Year of the Kraken Infographic

by OtakuMZ - 8 years ago     show comments

Blizzard announced on Febraury 2^nd that they will soon split Play Mode into two types, “Standard” and “Wild,” as soon as the still-unannounced Spring 2016 expansion hits.

The Year of the Kraken will begin shortly. But what are the consequences? While in Wild all will be as it used to be, including all the cards we love and maybe some cards we hate (hello Dr. Boom!), Standard will limit the card pool to the more recent expansions. Namely, with the next set, all the cards from the “Naxxramas” and “Goblins vs. Gnomes” expansions will be unavailable in this play mode.

DannieRay23 already wrote an article about that here on Blizzpro. Allow me to bring the facts to you in a more visual way. I will also extend the consequences not only on the cards that are banned directly but also the cards that are heavily affected by the phased out cards. There is already a incredible post by ShadowOfSense on this topic which inspired me to extend this infographic to these affected cards.

I will focus on the cards that play a big part of the actual meta and which see frequent play on the ladder as well as in tournaments. I am aware that one or another will miss a special card dearly. So please be kind to me if I do not mention your fun and tech card of choice. Anyway, I have put in some honorable mentions for the best “fun cards” that created lots of Trolden moments.

As I said, this infograph will focus on competitive play only; please keep that in mind before criticizing too harshly. In the future, I will try to release the infographs in two versions (for either play mode) from time to time, but I will most likely focus some graphs on “Standard” only as it will be the competitive play mode. Also, with more expansions released, the graphs may grow to enormous sizes and will lack clarity and comprehensibility, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

One other thing that passed through my mind while putting all this together was somethign like: omg, most of the decks I love will be gone! R.I.P Patron Warrior, R.I.P. Mech Mage, R.I.P Midrange Paladin, R.I.P. everywhere (crying). But after a short while I thought: is this bad? Apparently yes and no. As much as I love these decks and others, isn’t the whole Hearthstone experience kept alive by constant change? Aren’t we all more than excited as soon as new cards pop up and we can begin to think about new decks? Then why is this change bad? We have even more to experiment with! And if we like to go back to what we loved we still can do it in the Wild mode. Change is good for the game.

There is still some uncertainty what the other balance changes will bring, but my firm belief is that these changes are necessary to open up the design space (e.g. as many other have commented about Force of Nature / Savage Roar before me). It will destroy one or another deck we used to play, but against all the outcries that happen also in other TCGs (e.g. Magic: The Gathering) every time new sets were released, cards were banned or unbanned. It will not destroy the game, the game will evolve, most likely to a game we will enjoy even more.

With that, enough is said. Just to be sure to mention one last thing: no, nobody us paying me to defend the developers, I really feel this way 🙂
Enjoy the infographic and all that will come to the game we all love.

P.S.:What Cards and decks will you miss in “Standard”? Are you glad to see some cards vanish? Feel free to leave a comment!