Hearthstone AMA with Developers (August 2020) Summary – Basic/Classic Rework, BG Balane Changes Coming Soon, No Standard Nerfs For Now, New Vanity Cards

Yesterday, Hearthstone dev team was answering community questions on reddit. Just like always, their answers varied from fluff / funny ones to more important and possibly telling a thing or two about the future development of the game.

In this post, I’ll try to summarize the most important points made, the things that you might find interesting and so on. The answers will be paraphrased, but I’ll try my best to keep their general meaning. If you want to read and analyze the answers yourself out can find all of them in the official AMA thread on reddit.

Let’s start! I’ll try to talk about more important things first and then proceed to the fluff.

Constructed

• Major overhaul of Basic/Classic sets is in the works. Current Basic/Classic sets are not up for the modern HS standards. We don’t know how the rework will look like, but right now the plans are to release it with the next rotation (April 2021).
• For that reason, there are no plans to replace 5 cards which rotated out to Hall of Fame with new ones. That will be covered by the rework.
• They’re looking closer at the meta shaping up, especially at Druid & Kael'thas Sunstrider, but they’re still gathering data (which means that – most likely – we won’t have a balance update very soon).
• When 2019 (Year of the Dragon) sets rotate out to Standard, they will think about reverting some of the card nerfs, and also look at some of the cards they didn’t revert nerfs of previously. This should keep the cards playable in Wild, which has a higher power level.
• They do plan to keep releasing some card buffs, but they’re much harder to get correctly, so we won’t see them as commonly as nerfs.

Battlegrounds

• They plan to release a Battlegrounds balance update soon-ish. They want to nerf Eudora. They’re also looking at Murlocs (nerf) and Beasts (buff). We should learn more about the patch in the coming weeks.
• They also plan to rework a few cards that spawn minions (e.g. The Tide Razor AKA “Boat” or Nat Pagle), because if a player gets unlucky, they can get hit for 20+ damage despite the game being very close.
• More features, such as seasons / ranking resets, are coming to BG – we should learn more about them soon (probably alongside the next big patch).

Arena

• Arena set rotations were removed – it was a planned decision. However, since players don’t like it that way, Arena will be back to rotating format in the next expansion.
• No bigger plans for Arena as of now – they want to keep the format stable and balanced, while they work on new game moes.
• Drafting buckets were removed, because they were too hard to maintain and keep updated.

Cards

• A new type of vanity cards (e.g. golden cards) is in the works. The cards would look differently in the collection manager, hand and battlefield (we don’t have any more details than that, though).
• No plans to make Elusive or Cleave keywords. They simply don’t feel like the upside of doing it is worth it. But if the need arises, they might turn some mechanics into keywords.
• Paladin Secrets are the hardest to design, because it’s difficult to keep them flavorful (Paladin’s aren’t “secretive”) and balanced (1 mana cards are harder to balance). They teased a new, fun Paladin Secret coming next expansion.
• We’ll most likely see more dual class cards in the future, but not in the amounts we did in Scholomance (it will be much less than 40 cards in a single expansion).
• Upgrading regular cards to their golden version with Dust is something they want to do in the future, but right now they focus on other features.
• Some older Legendaries should gradually get new, refreshed entrance animations.

General

• New rewards / progression system is being worked on. We’ve already detailed it in another post, so head there for more info.
• They’re working on “a number of exciting features and game modes” – that’s the exact quote. Emphasis on “modes” – one will be released later this expansion, but it looks like there’s at least one more in the works.
• Year-long narrative (such as the one in Year of the Dragon) is not planned right now.
• We shouldn’t expect expansion cross-overs with other Blizzard games from different universes (e.g. Diablo, StarCraft). But they might show up during some event in the future (like the Diablo Tavern Brawl we had).
• No events bringing Wild cards to Standards (like Doom in the Tomb) are planned, but if they do happen, they will be shorter & devs will step in faster to nerf problematic cards / combos.
• They’re working on improving the Hearthstone client performance.
• They will keep adding old Hero skins / card backs back to the store temporarily so players who missed them (e.g. didn’t play at the time) can get them.
• More Hero skins are in the works than ever – some of them will be earnable for free, other available for purchase. They sort of teased that Hamuul Runetotem might be one of them.

If we missed any important answers, let us know! They’ve answered a lot of questions, so rounding all of that up was pretty difficult. We’ve learned a few interesting things – the ones I’m most excited about are (quite obviously) Basic/Classic rework & new game modes.