(Lore)TIL Goldshire Footman dies to Frostwolf Grunt

That goes for both the golden and the ftp versions.

Frostwolf grunt deals 2 damage (duh) and Goldshire Footman has two health. However, Goldshire Footman deals 1 damage and Frostwolf Grunt has 2 health. So both in pre-gvg and post-gvg no matter which unit attacks first Goldshire Footman dies and Frostwolf Grunt survives with 1 health.

Now in Warcraft 3 (and in it's expansion WCIII: The Frozen Throne) footmen and grunts were the first combat units you could create as the alliance and horde respectively. This explains why goldshire footman and frostwolf grunt have such low mana cost.

HOWEVER A footman costs 135 gold, 2 food, and 20 seconds of build time to train while a grunt costs 200 gold, 3 food, and 30 seconds of build time to train. That means you can train a footman quite a bit faster than a grunt, and if we assume it takes you about 10 additional seconds to collect the additional gold needed to train a grunt, you can train two footmen in the time it takes to train one grunt. Hence the mana cost. Goldshire footman (1 mana) can be played earlier and you can play two goldshire footmen for the cost of one Frostwolf Grunt (2 mana).

Now here comes the kicker: check out the stats of each unit:

Footman: 420hp, 12.5 average attack, 2 armor

Grunt: 800hp, 19.5 average attack, 1 armor

Crazy right? A grunt has roughly double the attack of a footman. With a little rounding to account for hearthstone's single digit attack values this gives footmen an attack of 1 and grunts an attack of two! Just like Goldshire and Frostwolf.

Now I know what you're thinking: "But Papa_Sloth, grunts also have double the health of a footman, so why isn't Frostwolf Grunt a 2/4 or at least a 2/3?

Here is where blizzard accounts for the footman's heavy plate armor and 'Defend' ability. Remember how the footman has 2 armor while the grunt only had one. Well armor was a stat in warcraft 3 that modified the amount of incoming damage (much like the Warrior's armor up ability in hearthstone). However, since minion armor has yet to be implemented in hearthstone, blizz likely decided to factor the footman's additional armor into it's health. So really we can think of Goldshire Footman as a 1/1 + 1 armor and Frostwolf Grunt as a 1/2. Thus Frostwolf Grunt technically has more health than Goldshire Footman, but Goldshire footman's additional armor brings him in to the same total "health."

Here's the crazy part. This video provides a useful simulation of 100 grunts facing off against 100 footmen. The result is that the footmen all die and roughly half of the grunts survive.

Now consider what would happen if a board of 7 2/2 Frostwolf Grunts faced off against a board of 7 1/2 Goldshire footmen. If we were to run this simulation randomly there is of course a chance all the footmen die and 7 2/1 grunts remain. But consider the chances of this:

p(FootmanA attacks full health target)=7/7

p(FootmanB attacks full health target)=6/7

p(FootmanC attacks full health target)=5/7

And so on, multiply these probabilities together and you get a roughly 0.006 chance of that happening...and this is assuming independence too so it's probably wrong but I took stats like 3 years ago so sue me. tl;dr--it'll probably be about half the grunts survive.

I love this interaction simply because it is a nod to the lore. Footman died fighting and killing the Grunt in Warcraft 3 and blizz devs clearly thought this one through and probably ran way more statistical experiments to come up with the perfect stats for these cards so I think they deserve a round of applause.

Reminded me of the reddit wisdom why Salty Dog is a 7/4 and the only alternative would be 10/2.