Worst cards

This is a silly article. While related to a real Hearthstone topic, it should not be taken too seriously.

Cards are the epic weapons with which the heroes of Azeroth wage war upon their opponents, summoning fearsome beasts to assault their enemies and raining destruction upon the battlefield. But not all cards are crafted equal. While the right cards can lead the player to a triumphant victory, others do a less than impressive job, and at worst can actually lead to the player's defeat. This page celebrates the very worst cards in Hearthstone, from risky niche cards to outright death sentences for the player who uses them.

Worst Legendaries

• Majordomo Executus
  • This minion's understatted but still powerful 9/7 body hides a dark secret: the imminent defeat of any player foolish enough to play it. Replacing even a full-Health hero with an almost-dead 8-Health Ragnaros, this card is unseen in any competitive play, but is a common means of tricking adventure bosses into killing themselves through suffering its terrible Deathrattle. Too soon, Executus. Too soon.

• Millhouse Manastorm
  • Infamous for being amazingly risky, Millhouse's stats are great, but not much use if your opponent happens to have a lot of powerful spells in their hand. Capable of getting the player killed as early as turn 1, this card is the indisputable winner of the award for "Quickest Way to Lose a Match".

• Hemet Nesingwary
  • Often used to define terrible, 6/3 for 5 mana is terrible stats. The destroy effect could redeem this card if it weren't limited to Beasts. All in all, a terrible legendary. Should only be used if user has intent to lose.

• Flame Leviathan
  • One of the first truly awful class legendaries to be added to the game, Flame Leviathan makes War Golem look like a good card. This 1600-dust card offers a sub-par 7/7 for 7 mana, with the additional side-effect of dealing 2 damage to all characters when drawn. The effect could be useful for deterring zoo decks, but with no way to control the drawing of the card, and no mage damage-trigger synergies to speak of, Flame Leviathan is the Titanic of the Goblins vs Gnomes set.

• Bolf Ramshield 
  • Truly, this card is amazingly horrible. This card could be a big target for destroy effects such as Assassinate, if it wasn't so terrible that it's hardly worth removing, and more easily killed by attacking face. It theoretically acts like a Taunt for damage dealing spells and card effects that can hit face, but in practice it's basically +9 Armor in minion form when minions can attack face unscratched. The only time it would be more useful than being 9+ Armor is delaying C'Thun's Battlecry... until anything else kills it.

• The Boogeymonster
  • Imagine Gruul, a legendary that already sees little to no constructed play, but worse. While a Gruul you might've got from a Golden Monkey might save your butt in those really long Control Warrior mirror matches, Boogeymonster will most likely not. Gruul constantly gets stronger no matter what you do, while Boogeymonster needs to trade with something weaker to get stronger. Compare it to Darius Crowley, at least the latter can attack immediately. Apart from being untargetable by Big Game Hunter the turn after it's played, unless you can give it a Windfury and several small minions to eat over multiple turns, it's just plain worse.

• Acidmaw
  • This card is almost suicidal in nature. It could be said to go well with Dreadscale, but our immediate reaction is: you need ANOTHER legendary card for this to work? It could maybe work with a cheap AoE such as Arcane Explosion, but it's a pity that hunter doesn't have those, with the exception of Unleash the Hounds. Even then, it's useless against Stealth and Divine Shield. Now that is why the card is just bad, but what makes it deserve its place in this list is that your opponent can do the exact same thing back to you. If the enemy hero uses any form of AoE, all, or at best most, of your minions will die.

• Moorabi
  • Maybe the most head-scratching inclusion in Knights of the Frozen Throne, this understatted, over-costed combo piece was supposed to be the heart of the so-called Freeze Shaman. Moorabi does nothing when you summon him aside from putting an incredibly poor body on the field. Rather, his effect requires you to pay more mana on more cards that are very slow, weak and awkward on their own. What's the reward for getting all this together? The same effect as Convert. Just Convert, with no other upsides.

• Duskfallen Aviana
  • Also known as "Dustfallen Aviana", this legendary minion is supposedly designed to get out one of your expensive cards much earlier, but it has one major problem: it works for both players. Not only that, you don't get to take advantage of it until your next turn while you opponent is free to play something big right after you end your turn. Oh, and if they kill Aviana on that same turn you don't get to use her effect at all. Best case scenario, you're playing against an aggro deck that's run out of cards and they can't really take advantage of it, but what's more like to happen is that they get to play something big and kill Aviana while you waste 5 mana. This Millhouse-tier card has surely fallen far from the original Aviana.

• Harbinger Celestia
  • What if you took Mirror Entity and removed the Secret part of it? That's what Harbinger Celestia is. To answer the question, it becomes incredibly easy to play around and her solid base stats goes to waste. Virtually useless outside of Treachery shenanigans, this card is high on everyone's "dust on sight" list.

• Dr. Morrigan
  • Dr. Morrigan is one of the many "infinite value" cards that fail to be practically usable. Just playing her is a massive tempo loss and using her swapping mechanic to summon a bigger minion to replace her can be done better with Possessed Lackey. Hell, even Madam Goya does that job better. She can't even be used in generic OTK Knife Juggler combos. The only use she really has is if you can use multiple copies of her to create an "unkillable" 5/5, but it's counterable with common tech cards and it's useless if you draw all your copies of her.

Honorable mentions

• Nozdormu
  • Having the honorary title of "Worst Card to Pull from the Welcome Bundle", Nozdormu has mediocre stats for his cost and an effect that shortens the timer. How effective that actually is is unpredictable. In most cases, he does nothing. Sometimes he could actually screw up combos with long animations or people who aren't paying attention and/or like to rope, but whatever the case, mild panic ensues whenever Nozdormu enters the battlefield, no matter whose side he's on.

• Lorewalker Cho
  • This particular Legendary minion... useless in nature, but useful against Secrets. Also the minion most likely to exceed 2 billion Health, not to mention far too fun when both players have one.

• Maexxna
  • This card had a chance of getting in but it was just a bit too powerful when played in the right hands to be truly useless.

• Nat, the Darkfisher
  • This card barely escaped the list by a hair as it is useful in extreme fatigue situations.

• Mayor Noggenfogger
  • Sure, you could attack with your hero and suicide into a Deathwing, or hit a Taunt minions instead of the minion hiding behind it, or cast Healing Wave on your opponent, or Assassinate a Silver Hand Recruit, or your opponents hits face even after you played Onyxia last turn, or even Fireblast yourself at 1 Health remaining against all odds... but so can they. Best of all, he even gives a small chance to use the "Sorry" emote.

• Lakkari Sacrifice
  • How can a quest reward that gives infinite value be bad? By having the requirements be absolutely inconsistent to meet. Playing this Quest means you are at the absolutely mercy of the RNG. Didn't draw Malchezaar's Imp? You're gonna spend a lot of turns tapping out your life. Discarded your other Doomguard instead of a Silverware Golem or Clutchmother Zavas? Your quest is gonna take longer to complete. Discarded your alternate win conditions? Good luck winning without them. Hoping Howlfiend will speed up your quest? Pray you opponent doesn't have something that will make you discard uncontrollably and make you discard your Nether Portal. What this meant was that to complete the quest in a timely fashion to make the reward worth it, you needed absolute perfect draw and the best discard RNG.

  But now at least there's Cataclysm if you want reliable discard.

• The Darkness
  • Sure, its gigantic stats looks enticing, but getting the opponent to draw three candles takes a lot of work and/or luck. You can't run it in a mill deck because burning one candle will make it completely useless, and God forbid you get it out of something like Evolve. Even after it stops going dormant, any single piece of hard removal will destroy it. Still, a 20/20 is a 20/20, it's somewhat useful in fatigue matches, if you can play more than one copy of The Darkness you'll multiply the odds of drawing more candles, and it can stop Reno and Razakus, at least for a bit.

• Splintergraft
  • This card is just too slow. Not only you have to stick a minion you want to copy to the board, but then you need to drop an 8 mana 8/8 AND spend extra 10 mana on playing that minion again. But if you can pull off a combo that lets you play both for much less, like with Jungle Giants or a 0-mana Mulchmuncher, you can get big board value off of it.

• Blackhowl Gunspire
  • This legendary embodies the definition of "meme card". It's virtually useless on its own, its effect is not very amazing just looking at it, and neither defines a high-tier deck or fit in already existing ones. Yet for all its flaws, if a player is willing to go all-in on this card and sacrifice their time, win ratio, and possibly rank to create the perfect storm where it's blasting everything to smithereens with cannons blazing, the result is oh-so satisfying.

• Whizbang the Wonderful
  • Even though Whizbang's deck-building skills aren't exactly up to par, he's just too sweet for new players to call truly bad. Plus, he can even work as a random button (if you don't mind a lot of losses in between).

Worst minions

• Magma Rager
  • Spawning a whole line of intentionally bad lookalikes, this card needs no introduction. Its 5-Attack calls like a siren to the unwary, leading many inexperienced players to wreck their decks upon the stony rocks of the Rager's single point of Health. Theoretically highly effective with Windfury or Divine Shield, many hardy players have valiantly set out to find a deck where Magma Rager actually works... but none have ever returned.

• Silverback Patriarch
  • While not quite as notorious as Magma Rager for its awfulness, Silverback Patriarch is considered almost as bad, but for the opposite reason; instead of abysmal Health, it's got abysmal Attack. Even if it does have Taunt, it's awful Attack value means only the puniest of minions won't survive trading against it, it doesn't offer any utility to compensate for its awful stats, and the Beast tag does little to improve its viability. What does make Silverback Patriarch's case unusual is that game has introduced literally more than a dozen other minions that are flat-out superior to it throughout many expansion. What truly nails it in the coffin, though, is that even from the very beginning of Hearthstone, Ironfur Grizzly was a superior counterpart.

• Angry Chicken
  • The original "worst minion", Angry Chicken was actually intentionally added by the developers to teach players to recognize bad cards. In its defense, the Angry Chicken's Enrage has the potential to be fearsome in the hands of a Houndmaster, Mark of Y'Shaarj, stitched to a Zombeast, or even Crystal Core, but for the most part simply serves to fool inexperienced players. Giving its name to the lowest possible rank in Ranked play (as well as a popular podcast), this chicken has every right to be angry, but in fact appears to simply be as flabbergasted by its own existential impotence as the rest of us.

• Gurubashi Chicken
  • They said it was impossible to improve on Angry Chicken (in badness), but Gurubashi Chicken manages to do that just. Nearly identical to its cousin down to its terrible stats except it gains a bunch of Attack on Overkill instead. Consider the following: to activate Angry Chicken's effect, you need to play it, buff its Health, then damage it in some way. But for Gurubashi Chicken, not only do you have to play it and buff it, but you also have to kill something with it. Outside of nearly impossible cases where it somehow gets Windfury and the opponent is dumb enough to give it stuff to kill and last several turns, Gurubash Chicken is a straight up downgrade. At least it's a Common.

• Warsong Commander
  • Poor Warsong Commander, how the mighty have fallen. Once one of the single most feared card in the game, it is currently nowhere close to its former glory. In its original state when it gave any minion Charge, this card was absurdly broken. Then it got brought down a notch to only give Charge to minions with 3 of less Attack. For a while, everyone thought this card was just okay... until Grim Patron came to town. Warsong Commander would go on to lead an army of Grim Patrons to charge forward, empowered by a Whirlwind of fury and rage, while their old friend, Frothing Berserker, seething from all the minion damage, finished the job by obliterating the enemy face, all in a single turn. It seemed Warsong Commander was all but unstoppable, until Blizzard directly intervened by transforming it into a worse Raid Leader, annihilating its viability for eternity. Now Warsong Commander sits in the deepest reaches of every player's Card Collection in limbo, never to be put in any remotely serious deck yet unable to be disenchanted.

• Backstreet Leper
  • Players often overlook this distant cousin of Magma Rager. It has the same obscene 3 Mana cost, the same awful 1 Health, but it instead of 5 Attack, it has 3 Attack with a Deathrattle that guarantees 2 face damage. It's slightly less worse than Magma Rager against Mages or Paladins, but nonetheless this pack filler is not worth using at all. The was only marginally useful once, in a Tavern Brawl, no less, along with its sick brother and a chunk of meat.

Worst spells

• Totemic Might
  • Although this card doesn't have a long history of drama compared to other crappy cards from expansions, almost everyone agreed this was one of the the worst spell in vanilla Hearthstone. At best, it might let a Mana Tide Totem survive an extra turn when it's played on curve, but Totems were so limited in use that having them survive a little longer meant nothing. It was somewhat used after The Grand Tournament added some Totem synergy cards and the dreaded Totem Golem, but it wasn't long before everyone decided to ditch it.

• Charge
  • Although nobody ever liked facing a charging Molten Giant or an extremely enraged Raging Worgen before it got nerfed, its current form has extremely limited usage. Turns out paying 1 mana to hit a minion with another minion you've played is hardly efficient, especially if you're Warrior and have so many better options, not to mention weapons. Even on something that might have synergy with it like Magnataur Alpha didn't make the card any better. You're far better off playing something with Rush if you want the same feeling. Or its not very good but strictly superior successor, Rocket Boots.

• Savagery
  • This card rivaled Totemic Might for worst vanilla spell, yet even a card Totemic Might can have a day in the limelight if it had some busted enough synergy effects. Savagery was not so lucky. In most cases it deals 1 damage after using your Hero Power for 2 Mana, and it needs to be comboed with other crappy spells in order for it do anything more. It was usable back in early beta when it dealt damage to all minions, but in its current state as a single-target spell, it's worthless.

• Deadly Arsenal
  • Theoretically powerful, but woefully lacking support and horribly outclassed by every other board clear Warrior has at their disposal. Sure, you can get a Dragonfire Potion by pulling Arcanite Reaper, but would you really want to give up weapons like Supercollider and Blood Razor just to do that? And you better hope you don't draw your weapons first. One has to wonder why this ended up at 6 mana while the considerably-stronger Dragon's Fury is only 5.

Honorable mentions

• Purify
  • Semi-officially crowned the worst spell in Hearthstone by its pre-emptive exclusion from the Arena, reception to this card was so bad, its arrival led to an avalanche of other cards being excluded from the Arena as well. While it offered the potential for some fun synergies, unfavourable comparisons to the 0-mana Silence made this an auto-disenchant for many players. Yet, for all the backlash this card received initially, it became one of the few success stories in this list, when Silence Priest become an actually viable deck.

• To My Side!
  • A card that has caused almost as much confusion and revile as Purify, on its reveal, no one could understand why an outrageously expensive Animal Companion that requires an absurd requirement for not having any minions in your deck to be average for its cost to even be printed in the first place. But the full picture shows that it's meant to be used with the Hunter Legendary weapon, and not long after players realized a deck that can still summon enough minions through spells and get huge card advantage out of it (not to mention it's synergy with Barnes/Y'Shaarj) is... not terrible, to say the least.

Worst weapons

• Cursed Blade
  • Terrific and game-changing... in your opponent's favour. This terrible card also means that when attacking anything with more than 0 Attack, you take twice as much damage too. It's an effect so bad not even the tankiest of Control Warriors can handle it. All in all, one piece of advice: Disenchant it.

• Poisoned Blade
  • Marked unplayable since it's release, at the 4 mana mark the weapon is just too slow. It's ability to gain +1 Attack per Hero Power over a painfully slow period of time proved to be awful. Kingsbane laughs at its grave.

• Tentacles for Arms
  • Warrior's own Poisoned Blade! While oozing with flavor, paying five mana to keep reequipping such a terrible weapon is never worth it. Arcanite Reaper or Supercollider may not be infinite, but at least they're worth the 5 mana.

• Ice Breaker
  • Because Spirit Claws was just a little too efficient. Surely, getting 3 Shatters that damage your hero sounds pretty good... err, wait no, it doesn't.
• Likkim
  • Spirit Claws needed a reboot and this was the result of the idea.

Official worst card

Statistically, the worst card in the game is not the one that is used the least, but the one that sees the lowest win rate for decks that include it. Just prior to the release of Goblins vs Gnomes Magma Rager was officially confirmed as the worst card in the game, with players including the card in their deck winning only 29% of matches. However, according to Ben Brode in September 2016 the card has since been superseded by an even worse, unnamed card. Brode states that the card was released "maybe a couple of years ago", suggesting a card from Goblins vs Gnomes (or Blackrock Mountain, at a stretch), but says that the card is "so fun" that he doesn't want to announce it as the worst card, because he doesn't want people to stop playing it, later stating that he "really [believes] people love playing the card and would be sad to realize how bad it is." Brode also confirmed that the card was not any of those presented on a list of widely considered "worst cards", including Majordomo Executus and Flame Leviathan. However, he states that which card is currently the worst does fluctuate over time.