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.
Ticking Abomination+Generous Spirit+Shadow Word: Death wombo combo! PogChamp
Not bad arena changes, but they should remake rewards for arena.
rewards are fine... if your winrate over 55% you make 50 gold plus a pack in an average arena run so it is 150 gold worth of reward for slightly above average performance, which is fine... you need 67% winrate to go infinite though, but hey Blizzard is not interested in many people going infinite...
Is the Rogue's Smoke Bomb card worded correctly? It doesn't specify friendly minion, so does that mean I can cast it on an enemy taunt minion to bypass it?
Yes it is worded correctly so that you can target any minion.
Wow, probably the only one of these new cards that would be totally broken in constructed.
Bottled Madness will be insane.
Agreed Sinti. There are a lot of crappy demons.
the arena rises from the knees, :PogChamp:
Changes are usually a good thing and hearthstone as any other game needs changes in order to stay fresh.
These new cards are very interesting and i'm very eager to try them, same thing goes for the other changes.
Now i'm just waiting for the Q&A and the next expansion reveal and i'm a happy man!!
These changes are amazing! Arena is key to being a competitive f2p player, i cant wait!
Incredibly True
What's going to make this change interesting is how the power levels of each pick is now going to be determined. Before it was by card rarity. Now, what is it going to be?
Let's say they use something similar to HearthArena for card rankings, where each card is ranked on a scale of like 1-100. Is your pick a RNG number between 1 and 100? So if you roll a 5, you'll be stuck picking between Wisp, Angry Chicken and Penguin? Or perhaps all cards under a level of like 50 are grouped together? Or maybe they weight it so it's really hard to roll a 5? Or maybe the power level of the entire draft is set to a certain value for everyone? Who knows... I wish they would go more in-depth as to how the power level of the cards are chosen now.
Depending on how it all is programmed, this could lower the power level of arena decks significantly (which may not be a bad thing). Maximizing the value of weaker cards used to be a skill in arena that separated bad from good players, which now has been marginalized due to the power creep of the arena decks.
However, it also could make the RNG of deck building make-or-break your arena run, since if you get unlucky rolling three or four "5's" during the draft, you have 4 dead cards in your deck and you're going to struggle. Since they made the change to increase epic and legend rates a year or so back, success in arena has been pushed more to luck during the draft. I would hope this change adds more skill (it definitely does add to skill level during draft), but it also may make it even more luck-based depending on what power levels you rolled during the draft.
I agree...
“Each Arena pick in a draft will feature three cards of relatively equal power level, but different rarities.“….
I don’t think that is a step in the right direction. Not only will it increase the chance of ending up with bad cards in your deck (if the power level is low you must pick a bad card), it will also set the ‘power level’ of your deck equal to the power level of each of the 30 picks and there is nothing you can do about that.
Previously ‘better’ players could distinguish themselves by looking at the power level of the cards, the synergy and the mana curve… I think this update removes one of these three which makes the arena MORE random…
I'm excited to try these new cards. But if Bane of Doom and Kabal Trafficker are any indication of my luck, bottled madness will just get a hand full of Blood Imps and Street Tricksters.
Still 10/10 would draft.
I dont know why comunity wants expansion, i think they so often adding new cards, i think it was better2 exp and 1 adventure in year, 360 cards in year is way too much.
i hope the Arena cards become collectible cards
I hope These cards are reflective of what is to come in the new year. I really think Shaman needs a strong board clear tool similar to the card shown above. Volcano simply isn't enough to clear the more threatening boards in the later stages in the game and nothing really combos with other cards in the class like the Equality + Wild Pyromancer combo or Pint-Size Potion + Shadow Word: Horror.
Wow it's great to finally see some freshness into a gamemode I had personally started to hate. Hopefully they change the reward system too and I'll be a happy guy.