Two Expansions and One Adventure Per Year
Polygon recapped their trip to Blizzard a few months ago to discuss the Standard format alongside other community members. We've recapped the important parts below!
Quote from Blizzard
- No longer will set releases alternate between adventure and expansion.
- We will see two expansions per year (start and end) and one adventure (middle). At least for now.
- Ancient of Lore and Keeper of the Grove "maybe those aren't the right choices" - Mike Donais
- Leper Gnome and Knife Juggler are two neutral minions being looked at.
- The move to Standard may be a bit early, but they don't want to get to the point where it feels impossible to catch up.
- Wild was originally going to be known as Legacy but Brian Kibler urged them to make it more Warcrafty.
- Adventures could potentially come back out of "the vault" much like Disney's movies do. (Idea is not mature)
/\ This.
Magic has 3 sets a year and that game does fine
actually for a card game its not fast, rather slowish :) for example Magic the Gathering has a new expansion set every 3 months where every expansion has over 200 cards ;)
Magic the Gathering also costs you hundreds of dollars for decks, as a good standard deck will be $400-500 that is only good for 3 months that you then sell for $200 to buy yet another $500 deck.
At least with MTG you have a physical card and can collect them and trade them. In a way MTG is an investment on the off chance that in 100 packs you pull $300 in cards etc. Hearthstone, is purely digital based content. cards do not increase in value or rareness etc. Basically hearthstone is a money hungry machine that feeds off of people's addictions for gambling. Same kind of business methodology as a poker website or online casino.
Ancient of Lore does not surprise me. I am a little bit sad that we are extending the considerations to [card] Keeper of the Grove[/card] for the reason that there are far too few good silence effects in the game as is and it was one card in druid I had really hoped would not change.
Leper Gnome surprises me a bit but I suppose but with the rotation of so many control effects it would perhaps give some balance to what kind of control effects they might need to make to combat face aggro. I guess I am ok with it if it needs to change.
Two sets a year sounds great. I for one get a bit bored with a lower change based format. Even if it means possibly paying a little more into the game I look forward to larger card pools and more changing environments.
Keeper of the Grove should only do 1 damage instead of 2 and thus would have Moonfire and Silence effects which both are 0.
For all the people saying this is no longer F2P cus of the 2 xpacs a year, try arena, you just might learn how to go infinite.
I was a bit anxious that there would only be two expansions in addition to classic in standard mode. That would make classic dominate the format a bit much. In that respect, this is good!
Just hope that not many players feel that it becomes hard/expensive to keep up with all the new cards. Hearthstone does after all have a lower entry level than most other collectible card games (I've tried).
So it was Kibler that pushed for "Wild"... I personally don't like the choice, it isn't intuitively obvious from the name what the play mode actually represents. Also, I don't see how its that warcrafty vs. Legacy.
While I too dislike the final choice of "Wild" I like that they took a chance to differentiate themselves from MTG since they are different in many ways. I'll still call it Legacy/Vintage out of habbit but perhaps after 4 years Blizzard will make an extended for the last 4 years of expansions as sort of a Limited mode. Kibler probably offered them good advise as if you didn't play MTG it's likely an awkward term to use. Perhaps naming it "Ancient" or "Eternal" might ave been a better choice.
I like Legacy as it will be a show case of cards that left their mark on Standard and other formats, such as Dr. Balanced whose Legacy will not be forgotten anytime soon.