People are freaking out cause mage indeed is quite strong, and in this weekend's Managrind it took first 4 places in both EU and NA tourneys.
I think the big thing is that this week, someone figured out that if you add giants to the freeze mage, you no longer get beat by healing, so between the freeze deck and a regular Mage aggro deck, you can cover all your bases. The Managrind format allows you to sideboard a whole deck, which really gives this style of having 2 decks with one character powerful. But nonetheless, Mage is still really strong. And now everyone is running this freeze + giants deck on ladder which is really annoying to play against, particularly because it drags the game out with turns in which you can't do anything.
Argent Commander was soooo good. Like, every deck had to play it. 4/2 is a nerf, not a big one, though. He's still 2-for-one, except you can sac 2/1 into him now. Still very strong, priest still cant shadowword him.
Still probably a must-have in almost any deck. A little harder to play though, since you have to make sure the little guys are all dead or you lose the body. This and the Cleric nerf make Harvest Golem even stronger that it already was.
Similar goes for IMP, he was quite good, he is still good but 3 damage does hurt more, so it's a good thing. People will still have to make loads of adjusmtent with Warlock Aggro in mind, and he'll just have to play a bit more safetly.
I was hoping to see some sort of change like this. The way penalties are done for the Warlock demons is really weird. Flame Imp, Succubus, Fel Guard, and Pit Lord are all undercosted by 1 mana and have a penalty to offset this, but for some reason, the bigger ones have a bigger penalty. 1 mana is a bigger deal for a 1-drop than a 5-drop, so having a 2 health penalty vs a 5 health penalty doesn't really make sense. If anything, Flame Imp needs a
bigger penalty than Pit Lord.
SSC nerf makes me sad, that is my fav card in the game.
This didn't seem as broken strong as Argent Commander, but it was still in practically every deck, so I guess they figured they should give some other stuff a chance. The nerf is about as innocuous as you could get, since in a vacuum it still trades evenly with most other 3s (only exceptions are Scarlet Crusader and now Harvest Golem and Razorfen Hunter), but it does help AoE deal with these aggro decks better.
Unleash the hound wasn't THAT good, but I guess people complained enough and comming out from no creatures on board to 30 damage in 1 turn really pissed people off and turned new people away from the game so it had to be done. I expected a nerf, like, they get +1/+0 if they have charge, charge if they don't. New one is interesting but needs testing. Synergizes awesomly with lots of hunter cards (Hyena, Buzzard).
Mindcontrol nerf underseved imo. It only dominates Arena, it just needs to show up less in Arena.
UTH and Mind Control
were that good in the way they affected deck building. I think more than aggro decks, these decks made it really hard to play slow control decks. Because if you were too slow, there would at some point be a chance to get killed by UTH, or when you finally got out your Rag/Ysera, they would get MC'd. They just generally made you not want to have big minions in your deck, because the risk/reward wasn't in the right place. But with these nerfs, I think it's easier to build a deck based on swatting away aggression for the first few turns and then playing big guys bigger than 6-drops. Mind Control only seemed powerful in Arena because it's harder to build a strong deck without big guys in Arena.
The problem, of course, is that with the OTK Hunter out of the picture, there's one less thing that beats freeze mage, which means more people are going to be playing it...