As we might have guessed, there was no time to wait since the game was pretty much broken with her in play – on April 22nd, Orc-estra Conductor has been removed from the minion pool in Hearthstone Battlegrounds Arena. This news came from official Hearthstone Twiter stating that “Orc-estra Conductor has been temporarily removed from Battlegrounds Duos Mode until our next balance patch.” Let’s see what happened and why this has been done.
How did Orc-estra Conductor Work?
Orc-estra Conductor had a card text stating “Battlecry: Give a minion +2/+2. Improve your future Orc-estra Conductors”. This meant that every time you trigger her Battlecry effect, the stat would increase by that amount. Now, this doesn’t seem like it was too strong on paper – during the first two days of testing Duos, we noticed that pretty much no one was using her. However, players soon realized that she can be paired with Brann Bronzebeared and Draconic Deathscale, as well as Young Murk-Eye and Rylak Metalhead. The amount of Battlecries in that would skyrocket, buffing up Orc-estra battlecry to hundreds of stats each turn.
The problem was that her Battlecry, once triggered by a spell or any other minion, was random – she could even buff up the enemy minion if the effect was triggered by Rylak. However, this was a small price to pay as you will see in example build bellow.
Orce-estra broken builds
This is just one of the examples of how broken Orc-estra was. You can see the build above which I played in Duos just today. Basically, the whole Duos strategy of each player was one big race of who will get the Orc-estra first. Since this is duos mode, players just supported their teammate (the one who gets her first) and waited for Orc-estra to buff up the Tavern enough. Once that happens, simply by passing the buffed up minion, the other player would became insanely strong and the game would be won.
Furthermore, Orc-estra was Tavern Tier 3 which means that she could easily become golden by the simple use of Eyes of the Earthmother. Other spells worked in her benefit as well, leading players to pretty much just focusing every resource they had on her. Previous to patch, literally every team in duos, in the matches that I played, was either looking or using her.
Reactions on removal of Orc-estra
Just day before the removal, several reddit users complained about her broken mechanics. As you can see in this Reddit post regarding Orc-estra, this was a huge problem so the removal is really nicely timed. Once the removal was done, users were praising the decision that Blizzard made, commenting that it was “Much needed. Especially for Duos, this was entirely warping the meta, especially with any passing heroes, Brann, or Shudder.”
On Twiter, on other hand, most netizens joked about it asking “How am I going to give my minions +200/+200 now?“, and stating things like “I can’t imagine why“.
Will she come back in the next patch?
Most certainly, in my opinion she will be back. However, her Battlecry effect needs to be severely restricted. Perhaps she will be back as a Tier 4 or even Tier 5 card because nerfing the effect to +1/+1 won’t change much. We will just have to wait and see what happens in the next balance patch which is due in upcoming weeks. In the meantime, if you are up for regular HS BG, you can check out our full Hearthstone Battlegrounds strategy guide. Good luck!
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