Surrender to Madness

Surrender to Madness is an epic priest spell card, from the Rastakhan's Rumble set.

Strategy
Surrender to Madness gives an very large benefit on paper, but it pays off extremely slowly. While the +2/+2 buff is intimidating, it's cancelled out by the card leaving you down three Mana Crystals, leading to a massive tempo loss unless you play minions buffed by this card every turn, and even then, a +2/+2 buff equates to roughly 2 mana, effectively leaving you 1 mana behind in tempo. The mana loss also hinders your spells, making even cheap buffs and removal like Power Word: Shield, Shadow Word: Death, and Extra Arms much more expensive to play. Furthermore, in Zoo decks where the deck buff shines, spending 3 mana without affecting the board in any way is almost always a suboptimal play, and most other archetypes usually cannot justify putting yourself behind by 3 mana, making Surrender to Madness a risky niche card at best.

Surrender to Madness can be used with Mojomaster Zihi to put both players on an even field of five mana total while receiving the benefits of bonus stats. However, as Surrender to Madness is suited more to an aggressive zoo playstyle, this is not necessarily recommended as the mana reset will almost always come too late to significantly change the game's outcome.

Arguably the best use for this card is as a late-game power play (albeit one that takes multiple turns to pay off and requires earlier setup) with Bwonsamdi, the Dead and Spirit of the Dead. After the latter shuffles numerous 1-cost copies into your deck, play this card with 10 mana and then play Bwonsamdi to draw multiple buffed minions ready to play next turn for a large tempo swing.

Lore
is a level 100 talent for Shadow priests in World of Warcraft. It grants a powerful temporary buff to the priest player, allowing them to cast while moving and causing all of their -generating abilities to generate 100% more Insanity until they exit Voidform, but extols a heavy price from the user: as soon as Voidform expires, the priest dies "horribly".

Trivia

 * Surrender to Madness is an example of a "top-down" card design, intended to capture the fantasy of giving up everything for power as seen in ''World of Warcrafts Surrender to Madness talent as well as the theme of sacrifice and dark bargains seen in the ' storyline involving King Rastakhan, Princess Talanji, and Bwonsamdi.
 * Surrender to Madness' exact effect (such as the size of the buff, the number of Mana Crystals destroyed, and whether or not it would buff minions in both the player's hand and deck) was tweaked a significant amount during development. According to Peter Whalen, once Team 5 finds a card design they like, they will often try to push it to the most extreme version possible to see what form it takes. In the case of Surrender to Madness, this was a version that cost around 2 or 3 mana with the effect of giving minions in the player's hand and deck +3/+3 at the cost of destroying 2-3 Mana Crystals. As this was clearly far too powerful, it was changed to only buff the deck, which made the spell significantly weaker.
 * Surrender to Madness' flavor text is a reference to the famous quote "Never give up, never surrender!" from the 1999 film .

Patch changes

 * Added.