Designer Insights: Upcoming Arena Changes - New Cards and Pick Rules
Prepare yourselves, Arena changes are coming! In a Designer Insights video today, Kris Zierhut, Lead System Designer, talks about new changes coming to Arena.
- The cards from BlizzCon are finally being added! They will be available for a limited time.
- Cards will be offered based on their relatively equal power level and not just by rarity. Commons could be paired with a Rare for example.
- Legendary cards will still be offered in sets of 3.
- Picks 1, 10, 20, and 30 will still contain cards that are of Rare quality or better.
- They are temporarily disabling the increased chance to see cards from the most recent expansion.
- Existing rules that affect appearance rates are unchanged.
- The new cards will leave the arena pool when the expansion hits.
The New Cards
A couple of things have changed since the original BlizzCon cards.
- The Priest card has decreased in cost from 3 to 2 mana.
- Wording on several cards has been adjusted but retain the same effects.
Video
Mike Donais on Card Power
Quote from Mike DonaisWe had to take educated guesses on which power level buckets these go into when we added them.
Like most arena events they will be around for a while, and then they will leave. In this case they will leave with the release of the next expansion. I think they are pretty interesting cards in general.
*caw* *caw* wheres the first exp. of YoR *caw**caw* ??
Man that hunter one would be great for constructed. The cost would have to be adjusted.
Will we be seeing stream about new expansion or something?
I still don't like Arena. Drafts have still been shit for me and the mode feels so unfun.
Interesting changes. For the power level, I wonder how often they will be making adjustments to how they determine the power level of cards. Do they have a tier list algorithm like Grinning Goat / Lightforge? Are they going to give us any info on those power levels? Are they still going to do micro-adjusts? Many questions, but glad they are trying something like this.
smoke bomb doesn't say friendly minion, me still go face.
All of the Arena specific cards seem really strong but I feel like Smoke Bomb is easily the strongest before realizing that you can target any minion. Now with this notion, it's completely bonkers.
Yea nice sharp eye for taunt bypass, you are def arena material.
I like the idea of picks with the same power instead on rarity. I love the moment when at least two of the cards are interesting for your arena deck and you have to think about your options, mana curve, possible future picks, sinergies... instead of instapicks.
Grande hearthstone!
Cool!
But do we get 3 more packs after this update comes?
Seems like community has no sense of humour
tbh this is some pretty interesting news, i think this could make arena little more interesting.
even though this news is great! i feel like letting us know today was a bit meh as we are all on edge for the next expansion and exactly one week from the year of the raven being revealed they just announce some news we kind of knew was going to happen at some point does not really spark the hype train.
I'm suspecting the first expansion announcement will come right when the wildfest ends, so next week perhaps. That would line up well with an early april release.
Good to see the wording changes on some of the Arena cards, they sound much better now. And the Priest card getting buffed is good too, it was easily the worst one.