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

• 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, and it does a horrible job as a tech card because its effect is only worth using against niche Hunter minions. Simply put, big beasts are nowhere near common enough to bother teching against, and even if they were, generic kill spells are more efficient than an inflexible 6/3 for 5. All in all, a terrible legendary. Should only be used if user has intent to lose.

• Flame Leviathan
  • Until it was buffed in Caverns of Time , this was one of the first truly awful class legendaries to be added to the game, making War Golem look like a good card by being able to damage ALL characters like some weak, uncontrolled Hellfire , without rush to back you up after you accidentally destroyed your own board of mechs. This 1600-dust card offered a sub-par 7/7 for 7 mana, with the additional side-effect of potentially killing yourself past an Ice Block. 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 was the Titanic of the Goblins vs Gnomes set. Even getting Rush and making it no longer damage your own Mechs didn't help much, because the most action Mechs saw with Mages was for V-07-TR-0N and Time Warp shenanigans and Mages have much better removal than a costly Rush minion.

• 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 8-maximum-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. It's telling that the best use for the card is forcing your opponent to play it instead. You can also go full meme with Awaken the Makers for a 40-Health Ragnaros, but you could just play Fire Plume's Heart and not have to deal with the chance of throwing the game instead. Too soon, Executus. Too soon.

• Acidmaw
  • Even after it's buffs in Caverns of Time, this card isn't great, being a slightly more inflexible Urchin Spines, Serpentbloom, or even the equally unplayable Professor Slate.
  • Before that? it used to affect you minions as well, making it
    • "...almost suicidal in nature. It could be said to go well with Dreadscale, but our immediate reaction is: you need another legendary card to make this work? It could maybe work with a cheap AoE such as Arcane Explosion, but it's a pity that Hunter didn't have any of those back when the card first came out, with the exception of Unleash the Hounds (and Explosive Trap if the opponent is spectacularly dumb). 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 of your minions will die, and all they have to do is mop up Acidmaw's miserably-statted body... assuming it survived with its whopping 2 Health."
  • as the original worst cards writers put it. The Acidmaw/Dreadscale combo could actually work with The Jailer before he was nerfed, but were you really gonna play Control Hunter just to do that? Alternatively, you could drop acidmaw entirely and just put the non-legendary Serpentbloom on Dreadscale and have a far more realiable 3 mana, 2 card board clear (it doesn't even destroy your minions anymore after it's buff!).

• 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. Apart from being untargetable by Big Game Hunter the turn after it's played, unless you can give it Windfury and several small minions to eat over multiple turns, it's just plain worse. And just to rub salt in the wound, it's not even good in Battlegrounds. No, not even for Tirion Fordring.

• 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 resigned yourself to struggling against the discard mechanic and RNG itself. If you try to discard fast but don't have Malchezaar's Imp, you'll run out of steam and life from tapping it. 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? Your odds of winning just went down. 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. You burn through so many valuable resources discarding so much and if you don't get any good discards your hand is just dead on the water. What this meant was that to complete the quest in a timely fashion to make the reward worth it, you needed the exact proper draw order and the best discard RNG.

  The Discard Warlock archetype did get better over the years as it gained targeted discards and cards that actually gained value off discarding, but turns out the archetype didn't actually need Lakkari Sacrifice in their deck. While it's certainly easier to complete the quest now, paying 5 mana for two vanilla 3/2s per turn simply isn't worth it anymore.

• 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 (and now downsides, with it's buff in Caverns of Time). The fact that Shamans got their own version of Convert with a Freeze effect and it costs 1 Mana should tell you just how much value Moorabi actually provides.

• Temporus
  • Temporus has a pretty powerful effect, but to not make the card totally broken, he's got an equally big downside. Before you can wail on your opponent with some two-turn kill combo you've set up, you just have to survive your opponent taking two turns in a row. Surely for a defensive class like Priest, that shouldn't be too hard, right? You'd be surprised. Thanks to Temporus' terrible stats, he's kind of like giving your opponent three turns in a row. If you somehow manage to survive three turns of helplessness, odds are you were going to win that game anyway. In all other cases, Temporus is just an automatic loss. He's not even Priest's only extra turn option anymore.

• 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. She was born too early to make memes happen with Maiev Shadowsong, too.

• 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.

• Hir'eek, the Bat
  • Hir'eek is a great example of what happens when you have an archetype-defining card with almost nothing to support it. The main method of buffing Hir'eek is supposed to be using Spirit of the Bat and trade off your early-game minions to buff it. But history has shown that every hand buff that buffs one random card has never been good and average at best, this being no exception. Your only alternatives are Soul Infusion, which is better off on something you could play early game like Doubling Imp, or other crappy or slow Neutral handbuff cards. He's terrible to get randomly because he'll die to the tiniest of AoE removal when unbuffed, and even when buffed by the time you can play him your opponent will probably have a Brawl or Mass Hysteria ready to play. A literal clown is a better card than Hir'eek.

• Raid the Sky Temple
  • This is probably the easiest Quest to complete. In fact, you don't even need to warp your deck to play 10 spells as Mage. What's the issue? The "reward" Ascendant Scroll is awful. In most cases, it's a downgrade over Fireblast that grants high-variance value at a snail's pace. While it could theoretically help Mage outvalue control decks, Mage doesn't need help generating more value, especially random spells. Even then, it's so slow it couldn't possibly outvalue Dr. Boom, Mad Genius or Emperor Wraps anyway. If you're not convinced it's bad yet, keep in mind statistics have shown that Raid the Sky Temple has a higher mulliganed winrate than it does a played winrate. You're literally better off pretending you have a 29 card deck than you are starting this quest.

• Hack the System
  • This Quest lures players in with the possibility of infinite value of constant 4/3s. The problem lies however that building your deck entirely around weapons is not a good idea, as you're sacrificing the board to play them. Needing to attack 5 times, takes a long time, requires you to draw enough weapons to complete it and rewards you with a 2 mana 4/3 every turn. The hero power can be refreshed, but considering Warrior has no Windfury weapons, the best it can do is two 4/3, but at that time in the game, you're most likely to have run out of weapons, or suffering the opposite - a hand full of weapons with nothing else to play. It's ironic how Dr. Boom appears on either the worst cards or the best cards in the game's history.

• Al'ar
  • This card combines a lopsided statline with a laughably weak resurrection effect. If your opponent can't deal with 6 health divided into 3 health parts on turn 5, they have bigger issues than whatever threat this poses. There may be some combo somewhere involving copying or procc'ing Al'ar's Deathrattle to fill your board with "immortal" 7/3s, but is it really worth all that effort for a card that's super slow even when it's online?

• Sheldras Moontree
  • One of Druid's greatest claims to fame is cheating out big mana thanks to big legendaries, like Aviana, Anub'Rekhan, and Ysiel Windsinger. Sheldras Moontree... does not do that. While it's true that he can cast a free Convoke the Spirits, Miracle Growth, or any other big spell, the fact that you can't choose what your next three spells are means he can just as easily waste your Innervates and Lesser Jasper Spellstones. You also can't choose the targets, so setting up a meaningful combo is next to impossible. He also does nothing in an empty deck, and actually propels you three cards closer to fatigue. Plus, he's an 8-mana 5/5 that has no immediate impact unless you also draw a card on the same turn he's summoned. He's just too clunky to use. Stick to Druid's many, many other ways of cheating mana, or play Demon Hunter if you really want to see sparks fly.
• 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. He could technically tank something that hits really hard like a Sire Denathrius... but he's so easy to kill it's not a factor. After 7 years of being a worthless card, he finally got a useful synergy with The Jailer, turning your hero unkillable (and doing it with any class and more efficiently than Mal'Ganis) and winning you the game if the opponent doesn't have a board-wide hard removal. Then, they nerfed The Jailor and made him unplayable again.

Honorable mentions

• Illidan Stormrage/Xavius
  • For such an important and popular character he is for the Warcraft series, Illidan has long been considered a laughingstock of a Legendary in Hearthstone. While by no means a terrible card, his stat distribution is poor, he costs a lot, and his card effect is difficult to take advantage of for an unimpressive payoff beaten by a single druid spell. The resulting combination makes for an awkward card that doesn't fit in any kind of deck strategy. Even his niche as a neutral Demon is irrelevant as no Demon-based decks found a use for him, not even for Warlocks. He wasn't prepared to become a cornerstone of mediocrity for classic Legendaries, and after (less than 10 000) years of humiliation, he passed that mantle to Xavius when he was promoted to hero class status. (In a somewhat important note, Xavius got a "buff" in that the 2/1s he summons are demons!)

• 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 an interesting tech against Secrets. Also the minion most likely to exceed 2 billion Health, not to mention far too fun when both players have one.

• Maexxna
  • More a victim of being released so early than any problem with the card, Maexxna is often pointed at as one of the worst cards from Curse of Naxxramas. In truth, she's just a mediocre minion with a less-than-Legendary effect but some small viability in Arena. Probably not a card you'd want in your deck, but nowhere near one of the worst cards in Hearthstone.

• Justicar Trueheart
  • While for the most part a solid card, Justicar gets a mention for her atrocious Totemic Call upgrade, Totemic Slam. Every other class gets a direct statistical improvement over their hero power. Shaman gets to choose which totem they summon. Whoop dee doo. It's not worth 2 mana, overpriced for 0 mana, and definitely not worth 6 mana.

• Nat, the Darkfisher
  • This card barely escaped the list by a hair as it is useful in extreme fatigue situations. Nowadays, there are too many other ways too force your opponent to draw for it to be good anyway.

• 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. The real reason to use Mayor Noggenfogger though is to accidentally use the "Sorry" emote.

• The Darkness
  • Sure, its gigantic stats look enticing, but getting the opponent to draw three candles takes a lot of time and/or luck, and you can't run it in a mill deck because burning even just one candle will make it completely useless. 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 really long fatigue matches, it can be used as a janky tech card against Highlander (before Bad Luck Albatross was a thing), and if you can manage to activate its Battlecry more than once it becomes way easier to summon. It's also compatible with other meme cards like Gral, the Shark, if you're into that sort of thing. As an additional note, this card was briefly mildly playable until Switcheroo was nerfed.

• Splintergraft
  • This card is just too slow. Not only do 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. She's just okay in other borderline meme combos like Jungle Giants decks or with Mulchmuncher, where it's just a less good Sathrovarr.

• Emeriss
  • Emeriss is prime example of a good card stuck in the wrong class. She costs 10 mana, gives no tempo, and is a Hunter legendary, a class that is about as known for its control play style as Demon hunter is for treants. On times when you do play her and not die right away, her stat buff is pretty significant... if you have minions for it. Fortunately, there's one card that solves both giving Hunter control tools and minion generation: Deathstalker Rexxar. Also, she's a godly card to get out of Dragonqueen Alexstrasza.

• 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 fits 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. It's also legitimately threatening to leave it up in a Tempo/Enrage Warrior deck, and you do not want see them do something crazy with it.

• Dr. Morrigan
  • Dr. Morrigan is in theory an "infinite value" card that works best in decks only running big minions, but is too weak on her own to be any good. Her stats are bad, her job of swapping herself out with a bigger minion was better done with Possessed Lackey, or even Madam Goya, she can't even be used in generic Knife Juggler OTK combos with Spiritsinger Umbra, and while in theory you could create an "unkillable" 5/5 with a second copy of her there were no practical ways to pull that combo off and it becomes useless when you draw all copies of her. With all that said, after getting some synergy support with Plot Twist and getting buffed from being horribly understatted at 8 mana to understatted at 6 mana, Dr. Morrigan successfully went from one of the worst legendaries in the game to a crappy legendary that only really works in one equally underpowered deck.

• 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). The same goes for his brother-from-another-mother Zayle, Shadow Cloak, to a lesser extent. It's just a shame that he continues to run with Standard decks after rotating to Wild...

• Griftah
  • His statline is pretty on par (for his time), especially for something with card generation. The problem is that you don't get to pick which card you want to give or take, so you either have to play it safe and pick two cards that are relatively comparable in usefulness or bet on 50/50 odds and hope you get the good card of your pick. You could say he's not that different from cards that give both players something random, but the difference is that knowing you gave the opponent something good just hurts more. Fortunately, 50% of the time he'll give you the card you want 100% of the time.

• Hakkar, the Soulflayer
  • Terrible statline, double-edged effect — everything about Hakkar says "won't see play in competitive decks". Despite his flaws, there have been multiple decks designed to abuse his Corrupted Blood, like purging them out of you with Prince Liam or Arch-Villain Rafaam or Naturalizing him then giving your blood-infested deck with King Togwaggle. Even so, if he spawned randomly and neither player has a way to counter it, it's an exciting spectacle for viewers to see who bleeds out first.

• Nozdormu the Eternal
  • A 7-mana 8/8 is really not worth putting in your deck. That of course means no one puts a 7-mana 8/8 in their deck, and this effect will almost never, ever trigger. He's designed for the player that wants a goofy meme game, but instead only delivers a boring stat stick. At least he isn't understatted.

Worst minions

Bad Stats

• 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 (or a chance to BUFF), 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, its 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 expansions. What truly nails it in the coffin, though, is that even from the very beginning of Hearthstone, Ironfur Grizzly was a superior counterpart.
• Stormpike Commando
  • Yet another Basic card with infamously weak stats, Stormpike Commando was recognized as being overcosted even back in the Classic days. While it at least does something on the turn it's played, the dreadfully fragile 5-mana 4/2 body meant it very rarely netted you a tempo gain; even if you traded 2-for-1 with it, those two minions put together probably cost less than the Commando on its own. A lot of players just opted to pay 1 extra mana for Argent Commander instead. While tolerable in early Arena drafts, it was very quickly shunted out of relevance, and nowadays it's outclassed by far too many Rush minions and damaging Battlecries to count.

• Stoneskin Gargoyle
  • One of the original bad cards, coming from Hearthstone's very first new set. While the regeneration effect is neat, a 1/4 body for 3 with no innate defenses is unworkably terrible. The idea of the card is to pump it up with cards like Mark of Nature and Blessing of Kings, but it's simply too slow and inflexible. It's good at doing the Heigan dance (and, conveniently, is obtained from the boss right before Heigan), but after that there's no good reason to keep it around.

• Grotesque Dragonhawk
  • Say hello to basically the only reason Windfury Harpy and Thrallmar Farseer avoided this list. This is a 7-mana minion that — if it lives — can go face for 1 more damage than a Core Hound. It won't ever go face though, since your opponent can just kill it and have anything with more than 5 health, IE, almost every 7+ mana minion, survive. You pay 6 whole mana for a +4/+4 buff over his younger brother. If you want to meme it up with a big Windfury, just use Stormwatcher or Siamat. Those at least might actually survive a turn.

• 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 bad than Magma Rager against Mages or Paladins, but nonetheless this pack filler is not worth using at all. It was only marginally useful once, in a Tavern Brawl no less, along with its sick brother and a chunk of meat. Even then, this card's since been overshadowed by a rat in pretty much every way.

• Arena Treasure Chest
  • You know those egg cards? Those useless minions that are otherwise great with Deathrattle activators? This is not one of those cards. Sure there are other similar minions that are also useless on their own and don't create a minion, but those cards cost 1 Mana. This thing costs 4 mana. Arcane Intellect costs 1 less and you get your cards immediately, and even the most aggressive of Hunter decks don't need to create this level of tempo loss to draw cards. Overall, this card is so abysmally statted for an effect so inefficient that it doesn't belong in anywhere but this list. Not even in Arena, ironically.

• Rock Rager
  • Despite powercreeping Magma Rager twice, Rock Rager somehow manages to be an even more worthless card. That Taunt keyword means the iconically pathetic 1 health has absolutely no way to be protected. Any minion on the opponent's board, and your 5/1 is gone, no matter how far ahead you are. It fails as a defender, it fails as an attacker, and it fails as any kind of Elemental support. The only "rock out" happening here is getting that rock out of your deck.

Bad Gimmick

• 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.

• Gnomish Experimenter
  • What is it with Hearthstone and bad chicken cards? There's no reason to play this over Gnomish Inventor, Novice Engineer, Witchwood Piper, or the myriad of better card cyclers. Unless of course you really like discarding minions from your deck and drawing a worse Snowflipper Penguin. S'pose it might work if you were hyper-drawing for a spell-only combo, but why risk chickenizing your other draw cards?

• Void Crusher
  • A minion that came with a Deadly Shot effect? That would probably be played. It having terrible stats for the cost? A little less good, but worth thinking about in Warlock. Paying 8 mana for the effect? Much worse, but at least it's repeatable for only 2 mana if you can stick the minion. Having to sacrifice a friendly minion each time you use the ability? Now it's considerably less useful. The effect can potentially kill itself, making it a literal Deadly Shot for 8 mana? ... maybe you can give this one a pass, most players object to using it.

• Wicked Skeleton
  • Known as the worst Evolved 3-drop in the game, it takes a lot to make this card's stats go into halfway respectable territory. Sure, you could trade two minions into enemy minions and have them all destroy each other and you'd get a slightly better Chillwind Yeti that still gets murdered by Silence, or you could not commit tempo suicide and just play Chillwind Yeti in the first place. You could use it to follow up a massive board clear or a Doomsayer, but then again, most control decks would much rather not waste a deck slot on a card that's a dead draw in most other situations, because you're not always going to get a huge board to clear. Even if you could summon a bunch of tiny minions to kamikaze into an enemy with Unleash the Hounds or Swarm of Locusts to power it up, it's just too easy to counter and comes in too late to be worth it.

• Furbolg Mossbinder
  • This is one of those times where we have to stop and ask why a card was printed. This is a 5 mana 1/1, that can, at best, give a token +5/+5 and prevent it from attacking that turn, IF you have a token in play. Just play Big-Time Racketeer or Former Champ instead. Or play Mistrunner or Faceless Corruptor and swing with the buffed minion right away. Or maybe even a Wargear. Basically, just don't play this. It's almost like Blizzard made this card just to troll Shaman.

• Holomancer
  • Similar to Harbinger Celestia, this card is kind of like playing a Mirror Entity face-up. Except, you don't even get the full stats of whatever you copy, so it's even easier to play around. It's also pathetically fragile, at a mere 5-mana 3/3, unlike Celestia's relatively impressive body and inherent protection. If your opponent actually can't respond to Holomancer somehow and needs to just play a minion to take back the board... you've got yourself a total of 4/4 in stats for 5 mana. Congratulations.

• 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, Gurubashi Chicken is a straight-up downgrade. Even with the addition of BEEEES!!!, Linecracker is an infinitely better meme. At least it's a Common.

• Gurubashi Offering
  • If you go first and drop this on turn 1, it's a better Iron Hide. Anytime else, it's a worse Shieldbearer. It won't survive a turn in situations where 8 armor makes a difference, classes that use armor have better options, and let's not even get started on Platebreaker. The meme value with Glinda Crowskin is there, but she really prefers the company of Mechs, and Druids do it better. Also, Iron Hide and Shieldbearer are both Commons that see basically no play, so why is this thing Epic again? We have yet to hear any epics about it.

• Ice Cream Peddler
  • Not as awful as some of its contemporaries, but that's not saying much. This card has below-average stats and an effect so incredibly specific, you should buy a lotto ticket if it accidentally triggers. If it worked off any frozen minion, it might be an okay ability. The fact that it has to be a friendly minion though means you have to run into a rare Freeze effect from your opponent while this is in your hand... or freeze your own stuff, and we all know how good those synergies are. And if it does trigger, basically all you get is a Heavy Plate. By the way, this is indeed the third Rastakhan's Rumble card in a row. It isn't the last on this page, either.

• Desert Obelisk
  • What would normally be a funny meme card is somehow outmemed in the very same set. Mogu Cultist has a similar condition (although slightly more restrictive, its low mana cost makes it more feasible) and a reward that surpasses Desert Obelisk by a million years. Would you rather cheat around 15 mana to deal 5 damage to 3 random targets, or finagle 7 mana to summon a 20/20 and deal 20 damage to everything? You can't even make an availability case, since they're both Epics. It saw a tiny bit of play when Turtle Mage was a thing, but that time was extremely short-lived and it was still a meme option compared to better cards.

• Blood Herald
  • In some ways, this is a Take 2 on Wicked Skeleton. Unfortunately, it's about as bad. Now you can at least build it over time instead of needing one lucky turn, but it only grows at half the rate and you need to sacrifice your own minions. Blood Herald takes the same problems Bolvar and Blubber Baron has — needs to be in your hand as early as possible to get buffed and is a god-awful top deck — and amplifies it even more. It's also more costly than both of them, so the token-based deck that could fuel this effect can't afford to keep a dead 5-drop. Then it runs into the eternal problem where it can just get hard removed, since it has no protection whatsoever — which is especially bad because if you're using Blood Herald, it's probably the only major threat in your deck.

• Two-Faced Investor
  • What's worse than a Forgetful minion making a bad trade? A Forgetful minion that can wreck your curve. A 3-mana 2/4 that always reduced the cost of a single card in your hand would probably not see any play outside of ultra-gimmicky OTK strategies or a so-so pick in Arena. The fact that it can actually increase the cost makes this card absolutely unworkable.

• Sinfueled Golem
  • While you could theoretically make a humongous minion, the effect is far too awkward to actually use. You need to first draw Sinfueled Golem, get three reasonably large minions into play, then have all of those minions die, just to get a vanilla beatstick that has no effect the turn it comes into play. That's the best case scenario. You better hope you don't have any 1/1 tokens lying around, because one of those dying when you've drawn this card will lock in one of those three precious slots with a nothing buff. It's no wonder that Sinfueled Golem wound up being the worst-performing card in its set.

"Overstatted"

• Felguard
  • A Sen'jin Shieldmasta for 1 less mana isn't too shabby and would be good for tempo, so naturally it needed some kind of drawback because that's how Warlocks roll. Unfortunately, any possible tempo advantage to be gained from this thing is immediately destroyed by the awful drawback of permanently putting you behind on mana for a defensive minion that's only slightly above the curve, basically giving your opponent Wild Growth for free. Even back in the day, there were enough early Taunts and minion removal that Felguard was too unnecessarily risky to play, and nowadays Vulgar Homunculus laughs at its grave. It did see a bit of play when Warlocks got Krul the Unshackled, except people quickly realized it's not even good enough to cheat out.

• Mogor's Champion
  • This card has the same number of stats as Boulderfist Ogre... with abysmal distribution... and a RUINOUS downside. The Grand Tournament has a rather infamous legacy, especially among its neutral cards, but this one takes the (funnel) cake. As it happens, you really don't want your 8 damage to redirect on your opponent's Silver Hand Recruit. It's hard to believe this card saw print in the same world as Fel Reaver.
• Argent Watchman
  • Inspire was never a particularly well-regarded keyword, since it basically forced you to sink 2 extra mana into a minion for effects of questionable quality most of the time, and Argent Watchman embodies everything wrong with it. This is a River Crocolisk with 1 more health and the drawback of not being able to attack unless you used your Hero Power that turn, basically making it a 4-mana 2/4 after just one attack. Having to spend 2 mana on your hero power every turn just to use this minion as a vanilla body quickly turns this technically-overstatted minion into a massive and devastating tempo loss. Even with Genn Greymane in the game, Argent Watchman just isn't strong enough to be worth it compared to the myriad of 2-mana minions with vanilla stats and upside.

• Unlicensed Apothecary
  • A 5/5 for 3 mana is quite the stats, but Unlicensed Apothecary comes with a horrible drawback of damaging you for 1/6 of your life whenever you summon a minion. The sheer amount of damage you take means if this sticks on the board, you will not be able to play more minions to maintain tempo without destroying your life points, and even with cards that have synergy with self-harm the damage was far too much. Attempts to counteract this have been met with results underwhelming enough to be not worth the trouble, let alone using the card at all in the first place. It used to infamously be one of the worst minions to evolve a basic totem into with Thrall, Deathseer, which used to trigger off of transformed minions as well, obliterating your hero's health pool for no good reason. This card is OK-ish with Blightborn Tamsin, but that's more due to The Demon Seed's poor design rather than any merit this card has.

• Howlfiend
  • Randomly discarding never was a particularly popular Warlock mechanic. Letting your opponent control how many cards you lose, even less so. A 4-mana body on a 3-mana minion is good, but not if it comes at the cost of losing your entire hand. Even Lakkari Sacrifice decks think twice about running this thing because your opponent can easily use it to snipe the Nether Portal. It should really say a lot about this card that one of the best things you can do with it is to let your opponent have the thing so you can wipe their board and hand... in a slow, gimmicky three-card combo that takes up deck space better used for things like Twisting Nether, of which two pieces are nearly useless on their own. You should also cross your fingers and hope you never encounter one as a Wandering Monster, and don't even think about dancing with it.

• Kobold Barbarian
  • This is actually a worse Ogre Brute in every way. With the Ogre, you have a 50/50 that it'll hit the correct target, and >50% it'll hit anything else. Those are decent odds for a big Arena bruiser. This guy on the other hand does whatever he wants, meaning he'll almost never hit what you want him to. There is no advantage to using this card instead. And it's a class card. A class rare. Why.

• K'thir Ritualist
  • One stat point, particularly an unimportant one like 1 Attack on a Taunt, is not that big of an upside. Already, that makes this card fairly underwhelming. What really pushes it over the top is the counter-intuitive downside, negating the supposed tempo plus by literally delivering something for your opponent to play on curve. This makes it the rare example of a stat stick so bad, it's worse in Arena than it is in Constructed. Now that's impressive.

Honorable Mentions

• Arcane Golem
  • Once upon a time, this card was the dream finisher for Zoolock, giving them a vessel to play Power Overwhelming on to end the game without any downsides. Then Whispers of the Old Gods came along and nerfed a bunch of problem cards, turning Arcane Golem into a laughable vanilla 4/4 that gave your opponent a free Wild Growth. It sat as one of the worst cards in the game for five years, until the nerf was finally reverted when it moved into the Legacy set. As it turns out, it's way too slow for Wild nowadays.

• Starving Buzzard
  • Another Basic card that was absolutely devastated by nerfs, but not as recognized because it happened very early and hadn't broken the meta as hard as Warsong Commander. This minion had an absolutely pathetic stats of 3/2 at 5 mana, killing any amount of viability it could have. While you can theoretically draw a ton of cards when comboed with Unleash the Hounds or some cheap beasts loaded up in your hand, timing for such a scenario is too impractical and comes in too slow to be viable. Over many years since its release Hunters have gained much better ways to draw or generate cards without absolutely destroying their tempo, so there is pretty much no reason to use this card to keep a higher card count. With the Core set changes, it was restored in its former glory and released into the Wild, where it finally saw some play.

• Warsong Commander
  • This card's history is one of the most tumultuous in the game. It was originally a totally bonkers card that could give any minion Charge, including, say, some Molten Giants. It was quickly nerfed to only work on minions with only 3 or less attack, but even this proved to be an issue when Grim Patron rolled into town, bringing a Frothing Berserker for some OTK fun. It was nerfed again to the worthless effect of giving Charge minions +1 Attack... on a 3-mana 2/3. Warsong Commander sat 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. It stayed there for many years until the Core set came along and reworked it to give minions Rush, making it... not great, but at least playable. Then, it was rotated out of core and restored just like Arcane Golem, though it's usefulness has not returned with it's unnerf. However, Patron Warrior still generates the occasional highlight even today.

• Worgen Greaser
  • When this card was first released, it earned the nickname "pack filler" for a good reason. 6/3 was the worst stats you could realistically put on a 4 drop with no abilities to help it out. Even the equally awful Salty Dog was at least a Pirate. This thing was thrashed so hard, he indirectly prompted an apology from the dev team and a promise to print neutral cards with more interesting effects going forward. Thankfully, all the community attention paid off for this little guy, since he was buffed to 4 health as part of the 2022 April Fools Day joke, and again in Caverns of Time. While he's still not great because you're not getting very far in Wild with vanilla beatsticks, he no longer qualifies for the list due to being a better Chillwind Yeti.

Worst spells

• Savagery
  • Hailed as the other worst vanilla spell in the game (see Totemic Might below), Savagery has never found good use in its entire lifespan. In most cases it deals 1 damage after using your Hero Power for 2 Mana, and it needs to be comboed with other awkward attack buffs in order for it do anything more. Even when it got archetype support in Rastakhan's Rumble, the one time where it could be useful, it was still too weak to be played. Savagery is such a forgettable card that even in discussions regarding worst cards most players don't even remember that it exists to bring it up. The card did see some niche casual use in Lost in the Park decks however... at least until Rake came out and creeped Savagery out of relevance entirely.

• Ancestral Healing
  • This card fully heals a minion and gives it Taunt for free. It sounds like it does a lot, but in reality, this is a total "noob trap" card. A card that only heals a single minion and do nothing else (the Taunt adds barely anything) is far too low-impact to slot into a deck, and you're incredibly unlikely to get a best-case scenario where you heal a large enough minion to use it on. Could you at least use it for some synergy effects? Nope, because this isn't even a Priest or Paladin card, it's a Shaman card, which makes it even more awkward to use. If you want healing, you're far better off using any other healing spell that Shamans have or even just whatever Neutral minion with healing. Even a measly Healing Totem can do its job better.

• Cobra Shot
  • This card is a 2-in-1 package of board control and face damage... except it does both jobs poorly. Even back when it was introduced, Hunters already had better options for both removal and direct damage than this piece of overcosted junk, and it's since been hopelessly powercrept by the likes of every other damage-dealing spell (even the other bad ones). Heck, the fact that Corrosive Breath costs 3 mana less goes to show how horribly inefficient this card is, to the point that not even the most desperate Face Hunters would run it. Caverns of Time tried to give this card a second chance, but it's not that much better at 4 mana.

• Astral Communion
  • Back in the day, Astral Communion was a fun meme card that allowed for some crazy highrolls. It was never good, but too cool to place on this list. Unfortunately, the card has not fared well in the face of power creep. These days, it's not that uncommon for Druids to accelerate to ten mana without sacrificing their whole hand. Once they get there, instead of dropping big threats they can focus on comboing the opponent down, meaning the discard effect has only gotten more devastating as time has gone on. Astral Communion's whole shtick has been replaced by running cards like Celestial Alignment, Wildheart Guff, and basically any other ramp cards, making it completely obsolete.

• Power Word: Tentacles
  • Blizzard recognized that Velen's Chosen was just a tad too good, so they nerfed it for the Year of the Kraken. Maybe a bit too much, since for 2 more mana, all you get over Velen's Chosen is... +2 Health. That's the same as slapping a Power Word: Shield on it, without the deck thinning. And you lose the Spell Damage. And that's the same stat total as Blessing of Kings but more expensive. And then Paladin one-upped this card by getting twice the stats plus Taunt for only one more mana. At best, it was a low-tier pick in Arena. It was bad enough that Blizzard released a power-creeped version of this card in the Basic set.

• Shatter
  • People actually had hopes for this card since it's basically Execute with a different activation condition, and Mages are pretty good at freezing things. As it turns out, it's not quite that good, since Mage isn't exactly starved for single target removal that doesn't require another card to set up, Doomsayer is still a better follow-up to Frost Nova since it kills the entire board rather than just one minion, decks that like to Freeze things tend to have higher priorities than kicking one specific minion while it's down, and most decks wouldn't waste a slot on a card that's basically dead when you're top-decking. To add insult to injury, The Witchwood crept this card by crossing it with Ice Lance and it still sucked.
• Dinomancy
  • As the old adage goes, "face is the place," and Hunter's Steady Shot lives up to that creed by pressuring the opponent's hero and pushing you that much closer to lethal. This card, on the other hand, trades that guaranteed damage for a small buff that only works on Beasts, making it worthless when you're behind on board or if you can't put any Beasts down, and even if you do have a Beast on board, any sort of minion removal means you just threw a bunch of mana down the drain. Theoretically you could tap your hero power and then play this and buff a Beast in the same turn, but then you're paying 4 whole mana just to get a +3/+3 buff. If you really want a better hero power, just play a hero card or one of the quests instead.

• Glacial Mysteries
  • Remember how Mysterious Challenger ruled the meta for a bit? Remember how good that was? For two extra mana, you get potentially the same amount of Secrets, but they're all three-mana Mage cards instead of measly, one-mana Paladin cards. Sounds okay, right? Well... The first issue is that Glacial Mysteries is not attached to a minion — the Mage Secrets may carry more value than Paladin ones, but the 6/6 body that you place on the board is certainly part of the reason why Mysterious Challenger was good. Another issue is that Mage Secrets are not Paladin Secrets. In a vacuum, Flame Ward may be more powerful than Noble Sacrifice. Individually, Duplicate can have more long-term value than Redemption. But the value you may gain from pulling these Secrets out is much, much weaker than the massive tempo push Mysterious Challenger provides, given that Mage Secrets tend to have some needless redundancy (or outright negative synergy) with one another. Consider that you're paying 8 mana for a mostly defensive play that could probably be better used on something else that actually affects the board in a significant way, and that you have a decent chance to have drawn a good number of your Secrets by the time you play this, since it's 8 mana, and you'll understand just how bad this card is.

• 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, Ancharrr 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.

• Surrender to Madness
  • If you thought Prince Keleseth Shadowstep Prince Keleseth was an insane turn, imagine doing all that with one card! ...Unfortunately, Surrender to Madness has a slight downside to it, which may put you a little behind on tempo. That's a pretty bad downside on what's supposed to be a tempo bonus. Granted, some zoo decks may want to try the card out, but the card happens to be in Priest, the least zoo-y class in the entire game. Even after Extra Arms was buffed and Zoo Priest was experimented with, this card proved too slow and awful to even be attempted there.

• Dr. Boom's Scheme
  • Even with unlimited scaling this card is just grossly inefficient. It costs a whopping 4 Mana, and the amount of Armor it gives goes up by a measly 1 each turn, so low that not even the most patient of Control Warriors can last long enough for the payoff to be worth it. For comparison, it takes 11 turns dead in your hand for it to be comparable to Greater Healing Potion and Branching Paths, and it provides zero additional effects or flexibility, and that's if you start with it in your hand. Given that peculiar artwork, it's unsurprising to learn that this card was the result of an emergency rework, with its old effect instead going to Hagatha's Scheme. Even Dean Ayala admitted that printing this at 4 mana was a mistake, however.

• Soul Split
  • Is it any wonder that Big Demon Hunter was a deck that struggled so much? While their aggro and midrange compatriots got some of the most broken cards ever printed, the control side got... a strictly worse Molten Reflection. Not that Molten Reflection is necessarily a bad card, but it's just never seen play except as a combo piece. Restricting the effect to demons severely limits any combo potential this thing has. As for the intended synergy, that being copying the likes of Pit Commander and Hulking Overfiend after cheating them out, you don't want to run a card that's dead unless you're ahead in a deck that's already so highrolly.

• Kidnap
  • Stuffing a minion into a sack and forcing your opponent to replay it is good disruption in theory. In practice however, that little word "after" instead of "when" really butchers this card's viability. Your opponent still gets their Battlecry effect. That means they still get the effect from cards like Sire Denathrius and Necrolord Draka, and your opponent probably doesn't care about losing the body. Not only that, they get to use their Battlecry again if they break the sack. It's the same issue Freezing Trap has, except it's so much easier for your opponent to abuse. This card's unplayability basically dragged poor Private Eye and Ghastly Gravedigger into obscurity despite their high-power effects.

Honorable mentions

• Totemic Might
  • For years, Totemic Might was hailed as one of the worst cards in the entire Classic set. In vanilla Hearthstone, totems were Bloodlust fodders at best and totem synergies were nonexistent, and the best possible application for the spell was to buff a Mana Tide Totem to help it survive a little longer when played on curve. It was somewhat used after The Grand Tournament added some Totem synergy cards and the dreaded Totem Golem, but even that was deemed too inefficient to take up a card slot in a deck. Years later, it finally started to see some use in Even Shaman, which coincidentally had many good even-cost synergy cards to abuse its 1-mana Hero Power. Finally, it was used in Ashes of Outland, where a small health buff made a difference in having it survive to the next turn to abuse Totemic Reflection. While still terrible outside of that specific deck, it's nevertheless a valuable card in them.

• Sacrificial Pact
  • Sac Pact was considered bad for years — despite the strong effect (destroying ANY demon originally, including any hero after they've played Lord Jaraxxus), the lack of good targets and the sheer inconsistency of the card vs. non-Warlocks made it complete trash. Plus, it was just a bit too weak to use in decks that just wanted life gain. The card gathered dust for years until Galakrond, the Wretched was printed, which gave Control Warlocks more than enough demons to sacrifice. What really took the card over the edge though was when Demon Hunters took over the meta. Suddenly, a card that was too weak to include in any deck became the best anti-meta card ever, especially with non-Warlocks having the means to generate it reliably. It was good enough that it eventually got nerfed to only hit friendly Demons, relegating it to obscurity yet again but still marking it as a success story.

• Charge
  • Charge is a card with a fairly colorful history. In its earliest days, being struck by an Alexstrasza backed by Gorehowl was the bane of most players' existence, and while its burf to +2 Attack and Charge for 3 mana neutered the Alexstrasza OTK, Molten Giant and Raging Worgen proved to still be dangerous enough to warrant a nerf to a 1-cost spell that essentially grants Rush. This instantly dumped the card in the garbage heap as paying 1 mana and a card 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 and minions with Rush in the first place. Even something that might have synergy with it like Magnataur Alpha didn't make the card any better, and it proceeded to be rendered obsolete by (the still not very good) Rocket Boots. The introduction of the Legacy set finally reverted Charge to a usable form, though.

• Bolster
  • The hallmark meme card for years. Back when Bolster came out it required a deck full of bad Taunt cards to be remotely consistent, which in turn meant the deck itself was hilariously inconsistent. Despite its awful status on release, years of expansions and tons of better Taunt minions and other Taunt support cards have made Taunt Warrior a viable archetype in Wild.

• Purify
  • Semi-officially crowned the worst spell in Hearthstone by its preemptive 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.
• Explore Un'Goro
  • If you ever wanted to pay 2 mana to take the deck you built, throw it out the window, replace it with some semi-random garbage, and slap a 1-mana tax on your own cards for good measure, this is the spell for you. It really says something about how awful this effect is when the most notorious thing about it is using King Togwaggle (which didn't come out until months after this card) to ruin your opponent's deck and maybe use Skulking Geist to add insult to injury, though at that point they might just settle for using your deck instead. The buff to this card doesn't exactly make it playable because you'll still have to settle for random unhelpful trash half the time, but at least you're no longer paying extra to get them if you really felt like playing it for the memes.

• 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 Rhok'delar, and not long after players realized a deck that can still summon enough minions through spells and get huge card advantage out of it is... not terrible, to say the least. Moral of the story: Don't judge a card without looking at the whole set.

• Void Contract
  • This card is a symmetrical effect and tempo suicide. There's no reason to ever play this aside from the memes. That said, it's pretty awesome to snipe that Dr. Boom, Mad Genius or Mecha'thun before your opponent has a chance to draw it, or to burn all those Bombs out in one fell swoop... at the same time, you might end up giving your opponent their combo pieces and burn the useless 1 drops out of the way for them. Too cool to call horrible, too horrible to call playable, Void Contract instead ends up perfectly balanced (as all things should be).

• Last Stand
  • Another Taunt Warrior spell that proved utterly laughable, released at a time when Warrior was seriously suffering in every format. It was originally released at 4 mana with a non-conditional stat-doubling effect, which is beyond slow for modern Hearthstone. Blizzard thankfully took pity on this card and reworked it to its current form in just a few months. The buffed version still isn't great since Manathirst 7 is a rough condition, but at least it's no longer overcosted for a 1-card tutor.
• Demonfuse
  • Simple rule of Hearthstone: mana is everything. Following the Mana curve is the most basic strategy. Cards that cheat themselves or other cards out are some of the most broken in the game. There's a good reason player 2 has so many extra bonuses. Of course, you could throw all that over to your opponent for a measly +1/+1 extra stat over Demonfire. Or you can wait for it to be buffed and forgotten completely.

Worst weapons

• Cursed Blade
  • Terrific and game-changing... in your opponent's favour. This terrible card means that if you want to use it for trading, you take twice as much damage. That would already be bad, but then it continues to work on your opponent's turn, giving them a Prophet Velen and a mass Blessed Champion and most certainly killing you. Then there's the fact that it lasts 3 turns unless you ditch it for something better. 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.

• 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 price.

• Piranha Launcher
  • Unbelievably slow and not terribly synergistic. Summoning four 1/1s for 5 mana isn't even good, much less so when it comes over four turns and is built into a weapon with a useless statline. If you want this card done right, take a look at Desert Spear and Remote Control and never look back.

• Ice Breaker
  • Because Spirit Claws was just a little too efficient. Sure, getting 3 Shatters that damage your hero in a class that's infinitely worse at Freezing things than Mage sounds pretty good... err, wait no, it doesn't.

• The Runespear
  • The biggest loser of the Kobolds & Catacombs Legendary weapons, for a hideously high price of 8 mana for a 3/3 weapon, this weapon gives you a random Shaman spell of limited choosing with each swing. On paper it seems like the weapon could pay for itself if you get some good spells, but planning for them is impossible. A lot of Shaman's biggest spells like The Storm Bringer barely do anything if the board isn't in the right state, anything slightly weaker than a Volcano ranges from modest card draw to other terrible spells, and any targeting spell is unreliable, so if you Windfury or Hex the wrong minion then you're screwed. Outside of a few highlights, the Runespear hits way too many duds for it to really work.

• Bloodclaw
  • Originally designed to give Paladin a way to trigger healing synergies against Control and Combo decks, it turned out that a 2/2 weapon was worthless in non-board matchups and taking 5 extra damage was suicidal against Aggro. Blackwater Cutlass proves that a 1 mana 2/2 weapon isn't even overstatted, since it comes with an upside and is still rarely played for the stats.

• Farraki Battleaxe
  • Hand buffing has been a mixed bag, and the only reason it's worked for Paladins is because it's fast and doesn't rely on random chance to hit the right minions. This weapon throws that advantage out entirely for what is effectively a 2/3 weapon for 5 mana that can conditionally provide +6/+6 to random minions over 3 turns. And this was printed after Glowstone Technician. And proceeded to be completely buried by Hammer of the Naaru, which lets you use the full Attack of the weapon and gives you the 6/6 stats up front for only one more mana. Or if you want the handbuff done right, Whizbang's Workshop has that covered.

Honorable mentions

• Fiery War Axe
  • In the early days of Hearthstone, this was one of the most powerful Warrior weapons. Unfortunately, it proved a little too good for Pirate Warrior, forcing Blizzard to bump it from two to three mana. It shares its stats with many, many other weapons of that cost, all of which also come with an upside. A few of those strictly-better weapons were even available for Warriors. Thankfully, this card was finally reverted -- if not to playability, then at least to its former glory -- for its rotation out of Standard format in 2023.

• Poisoned Blade
  • Marked unplayable since its release, at the 4-mana mark the weapon is just too slow. It was supposed to synergize with Inspire cards, but the ability to gain +1 Attack per Hero Power over a painfully slow period of time proved to be awful. Self-Sharpening Sword laughs at its grave. Caverns of Time buffed it from 4 to 2 mana, but this was after years of power-creep and it's still not exactly a Kingsbane or anything. Still, players have been more willing to experiment and meme with it (especially paired with Genn Greymane), which is more than most terrible cards can claim.
• Light's Sorrow
  • This card was derided on release as a Light's Justice for four times the cost, and for good reason because building an entire deck around Divine Shield minions just wasn't viable in the slightest. Nowadays, there are a lot more good Divine Shield minions running around in Wild along with ways to grant Divine Shield, and Light's Sorrow finally saw some play there.

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.

According to HSReplay, the current worst card of February 2020 is Ice Cream Peddler with 22.2% win rate. The previously monstrous Magma Rager now sees a semi-comfortable 35.1% winrate.

In February 2024, the worst Standard card to see widespread play according to HSReplay is Chillwind Yeti with a 25.6% winrate; in Wild, it's Gang Up with a winrate of 39.5%.