Leeching Plague

Leeching Plague
Lifesteal. Infect an enemy minion. At the end of your turns, it takes 1 damage.
Class:	Death Knight
Card type:	Spell
Runes:	1
Cost:	1
Spell school:	Shadow
Flavor
Card set:	March of the Lich King
Rarity:	Common

Leeching Plague was a card Blizzard was playing with during March of the Lich King development.

For more information on how early death knight Runes worked, see Rune.

Related with

History

Plagues were an old death knight mechanic pitched during early development.

Plagues are a core gameplay mechanic of death knights in World of Warcraft, where they apply different kinds of plagues and diseases on their opponents as damage-over-time effects or debuffs. As such, developers explored multiple plagues, a common plague debuff, as well as a plague tied to which Rune the player was predominantly using.

The net result of Plagues was that because they heavily depended on what the opponent was doing instead of the player, as they required the opponent to have minions, it didn't feel like the player was in control of the game. It ultimately didn't feel like they were necessary and that they were a lot of added complication. The idea of applying multiple debuffs to a minion regularly didn't feel realistic, and when the minions would likely die within a turn or two anyways, it didn't feel like the Plagues were doing a whole lot.

Finally, the developers scrapped the idea and decided to use few of the Plague cards individually. Some went through major reworks, such as Blood Boil (removed), which turned into Blood Boil. While hints of the Plagues made it through all the iteration, developers felt Plagues didn't suite Hearthstone, even though they were excited to explore them.