Hearthstone is Getting Major Changes in Next Update
By Maxwell Jeffery 26 January 2016
Heathstone: Heroes of Warcraft is getting some serious updates, allowing players access to two new game formats as well as raising the deck slot limits.
Popular online card game Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft is getting significant changes in a future update, according to developer Blizzard. Today the company announced that two new play modes, Standard and Wild, will launch this Spring with the intention of keeping the title “fresh, exciting, and accessible.”
In the video below, designer Ben Brode explains what these two new modes mean for the highly profitable game. In Standard, Hearthstone players will be able to compete in Friendly Challenges, Ranked, and Casual games using any cards that have been released in the past two years. Every year, when a new expansion is released, the format will be reset and any card released over two years ago will be removed from the Standard mode, allowing the metagame to constantly evolve.
Standard aims to be an easy way for new players to jump in to the game, as they won’t be forced to collect as many cards in order to have a viable deck; a problem that Blizzard are well aware of in the current Hearthstone community. Going forward from the update, every new Standard year will be allocated a name pulled from a zodiac constellation in the fictional skies over Azeroth. This inaugural year will be the Year of the Kraken.
Players that want the game to remain where every card is in play should know that the second format, Wild, will allow any card already in a person’s collection to be used freely. According to Brode, the Wild game mode was given its name because “eventually there’s going to be tons of cards and it’s going to get a little bit crazy.”
One more exciting piece of information revealed by Brode in the video is that Blizzard will finally be raising the amount of deck slots available to each player from 9 to 18. This is to allow Hearthstone fans to store more deck combinations and experiment more with all the available cards, including ones in the upcoming expansions. This announcement is sure to excite the community who have been asking for an increase in deck storage almost since the game came out in 2014.
This announcement of the Standard and Wild modes will mean the biggest change to Hearthstone since the addition of the Tavern Brawl game mode last year. This mode was designed to keep the game feeling fresh by providing a new challenge each week, and thus far it has done a solid job. But, players are constantly looking for new ways to keep the game fresh, and it sounds like Standard mode will be another attempt by Blizzard at doing so.
Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft is currently available for PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Android devices.
Source: YouTube
