Bad Luck Albatross

Bad Luck Albatross is a rare neutral minion card, from the Descent of Dragons set.

Strategy
The unique factor of this card lies in its Deathrattle, adding two ineffectual cards to the opponent's deck. Much like Weasel Tunneler, this can create 'dead draws' that interfere with the opponent's strategy without the risk of your opponent playing those tunnelers to give you dead draws in turn. The two Albatrosses also disable Highlander effects, effects that are incompatible with neutral minions like Lightforged Crusader and Apexis Blast, making this minion an excellent counter to decks reliant on their power. It can also disrupt any cards that rely on minions in their deck like Recruit cards, Scavenger's Ingenuity, and Muckmorpher, and adds a near-useless card in their deck to make the odds of drawing good cards from the effects of Galakrond, the Unbreakable and Wondrous Wand worse.

You can shuffle large numbers of Albatrosses into the opponent's deck using cards like Grave Rune and Psychopomp. Be careful of doing this in control mirrors however, as the opponent will often gain a heavy advantage in Fatigue.

Fixed bugs

 * The Albatross tokens created by Bad Luck Albatross originally had no class defined in the game's code (neutral cards are internally defined as their own class), so they were not treated like neutral cards. This meant that Lightforged Zealot and Lightforged Crusader could still trigger their Battlecries even with Albatrosses in the deck and Tess Greymane could resummon any played Albatrosses. This bug was later fixed.

Trivia

 * This card is a reference to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, an 18th century poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In the story, an albatross, typically seen as good fortune due to flying on favorable winds, is shot and killed for meat by a sailor. As a result, the crew suffers nothing but bad winds and rough seas. Thus, they tie the corpse of the albatross around the offending sailor's neck for bringing bad luck onto them.

Patch changes

 * Now costs 3 mana. (Down from 4)
 * Now costs 4 mana. (Up from 3)
 * Added.