Blizzard is changing how drafting will work in the next patch. Normally you are offered a choice of 3 cards based on one rarity. Soon you will be able to pick any rarity depending on what pick number it is. Blizzard also promises that they were will be of equal power level. How they are going to do that I don't know, but I hope it works out.

Included will also so be a couple new arena exclusive cards. They appear to be here for a limited time unless Blizzard wants to keep them due to player feedback.

Hearthpwn:

• The cards from BlizzCon are finally being added! They will be available for a limited time.
• Cards will be offered based on their relatively equal power level and not just by rarity. Commons could be paired with a Rare for example.
• Legendary cards will still be offered in sets of 3.
• Picks 1, 10, 20, and 30 will still contain cards that are of Rare quality or better.
• They are temporarily disabling the increased chance to see cards from the most recent expansion.
• Existing rules that affect appearance rates are unchanged.

Makes me wonder if they have some kind of internal power-level ranking for each card. I mean obviously some cards at common are going to be "as good" as a rare, but it'd be hard to find that out without a lot of data (which they obviously have).

I guess this makes sense, when there are certain commons (Firelands Portal, Abyssal Enforcer, Bonemare, Truesilver Champion, etc.) that are some of the best cards available in Arena period, and are better than most rares and epics in the format. Presumably Blizzard has the dev tools to gauge the approximate "power level" of a card, at the very least based on how much better your winrate is with that card in your deck compared to decks that don't have that card.

This will probably make the drafting step quite a bit more challenging, because instead of something like a Firelands Portal being an autodraft because it's up against some junk commons 99% of the time, now the overperforming common cards are going to go up against good rares and epics and you're actually going to have more tough choices instead of "lol I just choose Fireball."

This is..amazing. I've been howling about the absolute insanity that was their arena structure for...well until HS completely lost me basically. The fact that "Hey we are going to make people's drafts have some consistence!" is some massive change is praise worthy yes..but in a "Its about bloody time" kind of way.

How they didn't have set rarity's of at -least- the "3+ choices in each arena run will be rare or better" from the beginning is beyond me. The varience in the limited format of HS compared to basically any other game was just..awful. One person pulls 3 amazing legendaries. Another gets 2 rare choices (so only one aside from the set one at 30) and they are all awful choices. It was absolutely ridiculous when HS was first released, and became increasingly so when they didn't limit the arena card-pool to just standard.

Which is its own issue. Imagine playing a game where the key cards you should be drafting, say removal and such, are more and more rare to see since, you know, fireball is a classic card. Unlike something like MtG say, which has a 'fireball' or etc equivalent in every set, so any draft you join has about the same rate of chance to see/draft them, HS has just 1 card, and is never going to print a equivalent card because there is no need for the standard/wild format (in fact it would be a bad idea). So your 1 in 40 chances to see 'fireball' or any other quality removal etc spell gets increasingly less and less as more spells get added to the pool. 1/60, 1 in 80.

Let alone the idea of seeing 'build around me' cards. They certainly like to push tribes (dragons, elementals, murloks, pirates). But without limiting Arena to some sub-set of the available cards, most such cards are just a straight up trap, since they rarely come together. Except for those random lucky people who get a decent deck through sheer luck.

So yah, bring on these changes, it should make arena a lot better. Now tell me they are going to limit the cards in it to standard, and maybe you have a decent limited format in HS finally instead of this fundamentally broken setup they have now. This is a nice step towards fixing it..but not sure its enough.

They made a big Arena update about a year ago (https://www.hearthpwn.com/news/2262-upcoming-changes-to-hearthstone-arena-standard) that changed Arena so that it only offered cards from Standard. I agree that prior to that change, the general trend was looking pretty bad for Arena, since as you point out, the core Basic/Classic cards for each class were becoming less likely to draft as the card pool expanded, so it was increasingly hard for a Druid to get that Swipe or Wrath (some of the only good removal in Druid), etc. The change to Standard was a big improvement, but I still think Arena sucks in a bunch of other ways that make me not want to play it very often.

The exception to Standard Arena recently has been a special event that is temporarily changing Arena back into Wild, just to give people something different, but it is ending soon (https://www.hearthpwn.com/news/4395-wild-cards-return-to-arena-for-wildfest-a-three).

@bisonhero: Well..color me put well and truely in my place!

Those were the two major things I wanted from them, normalized rarity levels for draft, standard-only. Its not perfect but last time I really dove into arena..as I suppose one can tell from my not knowing about the standard thing, was years ago for the reasons I ranted about already. Thanks for setting me straight.