Blizzard have to Put the legacy dk cards back in standart

The illusion of choice 😞

The problem is they don't give even support to all the runes. They killed blood because people cried that blood was a control style and the extra health led to games that didn't end on turn 5. When you start to work backward from Blizzard wanting games to end on turn 5, so many decisions start to make sense.

Zeddy. They can revert stuff next year. I strongly believe that they just add some old cards which complete some archetypes. That's the minimum they should do.

Unfortunately this is going to have to be reworked unless they start adding cards to the pool for DK for the higher runes only

Idea of a rework: maybe all the cards should be runeless and some of them get nerfed. However, if you commit to, let's say, triple unholy, the cards that were triple unholy get "upgraded"/unnerfed if you put them in your deck. All the sudden, you can play with all the DK cards but their most powerful version are only for those who build their deck with the rune system. Of course, that would require more work for the devs, as every card would have different numbers/effects according to which and how many runnes you go for.

Death Knight went from one of my favorite classes on release to now being my least favorite. Both because they got rid of the creative deck building with runes, and because of plagues.

In my opinion, all this could easily be resolved if they make double-rune (of a single type) cards as the payoff cards and make one for each rune type every expansion. Then add 3 multi rune cards (runes of two different types) of every combination that somehow interact with both payoff cards of the two matching rune types. With the aim of making 2-1 combinations with interoperability and flexibility the norm. All that was off about the original design was forcing triple rune combinations instead of supporting interoperability, and what has gone wrong with the execution is that each set death knight just gets one synergistic package and a bunch of garbage filler. The idea to just focus on one rune type for every expansion and leave the others without support was just weird. The HS design team needs to step away from this idea of every set introducing some new hyper synergistic package for every class in general...

I think rather than scrapping the rune system entirely they should make it so the cards incentivize building different rune combinations without restricting them. Here's a few examples from the top of my head. Mograine instead of requiring such a narrow deck starts at a base of 1 damage per turn but the damage increases for each blood rune you have. Slippery Slope can freeze an additional character for each frost rune you have. Climactic Necrotic Explosion can upgrade faster if you have one of each rune. Any card can be in any deck but some cards very much want specific rune combinations. Mograine would be pretty bad without any blood runes in this case but fairly strong in triple blood. Slippery Slope would be OK in a 0-1 frost rune deck but ridiculously strong in triple frost (freeze 4 characters draw 4 cards for 2 mana). Like this you're making decisions on which cards in your deck you want to be stronger and which you're ok accepting a weaker version of. To get around the text box limitation issue create some keywords to indicate that a specific rune changes the card similar to mana thirst.

The problem with triple Runes is: if it's way too strong it just limits how you make your decks because usually will make so it doesn't have any reason to go mixed, and although at the start we had very clear frost/blood/unholy, frost and blood kind of lost their power, meaning that maybe their triple card was close to what they should be because it didn't limited so much your ability to mix runes... but Marrowgar was WAY too strong, there was no reason to play 1 or 2 unholy with something, if you wanted to play anything unholy it was better to go 3 unholy just because Marrowgar was broken... either remove it, or die, and triple unholy were relentless decks that made your opponent react every turn eventually making them run out of resources and eventually win, you now... what Hearthstone is nowdays. Probably the reason why the other triple runes became unplayable.