hearthstone has been a huge hit both on PC and iPad. The game has nine playable classes but one class has been dominating most play of late, Hunter. The key card around which its dominance is based, Release the Hounds, has now been slightly nerfed, with its cost raised from 2 Mana to 3 Mana. Though its effect, spawning a single hound per minion your opponent has on the board, is unchanged

The card has had a turbulent history, first costing 4 Mana before crashing down to 2 Mana in a previous patch. That allowed for powerful combos to be played early in the game, with Starving Buzzard (for huge card draw) and Scavenging Hyena (who buffs off the wave of death that usually follows Hounds).

The change will reduce the effectiveness of the most aggressive Hunter decks and slightly reduce the power of mid-range Hunter decks that attempt to achieve board control. The one point Mana change looks like a good idea, as Hunter decks have made up a sizeable chunk of all the decks being played on the ranked ladder at present.

The top players are masinly using Rogue decks, admittedly, but these cost far more to craft than the popular Hunter decks and are far more complex to play as well.

Announced in a forum post , Blizzard says the change is down to the fact that Unleash the Hounds was preventing other players from playing minions and so making the game less fun.

We're happy that the nerf has happened, but we think it may have been better to simply limit the number of hounds unleashed to 3, that would still make it an early game, tempo-effective, play, but without the potential combos with other cards getting out of hand.