Big Changes Are Coming to Hearthstone's Arena

[Steven Bogos]

Big Changes Are Coming to Hearthstone's Arena

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Hearthstone's arena mode is getting some huge changes in patch 7.1, including the shift from Wild to Standard.

As far as Hearthstone's game modes go, Arena is in a weird place. For an entry fee of 150 gold or two real-world dollerydoos, you choose a random hero, and build a deck out of randomly drafted cards. It's a fun take on the game, supposedly "evening" the playing field by having random decks, but as the game and card pool has grown, the chances of you having a deck filled with utter garbage while your opponent drafts seven Flamestrikes is pretty high. So, Blizzard has announced some pretty substantial changes to the format coming with patch 7.1 to try and shake things up.

First and most foremost, Arena will now be in the Standard format, instead of Wild. This means that you'll only see cards from the Classic set, and sets released in the last year. Blizzard had this to say on the change:

As more cards are added to the Arena pool, having each game feel meaningfully different actually becomes harder to accomplish. Many of the cool synergies between cards, such as Jade Golems or Mechs, live within each individual set release. Attempting to create decks that utilize these meaningful synergies in a wide and diluted card pool will become more and more difficult as the Wild card pool grows larger. Arena runs then becomes less about card synergies and smart deck choices and more about being fortunate enough to be presented with the best card from each set. This change should put the focus back on the player for good, synergistic Arena choices and make Arena decks feel more cohesive.

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Secondly, some changes are coming to rarity distribution. "Common" quality cards currently make up 78% of all Arena decks, a number Blizzard thinks is too high. Following the patch, the number of Common and Basic cards that show up overall should be lower, giving more room for fun Rare, Epic, and Legendary cards to show up in an Arena run.

Additionally, the cards Abyssal Enforcer and Flamestrike will show up approximately 50% less in Arena. Rejoice!

The distribution of spells and minions will also be brought a bit closer together, meaning you should have a fairly even spread between the two types of cards in your deck.

Last, but certainly not least, "Classic" minions that are just vanilla stats with no text (like Bloodfen Raptor) will also show up a lot less.

Source: Blizzard [https://us.battle.net/forums/en/hearthstone/topic/20753189941]

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[Eric the Orange]

eh, I dunno. I remember arena before any expansions and even then if you wanted to make a synergistic deck like Murlocs you would have to be incredibly lucky to get enough murlocs to make it work.

 

[bladestorm91]

As someone who still watches Hearthstone on Twitch, this change is good. All you have to do is compare arena meta from GVG to Gadgetzan and you know how absolutely boring arena has become. Both the change to standard and especially the rarity distribution is a great change.

 

[Xeorm]

eh, I dunno. I remember arena before any expansions and even then if you wanted to make a synergistic deck like Murlocs you would have to be incredibly lucky to get enough murlocs to make it work.

Murlocs are a bad example though I think. The murlocs themselves require full synergy to really be effective, and missing a few cards makes it much, much harder. Better might be mech synergy after Gadetzan. Much easier to achieve, and could be used to great effect if you had the right hero.

 

[RejjeN]

Unless I missed it, does this means the booster pack you get at the end is still random? That's the prime reason I stopped doing Arena, I've already gotten 99% of what I want from the basic cards and the other expansion. Well that and the time investment became too much... Guess I might just be growing bored of Hearthstone.

 

[MHR]

What a mess.

Wild was what kept Arena interesting because you could see every playable card in the game in there. I might even seriously stop watching the streamers now. Standard is so damn boring, and now we're going to have to deal with it in arena too. Wild constructed is a joke game mode, so now there are a huge number of cards that will never see serious play again.

You didn't need to gut entire expansions from arena, you just needed to not have ridiculous cards like Abyssal Enforcer and Firelands Portal being common!

Now arena is just going to be Janky standard decks and probably wont even differ much from constructed. Everyone will just push for the "budget" version of the top standard decks and you'll just see "budget" pirate warrior or "budget" aggro shaman. Is that what you want to see when you're done playing constructed for the day because you keep running into the same decks? That's pathetic.

 

[Kahani]

Wild was what kept Arena interesting because you could see every playable card in the game in there.

Exactly. Half the fun of arena was having the chance to play with all the cards you don't own. This change essentially means new players will never see any card more than a year old. They can't buy adventures, can't afford to collect all the cards, and now they won't even be allowed them in the one place they might have had a chance. Introducing different formats to allow new players to join without having to buy all the existing old content was sensible, but removing all the old content from sale and effectively banning new players from ever seeing it is just bizarre.

 

[KenAri]

What a mess.

Wild was what kept Arena interesting because you could see every playable card in the game in there.

Bingo.

If they really wanted to push something like this, they should've added a choice of 3 expansion packs after the hero selection in Arena.

At least Flamestrike will finally stop popping up so much.