Thunderhorn is a card I see used way too often. It might just be my experience with the game and not how the card actually is but at the same time why wouldn’t you play it? It has the potential to wipe out entire boards. However Is this card healthy for the game? Does its mana cost make up for the possible unfairness of the card? My answer would be no. Thunderhorn’s effect is one that puts frenzy to shame. Can you play around it? Of course but often times it is not the only threat on the board and positioning your minions to counter it leaves you wide open to several other threats that could be up. It could just be my bias as someone who mains swarm but now i’ve found that even in my Eggmar deck the card gets over too many threats. Not to mention if they give the minion frenzy or blast? You might aswell quit playing and concede by that point if you don’t have an immediate out to it. I’ve lost one too many games to a single card and before everybody gripes “wELL pLaY ArOUnd IT bEtTeR” there isn’t a way to play around the card sometimes. Not to mention it can be dropped very early game through ramping before most decks can realistically use their removal cards. It has the stats and effect of an (at least) 5 drop but it’s a 4 drop. I’m just a little tilted because it’s a card i’ve been losing to alot lately (yes, even when I try to position minions to play around the card)
Thunderhorn... (Salt thread P much)
I personally love Thunderhorn’s design, and I’m sad it’s having such a bad effect on the meta right now. My personal solution would not be a direct nerf to Thunderhorn but giving vulnerable decks a chance to counter it better. Maybe more powerful Deathwatch options for swarm or something.
Neutral minions that are so good like thorn and emp (and kron and meltdown back in the day) are the cancer of this game. I hope cpg will realize that soon
this again.
Well - learn to position better is all i can say, the card is amazing.
This pretty much.
We’ve been whining to CPG for ages to give us position based cards and Thunderhorn is perfect in that regard. Can be (almost) entirely negated by good positioning and very good against people with bad postioning. Exactly how cards should be in this game.
Thunderhorn may be easy to counter, but don’t forget the existence of cards such as Assassination Protocol or Lost in the Desert. I personally think Thunderhorn alone is fine; it’s just some synergies that allow the card to be stronger than it should be.
But isn’t frenzy a literal effect designed to do thunderhorn’s job but less stupidly op? It’s much easier to position enemies around frenzy than it is thunderhorn. Plus the decks that do run thunderhorn also run enough other threats that a thunderhorn drop often isn’t the only issue you have to worry about. It’s just really cancerous imo. Especially when there are several decks that can’t help the positioning of their cards (lyonar with zeal, abyssian is swarm, eggmar with ragnora’s bbs, etc.) it just seems kind of dumb to have a card that can wipe boards be what punishes those types of decks to keep them in check. If I’m playing to the strength of my own deck and somebody drops thunderhorn than it pretty much negates whatever strengths my deck has. Not to mention it wasn’t a very needed card. Swarm is already having an extremely rough time as is not like it needed a hard counter to push it even more into irrelevancy
Edit: also notice he is the ONLY nuetral 4 cost with board wiping potential. To me giving even a potential board wipe to a 4 cost is a bit much considering you can ramp it pretty early in game.
And yet you can drop 2 thunder. In a game and lose - thindeegorn is not a wincon.
And yes the skill needed for swarm is knowing how to create your swarm quick despite blows like thunderhorn and friends.
I never said it was a wincon. I said it hard counters decks playing to their strengths. Fast swarms auto lose to things like plasma storm and other mass removal cards. So opting for a slower/stronger swarm is more beneficial. Thunderhorn punishes swarm doing anything but hyperswarm which is just nailing the coffin closed. Thunderhorn itself may not be a wincon but it still hard counters several playstyles where you don’t really have very many outs to it. Either give more decks counters to cards like thunderhorn that need it or better yet just get rid of the card hammering the nails in the coffin anyways.
Totally agree, before Thunderhorn, Abyss swarm was just flooding the board as much as possible and then play the most useful between Grimwar, DFC or Shadowdancer … really not rocket science. Glad these days are over (and yes, I played Abyss a bit 
).
I personally love this card and everything about it. Do I believe it’s strong? Yes, do I believe it’s Staple? Yes, Do I believe it should be nerfed? No.
The problem is not the card itself but the cards around it.
lITD, AoS and Kinematic Projection are all cards this card abuses.
LITD: Broken in its own and you can only play around one or the other.
AoS: Weak on its own, Forces the board wipe.
Kinematic Projection: Fine on its own, with thunderhorn it OTKs out the ass.
this is like the same situation with instant fusion and Norden, in ygo Elder Entity Norden could be summoned off the effect of Instant Fusion and he would summon a level 4 from grave, effectively making Norden a 1 card rank 4 XYZ, Instant fusion allowed this to happen but Norden caused the bullshit. Same situation but replace Instant Fusion with Thunderhorn and Norden with the cards that I lost earlier.
Hyperswarm is designed to kill the opponent before he can even play Plasmastorm and most other AOEs so that coffin is kinda broken already. Hyperswarm can also kill you or deal massive damage before you can get a Thunderhorn up. And hyperswarm can rebuilt a wiped board easily 3 or 4 times after a complete wipe.
And no Thunderhorn doesn’t counter decks playing to their strengths, i can’t post the replay right now since i am at work but i had a match as Vet vs Ragnora yesterday where i had 2 Thunderhorns and Lost, the thorns killed like 4 small minions and the lost i ended up replacing after like 6 turns because i realised i would never get a chance for any sort of value. Proper positioning can easily counter both especially in decks that can produce a lot of minions. It’s much harder to play around thorn lost with just 1 or 2 minions on board then with 5-6. With a lot of board you can just split up your minions into 2 man teams minimizing thorn damage and rendering Lost useless. I’ll probably cut the amount of lost copies in my deck after realizing how entirely useless the card is against a skilled opponent. I mean i new it was situational, but i wasn’t expecting situations where it would be so useless.
The problem of Amazing neutral minions Like thorn is that they restrict deck building options because they are better then infaction 4 drops. This leds to a meta were evryone is playing this card and this warps the game. This doesnt means that the card is bad designed.
Imo in the decks that Horn is played in, not for it’s powerlevel, which is above par but not erroneously so, but for it’s synergy, positioning is a poor way to counteract it as opposed to just removing/dispelling the bloody thing.
At least when Kron was everywhere, you could tech grovekeeper against it and get massive benefits from doing so. Thunderhorn, on top of being very solid, has no real counter other than premium removal. Even if you dispel it, it is still only 1 hp below the statline of hailstone golem.
I believe that Thunderhorn should never exist in the same game as battle pets. It is not far off from printing a card that buries a key feature from an expansion.
Beyond that, I think duelyst was a more interesting game before thunderhorn was printed. Thunderhorn makes area control too easy in this game. It makes it also convenient to prey on an opponent that is a little behind on the board, because their only options are to make themselves vulnerable to the thunderhorn attack or to kill it instantly. I would prefer that this card gets deleted from the game given the option or to make it sufficiently weak that you need to invest a second card in getting this kind of power. It is just too good a deal for one card and 4 mana.
Pets were bad before Thunderhorn was ever in a design file and were largely proven to be a irrelevant mechanic for competitive play unless grossly overstatted by Nimbus the very first week Shimzar dropped.
The fact is pets were never a good mechanic and most pets were never good. Interaction with Aspect of Shimzar aside, Thunderhorn should be viewed outside of the context of pets since they’re both rotating and honestly were pretty awful anyway.
I really hope a proper Thorn counter/tech card is printed in the next expansion. That would open up a lot of deckbuilding options in the 4-mana slot. As it is, with Dioltas and Funsteel rotating, Thorn’s existence solely threatens to make the selection of neutral 4-slot options that people consider when deckbuilding even narrower than they already are.
Y’all need to realize that a card can be well designed but still be overpowered.
Thunderhorn’s stats are one (1!) minuscule hp off of the IDEAL statline for 4 drops (Hailstone Golem) and yet still has an effect powerful enough to clear your opponent’s board multiple times in addition to basically removing Battlepets from the playable decks in the game and synergizing with already powerful positioning tools.
My problem with Thunderhorn isn’t the card’s design, I think it’s sick. The problem is when you have such a powerful effect on such a phenomenal and difficult to remove body, you get neutral staples. Which are cancerous.
If Thunderhorn were just like a 3/5 or even 4/3 or 3/4, it would have to be played with buffs to get full value, but would still be good on its own. Hopefully not good enough to just be thrown in any deck, like it is now.