Kobolds and Catacombs brought us a lot of really strong cards when it was released last year. Some would even argue that the expansion, which included 135 new cards, was too strong. However, there aren’t a lot of incredibly under-powered cards in the set. Gone are the days of The Grand Tournament. Still, we went through and found five cards that really haven’t lived up to the rest of the set, and dubbed them to be the worst Kobolds and Catacombs cards.
5. Glacial Mysteries
Coming in at number five, Glacial Mysteries presents us with a true mystery: Who thought this card was playable? Perhaps at six mana, this card might seem playable, but at seven mana it’s not. Oh, wait, it costs eight mana, you say? Ha, yep!
There are several issues with this card. The first is that there aren’t that many playable Mage Secrets. In an ideal world this card pulls out five Secrets, which is the maximum you can pull out, but that would require those secrets being in your deck. You rarely want to draw secrets under any condition; instead, people try to cheat them into play, or into their hand. You wouldn’t even be that happy drawing the best Mage Secret, Ice Block. Now you want us to up our odds of drawing Secrets exponentially by running five? No thanks.
To make things worse, many of the Mage Secrets double up. This means they both activate at the same time. For example, if you have Potion of Polymorph, Mirror Entity, and Explosive Runes in play (depending on the order you played them), when your opponent plays a minion you will likely turn it into a 1/1 Sheep, get a copy of the Sheep, and then kill it and deal five damage to your opponent. Killing a minion and doing five damage to your opponent sounds pretty good, but not for three cards.
The final say in this card’s demise? It isn’t beneficial when you get it from random abilities. If you’re playing Yogg and get this card, it’s not even particularly good, because no one really runs Secrets. Best case scenario? You’ll get two Secrets in play, which is barely better than Yogg just playing Ice Block. However, it’s also potentially worse since it takes them out of your deck. This card is so bad that you’re disappointed when Yogg plays an eight mana card with no downsides. Let that sink in for a moment.
4. Primal Talismans
At number four we have Primal Talismans. Totems actually aren’t terrible, and there have been some interesting Totem decks in the past; even Shaman has a great deck to build small boards fast. With all the proper conditions going for it, you know it’s bad when Primal Talismans remains on the list of worst cards. Totems may be decent, but they aren’t decent enough to waste a card on. Any deck that makes use of this card is playing a flood style deck, which means they play lots of small minions fast. That’s great, but it also means they are on a clock to win. Having four or five 0/2 minions spawn really isn’t in their best interest.
The real issue with Primal Talismans is that totems cost one mana. Any deck that’s playing lots of minions quickly in Shaman is an Evolve deck, and Primal Talismans is a great card to rebuild your board quickly when it gets wiped. However, that means it fills up your board and you can’t play more minions until you get rid of the Totems. You’ll end up having to Evolve them to get any value, and waste an Evolve on totems. A board full of two mana minions on turns four or five really isn’t that intimidating. The optimal conditions for this card leave it as an annoyance at best, and there are infinitely more situations where the card does far less.
3. Dragonhatcher
Dragonhatcher is number three on our list. When looking into people’s opinions on the worst cards you can see how massively undervalued Recruit is, especially early on in the set (before people were considering it alongside specific conditions). For example, a lot of people thought Possessed Lackey was terrible, and now it’s in one of the top decks in the game.
Dragonhatcher meets many of the same requirements. It is a Recruit mechanic that allows you to play Dragons, specifically. Awesome, right? Unfortunately not. The downfall of this card is simple and to the point: it costs too much mana. You don’t get the Battlecry effect of the Dragon, and you don’t get to use it that turn. This results in your opponent getting the first crack at it.
If Dragonhatcher costs seven mana, then I could see the justification, but for the full cost of a Dragon, it’s hardly worth losing out on so much potential. If you limit your deck down to only hit something like Ysera, then you have the potential to just draw her and ruin the combo. Plus, Ysera’s ability wouldn’t go off! There’s just no way this card is costed correctly, despite its potentially very powerful effect.
2. The Runespear
Ah, The Runespear! Destroyer of dreams, crusher of souls, bringer of tears! (To those who open it.) Blizzard has been very open in the past and said that they sometimes print bad cards just because they are fun, and this card is a perfect example, except it costs way too much to ever be used for fun. It will cost you eight mana to use this random spell that yields random targets. Yay? I’m not a fan of randomness, so I feel like this card is way too expensive for what it is. Maybe if it cost six mana people would use it for some crazy comebacks, or for making hilarious memes. But as is, this is restricted to Blingtron 3000 shenanigans and that’s about it. Plus, it’s a weapon and can be destroyed by all weapon-destroying effects, so that’s just one more reason it’s garbage.
1. To My Side!
Come on, you knew this was coming. Our number one pick for the worst card in the set is, of course, To My Side. This card is bad in every way, shape, and form. Animal Companion is a three mana spell that summons one of three possible minions: Misha, Leokk, or Huffer. Call of the Wild came out a few sets ago, and it was an eight mana spell that summoned all three of the minions. This was quickly deemed too strong, and raised to nine mana, where it is now sub-par at best.
This means that the natural progression would be to have the card that summons two Animal Companions at six mana, correct? One at three, three at nine, and two at six! Makes sense to me. Luckily, it made sense to Blizzard too, so it’s what they did. Oh, but you can’t have any minions in your deck.
Wait, what? Yeah, you heard me. Instead of a natural three, six, nine progression, they have three and nine with no caveats, and six with the biggest downside in the entire game.
There is no reason to play this spell. Even if you meet the requirements, it may or may not work out. Honestly, the card just doesn’t have any redeemable features to it. It’s not good from a random abilities point of view, it’s not good in your deck, and it forces you to compromise everything to play it. The best thing from this card is the dust you get from trashing it.