Hearthstone is a game about board control, deck manipulation, and scraping every last advantage you can out of every last card. It’s a thrilling test of skill with an ever-changing metagame supported by a rabid fanbase. Since its inception, Hearthstone has had universal card mechanics, and with every new expansion, that list only grows.

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Infuse is one of the latest mechanics to be added, and it came as part of the Murder At Castle Nathria expansion. Infuse is a fascinating mechanic that encourages a wide range of decks, including slower, fatter ones. It essentially turns a negative into a positive, and that is more than enough to stoke our interest. Let’s check it out.

What Is Infuse?

Infuse is a mechanic that is very simple to grasp, but has long tendrils that threaten to engulf the deckbuilding process. Infuse, simply put, does the following:

• When a friendly minion dies, all Infuse cards in your hand gain a tally.
• When their tally reaches the level of their Infuse ability (shown in parentheses), they gain the Infuse benefit.

It really is that simple. Your minions die, and you gain a bonus. Some Infuse cards require very few sacrifices to trigger, others require more, and others still can endlessly Infuse making them especially dangerous.

Infuse cards can take the form of Minion and Spell cards.

The Best Way To Use Infuse

Infuse can be used in a number of ways, although the two biggest would be to support decks with a lot of disposable or summonable minions, or, to make big cards more viable in hand. For the first use, any card that summons multiple Minions at once, or splits into more minions on death, is ideal for Infuse, as you can quickly power up your Infuse cards and reap the benefits.

For more expensive cards, you could consider keeping them in your hand early on, providing you have a solid starting play of course. Being able to keep a chunky Infuse card in hand for the first five turns almost guarantees you will trigger its effects when it comes to playing it, getting maximum benefit.

Trade, Trade, Trade

As you may have guessed, Infuse is a powerful mechanic that rewards you heavily for killing your minions. Death in exchange for scaling. It’s a fun mechanic that, in practice, works well with other mechanics. The most obvious is Deathrattle cards.

Deathrattle as a mechanic already gives you some benefit (usually) for having a minion die. Deathrattle and Infuse, working in tandem, adds an extra layer of scaling to your deck. Suddenly, a minion dying is hugely beneficial to your deck.

More so than ever before, these mechanics (separately or together) make trading minions for board control that much more enticing. You can throw your minions at your enemy lines, clear the board, and still gain a huge swing in and out of hand.

The Downsides To Infuse

Infuse is a fun mechanic, but it has its drawbacks. Most importantly, Infuse cards are not necessarily worth their cost if you can’t trigger the effect. This means if you have too many Infuse cards, you could over stack your deck, forcing you to play inefficient cards to boost the rest of your hand. Worse still, you could just flat out lose on tempo. That being said, Infuse cards are not unusably bad, as has been the case with other mechanics introduced in prior expansions.

Next: Hearthstone: What Is The Wild Format?