Whizbang the Wonderful is an incredibly well-designed card. Unfortunately, the card will not see any official tournament play, with Blizzard issuing a Whizbang ban for their events. In a Battle Net forum post by community manager Jesse Hill, he provides a brief explanation of how the card works, and that it is banned. There isn’t a specific reason given for the ban, but one of the reasons could be that it is unfair in current tournament formats.
The most unique effect to date.
When putting Whizbang the Wonderful into any deck, he replaces the Hero class picture and removes any other cards. He will replace your deck with any of the 18 most recent deck recipes, two from each class. Your hero will be the class of the deck Whizbang selects, and the hero power to match.
When playing, your opponent will have no clue that you are playing a Whizbang deck. There will be no special animation at the beginning of the match. It will be as if you just put together one of the deck recipes.
Another important factor that the Hearthstone team took into consideration, is that giving the opponent that information takes up a good chunk of time at the beginning of a match. Whizbang doesn’t do anything special to modify the game like Genn Greymane or Baku the Mooneater. The information isn’t relevant outside of being a detriment to the player playing the card. Then the opponent knowing Whizbang is in the deck narrows down the deck to two lists, which is predictable.
The ban maintains consistency of the Tour.
As we are now aware, there will be no Whizbang in tournament play. From a spectator perspective, this might be rather disappointing. Whizbang brings an entirely unique aspect to competitive play. That also creates a problem which is a good reason for his ban.
First off, players are limited to one deck per class, and only four decks total. Whizbang could create situations where players can have the same class represented twice in their lineups. Whizbang could also give a deck of a class that has been banned out by the other player. The ban could be to avoid these awkward situations.
Secondly, there lies the issue with Open Decklist formats. This means that players know all of the cards in the opponents’ decks. Whizbang requires players to know the complete card lists for all 18 possible decks. Tournament organizers would hate to have to hand out cards to every player showing all the lists. Whizbang creates headaches and a lot of wasted time.
Whizbang doesn’t really add anything interesting. He uses decks with existing cards and doesn’t create anything meta defining or meta breaking. What he can do is allow players to cheat the four deck limit and play up to 17 additional decks.
These cards can still be played in Wild Format tournaments, but moving them over improved the health of the HCT.
Some can argue that this creates a lot of opportunity to queue bad matchups, but it could also queue good matchups. Players ban out classes knowing their deck or lineup is unfavored against it, and Whizbang can work around that ban. What Blizzard accomplishes with this ban is putting out a lot of fires before they even start.
Images courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment via their official website.
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