Hearthstone, the collectible card game from Blizzard, is about to undergo its biggest shake-up to date, with more than 150 previously released cards being declared illegal in standard games.
Cards from the first two expansion packs to be released, July 2014’s Curse of Naxxramas and December 2014’s Goblins vs Gnomes, will no longer be playable in normal games. They will, however, be allowed a new format, called “Wild”.
The move, known as “rotation”, is common among games such as Hearthstone, which have a steadily growing pool of cards being released on a periodic basis. It’s generally seen as a bad thing if the overall number of cards grows too high: it increases that outlay required to become competitive in the game, makes mastering the game increasingly about feats of memory, and ups the difficulty of managing a collection.
By removing old cards from legal play as new ones come out, the number of cards available stays roughly steady – in Hearthstone’s case, about 600 of them. That’s lower than most real-world card games with rotation, such as Android: Netrunner and Magic the Gathering, which each have more than 1,000 cards in their standard pool. The smaller size reflects Hearthstone’s status as a simpler, more accessible game than either of them, but also means that the rotation announcement took many by surprise, coming several years before it was expected.
Rotation also enables the game’s designers to explore new avenues for the game, which may interact badly with the previous cardpool, and perform soft-patches, releasing new cards that differ slightly from old ones for balance reasons without needing to rewrite the text.
Of course, the downside for existing players is that some portion of the cards that they have bought (often with real money, even in a free-to-play game such as Hearthstone) become less useful. Standard format is poised to be the less important of the two ways of playing the game, with solo play, adventures and the arena (Hearthstone’s name for its draft format, where a new deck is made from random card picks) all being Wild only. But it still means that players with a solid collection of cards from two years ago will be feeling stung.
Key cards that will no longer be allowed in Standard include Dr Boom, Death’s Bite, Darkbomb, Imp-losion, Crackle, Shrinkmeister, Flamecannon, Unstable Portal, Goblin Blastmage, and Glaivezooka. While players will still be able to craft those cards using dust, they won’t be able to buy packs or adventures from the rotated-out releases – a fact that has sparked concern among players. The decision mimics offline games, where older packs go out of print, but many have wondered whether there’s a better option in a world where cards are nothing more than entries in a database
The split in formats will likely happen alongside the introduction of the Spring 2016 expansion, and according to the company’s announcement will see a major re-evaluation of the existing cardpool as well. It says that “while normally we’re quite conservative about making balance changes to Hearthstone cards (and we’ll continue to be in the future), we’re planning to take the new Hearthstone year as a golden opportunity to re-evaluate a number of cards in the Basic and Classic card sets, including class cards, and make some long-considered adjustments.” Hearthstone’s lead designer, Benjamin Brode, said that the adjustments will number “more than two” and “less than 20”.
One sweetener alongside the news is that the game will allow players to store more than nine different decks in the game: the number of slots is doubling, to 18. Of course, with two game formats rather than one, the number of decks players will be expected to store also doubles.
[Source:- theguardian]