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)
Looks like Blizzard is really revving up the greed machine! Like all too many game publishers these days they have decided to market to the big-spending whales and leave casual players in a really bad place.
With three card sets a year a player will have to spend a LOT of money to gain access to even a moderate number of the best cards. And then those cards will rotate out and you'll have to spend AGAIN, and AGAIN and so on endlessly?
I'm wondering how many other players there are who are like me: willing to spend somewhere around $50 to $100 a year. When combined with dailies this allowed a player to build up a decent little collection over time. But this won't work going forward.
Blizzard seems to be gambling that sucking more money out of the whales will compensate for the inevitable losses in light spending casual players.
"With three card sets a year a player will have to spend a LOT of money to gain access to even a moderate number of the best cards."
The community has already done this math. Even F2P players, if they keep up on weekly TB's and daily quests, should be able to stay nearly current by the year on nothing but gold, if the historical pricing of adventure pricing and expansion card counts/distribution stay the same.
There was actually ONE xpac last year, and TWO adventures...you know adventures are cheaper than xpacs right?
LOE was $20 and you have 100% of the cards. Open 40 packs of TGT for $50 and tell me what percent of that set you own. You'll be lucky to get 2 of TGT's 24 legendary cards with that.
Actually for someone f2p this could be potentially better or equivalent. If we look at 2015 there were 2 adventures totaling 9 wings (5 BrM, 4 LoE) and one expansion. Let's assume a rate of 50g/day from quests, over 364 days you would make 9.1k g. 9100 - (9*700) = 2800g to spend on tgt. Depending on if the one adventure is 4 or 5 wings will give you (9100-(4*700))/2 = 3150 or 3150-(700/2) = 2800
So technically it's no worse than before which you were fine with.
Edit: my original math was off for how much money you make in a year. Calculating again.
Edit 2: change 9100 to 18200 and it's 11900 vs 14700 for 2 which is worse but technically you could disenchant stuff each year to recoup cost. Still could make more g if you wanted to farm the 10g for 3 wins more or did good in arena.
This isn't true. Before f2p were able to keep up because they didnt need most gvg or tgt cards, naxx was the backbone of most decks.
the new class defining epics and legendaries will make it more difficult for f2p to keep.
can confirm. preordered tgt, got 1 mysterious challenger and mostly worthless legendaries such as bolf and wilfred.
Just read last sentence guys
and...
NAXX OUT PogChamp
I think they meant remaking old adventures with new modifications
No, they mean making some of the old adventures playable for a limited time.
Can someone please clarify to me when the next end of the year expansion will rotate? will it take 2 years or only 14 months or so ?
14 months or so
That's seems odd to me, one expansion will expire sooner than the other not so fair. I think every new expansion should last 2 years regardless of its release date.
This is less confusing, there's only one rotation per year. it's probably closer to 16 months though for that end-of-year expansion.
Only nerfs for basic / classic cards, not a single buff. Obviously they are trying to force people to buy the new set to stay competitive.
Do not like this one bit.
I'm far form one of those "nerf everything" guys and I don't think that it's OP.
But Ancient of lore is by far the best 7 mana non Legendary minion in the game, the body is good enough since you rarely need to do more than 5 damage to a minion, and it's out of BGH range also the 5 health hit the sweet spot for most cards.
Just think.What midrange/control deck wont use Ancient of Lore if it was available to them?
It's just a really good card.
But yeah, if they want to go for a nerf combo is the target.
Ancient of Lore is so good that even aggro druid decks try to jam it in. It needs some consideration.
Drawing 2 Cards is a 3 Mana effect - so that's actually a 5/5 Body for 4 in Combination with Arcane Intellect
it's more like a 5/5 body + nourish since arcane intellect net you only 1 card
arcane intellect give you 2 card, ancient give you two card + a 5/5. in the end the body is not a "wasted" card but it can be used.