Getting into Hearthstone is easy, but gathering a large enough collection to actually play well isn’t. I’ve loved Blizzard’s card game ever since I retired my Yu-Gi-Oh! deck, looking for something that didn’t require me to sit across from smelly grown men playing a children’s card game. Since that day over three years ago, I’ve earned my daily quests, gathered every free Tavern Brawl pack I could get and saved up all my gold, just so I could earn enough cards to play competitively.
Some Hearthstone decks can cost thousands of dust, needing multiple Legendaries and Epic cards. If you don’t have the necessary crafting materials, your only option is to spend real money on virtual packs. Even if you get past the outrage over paying for microtransactions in free-to-play games, you still have to deal with the fact that the packs you open could be trash.
I’ve purchased hundreds of Hearthstone packs over the course of my career and only have a few thousand dust lying around to craft cards. For many players, spending their hard-earned money on nothing isn’t an option, so they forego buying packs entirely and sometimes even quit the game.
Blizzard is trying their hardest to fix the problem by adjusting how card packs work in a few different ways. All of these changes will be coming to live servers when the new set drops in August.
You will no longer be able to pull a Legendary minion from a pack that you already have in your collection. You can still pull golden versions if you have the regular and vice versa.
Packs with three or four of the same card will be disappearing, you will never see more than two in one pack.
In your first 10 packs, you're guaranteed to pull at least one Legendary. If you believe in the pity timer, that means you’ll get at least two powerful minions or Quests from 50 packs.
When I first saw Ben Brode’s Youtube video announcing these changes, I nearly fell out of my chair. My jaw was glued to the floor and all I could say was “wow.” Since Journey To Un’Goro ’s release, I’ve pulled three Sunkeeper Tarims and two Crystal, Cores . I have maybe a quarter of all the actual Legendaries in the set because the RNG gods keep thinking I need to turn more minions into 3/3s then 5/5s. It’s frustrating when you’re trying to put together a good deck, but keep getting cards that won’t help you.
Hearthstone pros and streamers think this is a great idea, even though they will buy packs even if they never opened a Legendary again.
“All of these changes put together make a pretty significant change in the pack opening experience,” Hearthstone streamer Kripp said in a new video. “It’s still a pretty expensive card game, but it used to be the worst one on the market and it was shocking to me that they didn’t make any changes, but here they are!”
Blizzard tends to get a lot of flak on forums like reddit that claim that they only care about the bottom dollar and not the fan experience. Considering this change only leeches cash from the vaults of Azeroth, there’s been less hate going to the company these last few days. This was a change that should have been in the game years ago, but better late than never.
Will you buy more Hearthstone packs once these changes go live? Tell us in the comments.
