When a new "Hearthstone" expansion is released is always an exciting time of the year. Even if you don't personally play The Game yourself, clips and highlights of new cards are still a great source of entertainment. The Witchwood expansion, in particular, is special because it simultaneously heralds the rotation of multiple previous expansions into the wild format. A notable vacancy in the standard format is the fan-favorite meme generator, Yogg-Saron. His ability to randomly swing the game in either players' favor has created some of the most iconic moments in Hearthstone.

Although his presence will be dearly missed, he may have a worthy successor in the form of the new Card, Shudderwock. Regrettably, this heir to the throne has proven to be quite the troublemaker for the past few days.

What is Shudderwock?

Shudderwock is a new legendary minion for the shaman class. It costs nine mana to play, has six attacks and six health. So his stats are a bit mediocre. What's special about him is his ability. When he is played, he repeats every single battlecry effect that you triggered prior to playing Shudderwock. Not only that, but he activates them in random order and on random targets. So at first glance, this is just another take on the Yogg-Saron's brand of large-scale random effects.

While this is true to some degree, this card has resulted in some problems regarding animations in "Hearthstone."

The never-ending turn

The problem with this card design lies in the fact that every single battle-cry effect must play out one at a time. Even sitting through a single cycle of this can prove unbearably dull for both players, but it only becomes unforgivable due to a certain combo involving this card.

A method currently exists that allows a player to generate an infinite number of Shudderwocks in their hand that each cost one mana to play (See video below for further details). So now, a sequence that was once unbearable is now being repeated up to ten times in a row where neither player interacts with the game. It's hard to know just how long this can potentially drag out for, since that is determined by how many battlecry effects you can play in a game.

But it isn't even difficult to have a single turn lasting at least five minutes.

What Blizzard needs to do

An important point to note is that, in "Hearthstone," calculations are already completed on the server the moment that any action is made. Despite this, Blizzard insists that we sit through dozens upon dozens of animations. It isn't as if the players need to see every single effect so that they can react in real time. That might have been the case if we were playing "Magic: The Gathering". Everything is already decided so just let the whole effect happen in one moment and maybe have a log of each effect somewhere if anybody wants to see it.

This is not a minor problem that occasionally happens.

The Shudderwock combo deck is a high-tier, legend-quality deck that players will face very often on the ranked ladder. I certainly don't speak for an entire community, but I find it hard to believe that players would enjoy playing constructed "Hearthstone" while this issue remains unaddressed. There have been some speculations that this problem may be rooted deep in the game's coding and that Blizzard would have considerable difficulty changing how it functions now. Then again, we are still very early in this new expansion, and I'm confident that the development team is designing some workaround as we speak. We'll just have to wait and see.