Death Knights are Being Removed from Arena Starting November 14
Rest in peace Death Knights. The nine hero cards added in Knights of the Frozen Throne will not be available in the Arena starting next week on Tuesday, November 14.
Official Post
Quote from Zeriyah
- Death Knight Hero cards can no longer be drafted in Arena.
Starting on the morning of Tuesday, November 14 PST, we will remove the nine Knights of the Frozen Throne Death Knight Hero cards from the Arena draft pool. While the Death Knight Hero Cards are exciting and powerful to play, their permanent Hero Power upgrades are hard to combat in a format where answers are limited.
We will continue to monitor Arena balance and make changes on an as-needed basis. Please note this change does not remove Death Knight Hero cards from existing drafted decks. For a complete list of cards that are not available in the Arena draft pool, please refer to our Arena Specifics forum post on the official Hearthstone forums.
its still in descover..
Arena is like a different universe. If you remove a card from arena it means you remove the character or the skill from that universe. This discover bs is really annoying. It kills the spirit of the arena logic.
inb4 Kripp facing death knight decks after the 14th lol
> Please note this change does not remove Death Knight Hero cards from existing drafted decks.
Well, people are going to haunt Kripp for years with their arena DK decks.
The hallow's end arena event put an end to an arena run I had that still included naxx cards like Sludge Belcher. I expect these kind of events to return in the future so any arena deck basically has at best a year's worth of sniping.
I thought the DK was going to be replaced by NOOOOOOOOOOOO
Good balance change.
*Shrugs* to each their own I suppose. My last arena run, during the dual class arena, I only ran into Bonemare once out of my 14 games.
diagree SO HARD. At least Bonemare has - value on topdeck mode if you don't have a minion on board.
i can be wrong, but i think the Bonemare problem is because of the bonus draft of new expansion and when Kobolds and Catacombs arrive the drop rate will be reduced.
Grossly Imbalanced cards don't get more balanced in Arena just because they occur less often. All it does it increase the power difference between the god-drafted decks and average to subpar decks. In other words, making problematic cards rarer to draft just increases the imbalances, the exact opposite of fixing the problem. You can at least somewhat likely draft your own Bonemare now, or actively try to play around it on turn 6-7 knowing that it's almost certainly coming (esp at high wins). Making it rare makes it harder to justify extreme counter play, and makes it rarer for you to have your own bonemare, which just makes the Bonemares you do run into all the more devastating.
You can play around bone mare much easier, and it doesn't have a last effect that you have no way to negate for the rest of the game. DK cards are unique in this way.
It's a shame but I can't say it wasn't necessary. Drafts are already unbalanced as it is, and an inclusion of a DK can often make it feel like you're playing against a constructed deck.
Probably not needed.
The KFT selection bonus made DKs more common than they ought to be. They certainly shouldn't be more common than other legendary cards. However, the selection bonus for all KFT cards is about to end anyhow. There would have been time to see if DK were still a problem once they were significantly more rare. Accelerating the end of the selection bonus would have been wise, though.
Other problem cards (Ultimate Investation, Bonemare) might not be problems once the current set isn't showing up more often. It'd be better to reevaluate once the selection bonus is gone. This feels like a knee-jerk overreaction.
Exactly.
Problem with DK cards is that it is almost always correct to not play around them, because they are already kind of rare, because they are legendary.
For example you often HAVE TO play several big minions against a priest if you want to win the game. Chances are high he doesn't have Shadowreaper. In about 5% of cases he does have Shadowreaper, drops it, it clears 2+ big minions from your board, and he just instantly wins the game because of it. Even though you made the correct play by playing into it. That's just the worst feeling there is.
You do realise that we still will be able to get them through discover effects, right?