
The elephant in the room is not just the fact that Mountain Giant is so huge, but that it also has a base cost of 12. As long as the coin interacts the way it does with hand size calculations, Mountain Giant will make every early card-draw or generation effect extremely dangerous. The sheer quantity of damage it puts out and its massive 8 health body is incredibly hard to deal with on turn three. Getting Mountain Giant down this early is a significant problem. And while Genn is no longer in standard, Mage can get Mountain Giants on turn three with Book of Specters.
#Big game hunter hearthstone full#
But with Evenlock, Mountain Giants could come down a full turn earlier when on the coin. Until Witchwood, the only reliable way to get Mountain Giant on turn 4 was as Warlock, tapping repeatedly to lower the cost and forgoing most early development. Earlier Activation Turn 3 giants are a real problemīeyond an inability to deal with it, Mountain Giant can now come down earlier. But if your opponent spends their whole turn dealing with it, then you risk far less by building your strategy around it. If the card you’ve been building up to dies to a 0 mana hunter’s mark and a weapon swing, that’s a massive tempo loss.

But beyond that, it also pushes the tempo back into the Mountain Giant players’ hands. Less mana efficiency means fewer decks run them, after all. While these nerfs may not always mean that there aren’t answers to an early Giant, it massively improves the effectiveness of the giant. That’s 5 separate answers to a turn 4 or turn 3 Mountain Giant that are now far less effective. Big Game Hunter went up two, as did Hunter’s Mark. Let’s look at the list of hard removal counters to Mountain Giant that got nerfed or rotated out.Įxecute and Hex went up a mana. Hard removal is both more expensive and harder to come by than in 2014. The increased problem of Mountain Giant becomes more apparent when you consider its counters. What’s changed? Nerfed Counters With more expensive counters, the risk of a Giant goes down But the card has been in the game for many years now. Recently, there are rumblings among pros of the problematic nature of such a dangerous early threat.

As such, it can come out terrifyingly early – traditionally turn 4 for Handlock, but more recent decks like Evenlock and Dragon Mage can get it down as early as turn 3 on the coin.

The lumbering 8/8 is cheaper the more cards you hold in your hand. Mountain Giant is one of the most familiar cards of Hearthstone’s classic set.
