Ben Brode, lead developer on Hearthstone , took to the Blizzard forums to discuss basic and classic sets and the future for Standard ranked play. Basic and standard set cards tend to be the most powerful and can often make finding places for newer cards much harder. Why would I try out a complicated but interesting combo in my Druid deck, when I can just slack an Azure Drake and Swipe in my deck and get more bang for my buck?
Brode says that the goal for the Year Of The Kraken, or the first year of Standard ranked play, wasn’t to completely fix the game: “We nerfed 12 basic/classic cards, to put more of the weight of the meta into the rotating sets. We always knew we'd have to watch the meta to see if any future changes would be needed when we got ready for the next year of Standard.”
If the game seems a little too stale, like it did last year when Dr. Booms and Piloted Shredders were in every deck, Brode says that nerfs could be on the way. If that isn’t enough, Brode is open to the idea of moving some cards to the Wild format, like what they did to Old Murk Eye.
Brode knows that keeping new cards strong is the only way to combat the strength of basic and classic set cards. Trying to figure out how many cards from these sets a deck should be built around is difficult, is it around 10, less or more? According to Brode: “If the goal is to get more cool cards into the meta, just releasing awesome new cards in expansions should make an impact there, and still keep Standard fresh.”
The meta doesn’t seem as stale as it did last year when Mysterious Challenger was making everyone’s life a nightmare, but some nerfs wouldn’t be terrible. Cards that are generically good from the base and classic sets, like Azure Drake or Ragnaros, The Firelord could use a few number tweaks to get them on par with everyone else.
Hearthstone is a complicated game with balance issues. Each new expansion, a small but noticeable power creep slowly engulfs the game, making older cards obsolete. To combat this, the Standard and Wild formats were put in to make the game a bit more fluid and dynamic. I can’t wait to see what crazy changes Brode and his team have in store for 2017, the Year Of The Unicorn.
