Hearthstone: The Witchwood’s most aggravating card to get a helpful change

Hearthstone’s newest expansion, The Witchwood, added several new legendaries to the game. One such legendary, a Shaman card called Shudderwock, has been plaguing players for the past two weeks. But Jesse Hill, a Hearthstone community manager, took to the forums to announce that Shudderwock would be getting a quality of life change in an upcoming patch.

“In a future update, we will be doubling the animation speed of Shudderwock’s Battlecry so it will lessen the impact on the overall pacing of your current Hearthstone match,” Hill said. “In addition, the amount of Battlecries Shudderwock can reproduce will be capped at 20.”

While frustrating, Shudderwock isn’t overpowered, per se. Players’ issue with the card is instead due to its extremely long animation. Shudderwock’s ability causes it to re-cast the Battlecry abilities of every card you’ve played that game. Since Battlecries cause effects the moment a card is summoned, if you build correctly around Shudderwock, then the beast could be replicating over 20 different animations in a row.

In the clip below, YouTuber Dane HearthStone shows off just how long Shudderwock can take to play.

This can cause serious problems in a Hearthstone match. Not only are there Battlecries that cause cards to copy themselves, but there are also Battlecries that send cards back to your hand, letting you cast them again next turn. This essentially means that players can cast Shudderwock, replicate all the Battlecries of a game, copy their Shudderwock and send the copy back to their hand, so that they can do it all over again next turn.

This can be frustrating to play against, as it can take a long time for Shudderwock to replay the animations of every Battlecry. Thankfully, sitting through them should be much better once the animations go double speed. Blizzard hasn’t announced when this patch is coming yet, but for collectors worried that Shudderwock won’t be worth acquiring now, the power of the card itself shouldn’t go down too much. However, it should be far less frustrating to play with — or against.