Plague of Murlocs

Plague of Murlocs is an epic shaman spell card, from the Saviors of Uldum set.

Generated by
As well as being collected in decks, this card can also be generated by the following card.

Strategy
A powerful source of soft removal. As a transform effect, Plague of Murlocs has most of the benefits of a Silence, including preventing Deathrattles, removing Enchantments, and otherwise clearing away abilities. It has the additional benefit of clearing away priority targets and replacing them with usually smaller minions, greatly reducing your opponent's board and bypassing Resurrection effects. Be prepared to deal with the results, since Murlocs have a lot of synergistic cards and may still be a threat.

This card can also be used offensively, turning your Totems into random Murlocs. It also works well with tokens created by Soul of the Murloc or Thunderhead. If you're playing a Murloc-synergy deck, you can follow up Plague of Murlocs with Murloc Warleader or Coldlight Seer.

Since most Murlocs have 3 or less health, Plague of Murlocs is great when followed up with Lightning Storm or Hagatha's Scheme. It can also be used with Earthquake in more desperate situations.

Plague of Murlocs is comparable to Devolve, which has similar benefits. Unlike Devolve, Plague of Murlocs doesn't care about the target's cost, making it far more effective against high-cost minions.

Trivia

 * Plague of Murlocs went through several iterations during development. One earlier version was a spell called "Plague of Frogs", which transformed all minions into 0/1 Frogs with Taunt and destroyed two of the player's mana crystals. An issue with this version was that when a player has a board full of 0-Attack minions, they can sometimes end up stuck with no way to remove them and no way to play cards from their hand, which led to the card's design being changed.
 * Plague of Murlocs' visual effect was created by artist Dominic Camuglia.

Patch changes

 * Added.