Hearthstone Update – July 1 – HoF Rotation, New Card Art/Names, Card Consistency Update, Tavern Brawl Downtime

The latest patch just went out alongside Saviors of Uldum announcement. It adds the pre-order options and such, but most importantly, it introduced some important changes.

First of all, Hall of Fame rotation went through. Vanish and Mind Blast are no longer playable in Standard. Instead, we’ve got two new Basic cards everyone got for free, as well as eight Classic cards that can be opened in Classic card packs or crafted. Here’s a full infography:

A bunch of old cards got their art updated (and in some cases names – Succubus became Felstalker and Mistress of Pain became Queen of Pain). Majority of them got some form of gore or nudity removed. Here’s a full list of updated cards:

Additionally, Pilfer was updated to work like other Burgle cards available in Standard right now (e.g. Hench-Clan Burglar) – instead of adding a card from your opponent’s class, it adds a card from random other class instead (so it doesn’t mess up synergies in Rogue mirrors). We don’t have an updated asset yet, but we’ll add it as soon as we can!

We also had a change to multi target-cards. Older cards that hit two targets required those two targets to be present on the board in order to cast them. E.g. you couldn’t Cleave when your opponent had only a single minion in play (even though you might have wanted to). Now you can, which means that the cards were slightly buffed. The affected cards are:

• Cleave
• Multi-Shot
• Forked Lightning
• Dark Bargain

If you like Tavern Brawl, we also have some good news. Downtime between Tavern Brawls have been reduced to only 1 hour. Yes, you can play the old Brawl all the way until an hour before the new one launches. Enjoy!

And last, but not least, here we have a bunch of QoL improvements and hotfixes:

• Elise’s Journal – Acquired from purchasing one of the Saviors of Uldum bundles.
• Matchmaking has been improved for players who are new to Arena mode. These players will be matched against other new players with the same number of wins.
• Fixed an issue where Summoning Portal and Reckless Experimenter’s effects were being applied at different timings than other similar cost modification effects.
• Rafaam’s Scheme and Dreamway Guardians can no longer be played if your board is full.
• Shrink Ray and Equality will now behave in a way that’s consistent with Sunkeeper Tarim in regards to stat-buffing aura effects, such as Stormwind Champion.
• Hunting Party will now generate golden cards if it is copying a golden minion.
• Cards generated by Shadowcaster and Sonya Shadowdancer will now receive the bonuses from Magic Carpet.
• Duel! can no longer be cast if both sides of the board are full.
• Wilfred Fizzlebang’s cost reduction now works with all card-drawing hero powers.
• Shudderwock now randomly resolves any Discover spells cast by Drustvar Horror.
• Fixed an issue where losing your internet connection while in the middle of editing a deck would sometimes not save the deck changes after you reconnected to the internet.
• Creating Zayle and Whizbang decks should now properly show the card’s deck header art instead of the class art.
• [Mobile] Fixed an issue that could cause a blank page to appear if you changed regions while on the sign-in page..
• [Dalaran Heist] Spirit of the Tiger now summons tigers with correct attack and health values while fighting in the Underbelly.
• [Dalaran Heist] Cursed! cards from The Hand of Rafaam will now trigger their visual effects properly.
• [Dalaran Heist] Hero cards that are transformed by Golden Candle will no longer retain their hero power tooltip.
• [Dalaran Heist] Fixed an animation issue related to replaying minions affected by Bribery after they were destroyed.