The Rundown from Hearthpwn

• Blackrock Mountain, The Grand Tournament, and The League of Explorers all rotate out of Standard with The Year of the Mammoth.
• Six cards from Classic are being moved to Wild-only.
  • You cannot dust these cards, but if you own them, Blizzard is going to just give you Arcane Dust.
  • You will only get the dust for the copies you have that can be included in a deck. If you have 3 Azure Drakes, disenchant one today.
• We will not see an Adventure this year. Instead, we will see three ~130 card expansions!
  • The second and third expansions will feature a playable story, like an adventure.
  • Cards will still only come from card packs.
• A Heroic Tavern Brawl will be going live sometime after the first expansion releases, using the Wild format.
• Blizzard is going to work on doing more Wild tournaments.
• Daily Login Rewards! At least for the start of the new rotation. Includes Dust, Gold, Expansion Packs, and "a few other surprises".
• Rogues are getting Maeiv Shadowsong, a new hero! Win 10 games of Hearthstone in Standard when the rotation occurs and she's all yours.
• We will see some Deathrattle build-arounds in upcoming sets.

Classic Card Rotation

Upcoming Nerfs

This sounds...alright. I've been out of the game for awhile and never really bothered with Rogue much, so why conceal? Is it limiting their design options for future rogue cards because off the top of my head I can't think of it being overly used while I played. So this also means the rumored dinosaur thing should be a 130 card expansion? That also makes me a bit happier. More cards more frequently means they might actually change the meta more often or at least give aggro new tools to play with so I'm not playing against the same aggro deck for 6 months. I might just come back for this...maybe. I've been too bummed out by their lack of urgency in addressing balance ever since the beta, so I'm hesitant to get too excited.

A bit of clarification regarding the "Hall of Fame" cards. Once the rotation happens they will still be available to both craft and disenchant as normal, the dust being given is an incentive for players to keep the cards for wild play. Also, gold copies will be prioritized over normal copies. For example I have 2 regular and 2 golden Azure Drakes, so I will automatically receive the full dust value for the 2 golden copies and would be free to dust however many of the 4 of them I wish for their regular disenchant value. That's my understanding based on some quick confirmations Ben Brode gave on twitter.

@mezza: Conceal is being sent to the hall of fame because it's hyper uninteractive, especially for classes like Druid who have very limited aoe options. This stops Rogues from being able to Gadgetzan Auctioneer and Conceal to ensure massive miracle draw turns, or stealthing a huge Van Cleef/Questing Adventurer to set up multi turn lethals that can't be stopped.

Gonna miss you Azure Drake. Rest In Peace.

Azure Drake can get fucked so boring and auto-includish. Sylvanas and Rag are really amazing cards though, just in terms of interactions and amusement; kind of sad. Need a new Rag from Un'goro Crater to compensate. Ragvilsaur.

Ice Lance is probably the weirdest one to get rid of. It's only really disgusting when it costs zero thanks to Emperor Thaurissan, but he's rotating out soon. Though yeah, being burned for 30 damage by a bunch of Mage fireballs and frost bolt and ice lances is a pretty boring way to lose, and there isn't much you can do to play around it other than win before the Mage draws all of those spells.

Is Year of the Mammoth the new Year of the Bow?

So if i go and craft sylvanus and Ragnaros right now, i'll get there dust value given back to me when the year of the mammoth kicks in? Am I reading that right or am I being dumb. These are literally the only two "Must have" legendary cards i'm missing despite playing the game since launch. That seems... really generous. I don't quite understand the logic of giving people back there dust if they keep the card. Anyone care to word this better? Or is it intentionally confusing sounding lol. Also 390 new cards this year? Wow + ouch. Time to start farming gold.

@therealmoot: That seems to be the case. I guess the logic is that they don't want to completely screw over the people who crafted these cards thinking they would be permanent fixtures in Standard, but they also don't want to disincentivize people from playing Wild by encouraging them to get rid of their good cards.

@spunkyhepanda said:

Yeah, they must have data from this past year that lots of people were just disenchanting everything as it rotated out of Standard, and also that nobody is playing Wild. So this is their plea of "Please don't just autodust these cards! We'll just give you free dust, and the cards will still be good in Wild! Which you should play, btw!"

Big changes here. Always excited when Blizzard decides to shake up Hearthstone. I've been basically playing everyday since launch, so this seems exciting.

I'm a bit confused about the dust for the hall of fame cards... That thing says to create gold cards, but you only get dust for gold? I don't understand the reasoning....

@therealmoot: Yeah right now if you don't have Rag or Sylvanas crafting them will result in a net dust gain if you don't intend to keep them for playing in wild. You can actually profit from crafting any of the hall of fame cards you don't already have, but the profit scales pretty hard with rarity. If you had 3200 dust sitting around right now and don't currently have one of those legendaries it is 100% the correct move to craft one of them golden, as it results in a full refund plus a profit of 1600 dust when the rotation hits.

The generosity is probably in part a result of all the heat Hearthstone has been fielding from various corners of the internet. They've had a lot of mud slung at them from places like reddit and a move like this is a solid hearts and minds thing that doesn't cost them anything. And as has been pointed out above it's an incentive to grow the wild playerbase.

@enemylandlord: I already have normal Sylvanas and Ragnaros, but I still come out ahead if I craft golden versions, right? Say I craft golden Rag for 3200 dust, then disenchant normal Rag right now and get back 400 dust, then when this update hits they give me the 3200 dust that golden Rag is worth, and overall I'm 400 dust ahead? Is that all correct? Should I basically go on a golden-version crafting spree for pretty much all of those cards? Note that I'd rather keep a useable set of the cards for Tavern Brawls and Adventures and the like.

Also it's weird to think that Adventures are semi-gone. It was nice knowing that if you just saved up a few thousand gold you would guarantee get all of the released cards from an adventure, compared to the card pack RNG of normal sets.

@bisonhero: Yeah you're correct as far as I understand the system. If you want golden Rag or golden Sylv for wild/tavern brawl, that's the way to go.

Honestly I'm pretty ok about the end of adventures. Obviously the value return for gold spent was on average higher than buying packs, but it never FELT that way in my heart so I always ended up talking my way into just spending real money. I don't know why but I have no problem saving gold for packs but hate saving gold for adventures. Pretty dumb!

@enemylandlord: I'm sitting on a lot of dust right now so I guess i'll go craft those two lol. May as well profit from getting them before the next years worth of cards comes out. This still sounds weird. I guess they're doing it because like 80 or 90% of all players have them and they are in about that same percent of every deck right? Was that a statistic that was brought up at some point? Ah whatever. Free cards!

Seems kind of soon to put league of explorers out to pasture.

I'm gonna really miss azure drake it's one of my favorite cards but like all good things time to move on I guess. I'm so happy about the spirit claws + small time nerf. The other night in like an hour of play I didn't have a game where I didn't see that combo so good riddence.

The tension of seeing who Ragnaros would spew his fiery rage at will be sorely missed.