Everyone has an opinion they’ll continue to hold no matter the cost, or the evidence they’re presented with. For some, it can be something globally-reaching, like the idea that climate change is a myth. For others, it’s something more personal – mine, for example is that Fallout: New Vegas is the best game in the series. But one brave Hearthstone player is prepared to defend the idea that the game’s worst card has the wrong card art, possibly until his dying day.
There are no Angry Chicken in our list of the best Hearthstone decks.
The story concerns the Angry Chicken card, a one mana 1/1 card. Its effect is enrage, which allows it to gain five attack if it’s damaged. But since it has one health, damaging it without killing it is pretty difficult, and there are very few scenarios in which a player would be able to use the card to its full potential. That makes it a pretty unpopular pick, and actually seeing an Angry Chicken in play is incredibly rare.
According to this Reddit thread, Angry Chicken started life in the Warcraft Trading Card Game, a physical card game that was first published in 2006. That game contained a card called Gnomish Poultryizer that turned minions into chickens, incapacitating them. The art for that card was a confused-looking chicken, surrounded by the armour that it was previously wearing.
When Hearthstone began development, Angry Chicken used to be a 1/1 with no effect. It was purely intended as an amusingly useless card, and in the end it was a QA tester that suggested the enrage effect. In its early days, Hearthstone had a small team, and that meant a lot of assets were recycled, including the chicken from the Warcraft card game, who looked confused, rather than angry. Even when the game grew, director Ben Brode said he felt changing the card art to make it appear angry would be too confusing.
When Hearthstone’s first expansion, Goblins vs Gnomes, was released, it contained a card that was simply called ‘Chicken’, which was the result of the battlecry of the Gnomish Experimenter card. Brode says he “commissioned the chicken art in GvG to be especially angry,” in response to the placid-looking art that Angry Chicken was currently using.
The whole story is a bit of a saga, and ends with a discussion about how the Angry Chicken card shouldn’t be used as the indicator for the lowest tiers of the ranked ladder. You can read all of it here, but the crux is that the Chicken and the Angry Chicken should have their card art changed. Quite whether that’s an opinion worthy of a 1000-word essay is up for debate, but hey, each to their own.