Hearthstone: How Does Zephrys the Great Actually Work?

Zephrys is a mechanically interesting, but potentially vague and confusing card. Let’s clear things up.

Zephrys the Great is one of the Saviors of Uldum’s most exciting cards with one of them, at first glance, vaguest card texts I’ve ever seen.

The truth is though; it’s both more complicated than it seems and exactly as it says on the tin. When it says it gives you “the perfect card,” it means it…within certain parameters.

Zephrys is a marvel, and I can’t imagine how much work it must have been to program this card even with its fairly strict restrictions. It will only give you a card from the Basic or Classic sets, only cards in Standard (if you’re playing Standard, it’s unclear how it functions in Wild as of yet with the Hall of Famed Basic and Classic cards like Ice Block), and doesn’t take into account your or the enemy’s hand.

However, beyond that, it uses very complex and sophisticated decision making to offer you a solution to the current problem, taking into account the board state and you and your opponents’ relative health totals, and even your remaining mana. Zephrys will always try to get you something you can play on the turn you play him or barring that something that helps you the next turn.

This extends to both comprehensive solutions, like offering you Flamestrike if your opponent has a wide board of small minions, Siphon Soul if your opponent has one giant minion, or Fireball if your opponent has exactly 6 HP remaining, but even extends to more specific or sometimes obtuse solutions.

The one given is Crazed Alchemist (swap a minion’s attack and health) if your opponent has a Doomsayer (a 0/7 minion), but it also extends to options for getting lethal.

Zephrys will always give you lethal if it is within its power to do so (meaning with your and your opponent’s board state, if any card from the Basic and Classic sets would result in their death). The rub (no pun intended) is, this lethal is not always obvious.

Chucking a Fireball at your opponent when they have 6 HP is obvious enough. Slightly less obvious is getting a Dire Wolf Alpha to do the “small minion shuffle” to get through your opponent’s Taunt minion with proper trade order to eke out the last damage you need. Even less obvious might be an extraordinarily esoteric solution that involves doing something wild like casting Hex on your minion (something that happened to win a championship match earlier this year).

This makes Zephrys the smartest card every printed, worthy of its drawback (having no duplicates in your deck), and will certainly be the centerpiece of a whole lot of highlights going forward if, of course, Highlander/singleton decks have a place in the meta.

Hopefully so, because such a marvel of a card shouldn’t be relegated to the stack of “cool, but impractical” Legendary minions. I know I’d cry if all my hard work went to waste like that.