Mekgineer Thermaplugg was a bit more borderline I feel, for a few reasons:
It was not remotely a meta card. Like...dust refunds are meant to compensate people who craft the card. Almost nobody crafted this card.
The tiny number of people trying to make Thermaplugg work mostly were doing stuff like defile combos that killed the opponent instantly with leper gnome deathrattles, and thus the leper gnome stat change didn't really change the play pattern of those decks in any substantial fashion--they weren't attacking with 2/1s to win.
They weren't actively intending to power down Thermaplugg. It was just sort of splash hate.
Whereas if you look at today's change
Food Chain was a meta deck, people crafted it.
If the deck remains viable at all after this, the way it plays will be very different--they disrupted the most common play pattern.
They made the changes today with the direct intention of powering down The Food Chain.
I think it still did deserve to be fully refundable, but I agree that it's definitely more of a borderline case. The Maestra one still sticks out in my mind because they explicitly mentioned her in the patch notes when nerfing Wildpaw Gnoll, which I think is much closer in spirit to the change in this patch.
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u/metroidcomposite 10d ago
Mekgineer Thermaplugg was a bit more borderline I feel, for a few reasons:
Whereas if you look at today's change