Necrium Apothecary has, with not much of a surprise, became one of the best cards from Descent of Dragons expansion. Whether he takes on Mechanical Whelp‘s Deathrattle, or Anubisath Warbringer‘s Deathrattle, the implications of getting either of them on Turn 4 (and possibly triggering them immediately with Necrium Blade) are scary. While Deathrattle Rogue is not the best deck on the ladder because it’s not the most consistent one, when you see Apothecary dropping on curve, you’d really like to use your Zephrys in order to get Silence to deal with it. However, if you tried that, you might notice that even after getting down to 1 mana (Earth Shock) or 0 mana (Silence), there’s a pretty low chance that he will give you one anyway.
Players have wondered about it ever since DoD launch and many thought that it’s a bug. In fact, the latest patch notes have mentioned that devs have changed how Zephrys “values Deathrattles”. Hearthstone Game Designer Celestalon, who was in charge of creating this card and still tries to improve it with every update, has commented on that matter. They did change the way Deathrattles are evaluated, but it’s not the reason why Zephrys doesn’t like to offer Silence against Apothecary. As it turns out, it’s not a bug, it’s just how Zephrys works. Since he can’t read any card text, he doesn’t know that Necrium Apothecary has a scary Deathrattle. He just sees a 2/5 minion that has gained some sort of Deathrattle. For him, it’s exactly as scary as a random 2/5 minion gaining Soul of the Forest, Soul of the Murloc or any other similar Deathrattle.
Of course, even though in this case Zephrys works correctly, there’s no telling whether it won’t be hard coded, since players EXPECT to always get Silence against Apothecary. It was the case with Doomsayer early in Saviors of Uldum – players expected to get Silence against it and then devs have card coded the interaction. Celestalon hasn’t said anything about it, of course, I’m just mentioning that it’s a possibility.
I can add some more clarity to that patch note.
Previously, Zephrys valued Deathrattles as summoning a minion with stats equal to the difference in stats between the minion’s base stats and the expected stats of a vanilla minion at that mana cost.
Now, instead of evaluating it as summoning a minion, it does something more generic, of adding ‘that much value’ to the opponent’s board. In practice, this produces about the same results, except without the occasional card offered to deal with that extra summoned minion (which doesn’t exist).
This was pretty hard to explain in a succinct patch note (how many times did you have to reread the above two paragraphs and scratch your head?), so we opted to just say that “something changed with Deathrattles”, and leave it to skilled players to retrain their expectations around Deathrattles.
As for why Zephyrs “doesn’t like” Silence anymore… I don’t believe that anything has changed with Zephrys; rather the use cases that you’re using Zephrys in have changed. A really good example of this is Necrium Apothecary. I often get reports of Zephrys not offering Silence for Necrium Apothecary… That’s not a bug. That’s Zephrys working correctly, with the info he has. From his perspective, he sees a (4) 2/5 that had some Combo/Battlecry, and somehow gained a Deathrattle that it didn’t start with. That’s a not-particularly-threatening minion, and has some best-guess-probably-not-particularly-threatening Deathrattle. In other words, it’s about the same as a Gnomish Inventor that got Soul of the Forest’d. You and I know that that Apothecary is gunna Deathrattle into something much more impactful like a 7/7 or a +3/+3 handbuff, because we know what deck they’re playing and what to expect. But Zephrys doesn’t know any of that, and so (correctly, from his view) likely doesn’t offer Silence.
I play with this card a lot and it really piss me off sometimes. There were several cases where i desperately needed some sort of removal whose cost was out of the total mana available and, because of that, he didn’t offer it to me. One example was when i played against a Rogue who equipped and attacked with Necrium Blade to set up for next turn. On my following turn i was at 5 mana and i had no way of using 1 mana to get him to give me an Ooze. Since i had no choice, i tried it anyway and he just offered me a bunch of useless 3 mana cards and i ended up screwed. Zephrys always chooses whatever card he feels convenient from his perspective and that makes full use of the mana available. That’s why the wording “Perfect card” on his text really annoys me. It’s really hard to program something to be truly perfect and that’s fine. But i can’t help but dislike his occasional unreliability.
solution run owl and spellbreaker
Of course, if Deathrattle Rogue becomes more popular, everyone would run those. But the point of Zephrys is that he can substitute most of the other tech cards and be useful no matter what situation you’re in. Which normally makes him great in a very diverse meta, but it just doesn’t work the way most players expect it to work against Apothecary. I honestly think that Zephrys is good enough anyway, but I wouldn’t mind them hard-coding it to always offer Silence vs Apothecary (at least if you get down to 0 mana first).
i wish it would offer hex more against priest, especially in wild very good for messing up their res pool
Yeah, it would be great, but the problem is that Zephrys’ thinking isn’t that complex. He won’t offer you cards to mess up with your opponent’s strategy (at least not on purpose) simply because he has no clue what that strategy is.
Maybe in future we’ll get a card built on machine learning that will get smarter with data, but we aren’t there yet 🙂
Imagine Hearthstone designing the next ‘Deep Blue’ that can crush a World Champion. Thats something I’d like to see haha.