New nerfs and changes just announced – here’s the short story:
Azure Drake, Sylvanas Windrunner, Ragnaros the Firelord, Power Overwhelming, Ice Lance, and Conceal will be moved from the Classic Set to Wild Only – you don’t have to dust them; they are giving you the dust automatically and you keep the cards.
This year there will be three Expansions of about 130 cards each, no Adventures.
There will be unspecified give-aways during the run-up and the release, and a new Rogue hero you get for playing 10 Standard games.
Losing PO makes me a bit sad - I’m sure they’re doing that to get rid of one-turn kill combos but it’s a nice card in a zoo-style deck when used as more-or-less intended. I wonder if the three neutrals will just be replaced with other auto-includes - Cairne for Sylvanas, say.
Wow. This is huge. No more Sylv, no more Rag - I’ll certainly be sad to see them go.
This seriously gimps my collection, though. Not sure if I’ll be able to make as many decks as I’ve been able to. I’m sure they’d prefer that I buy more packs again…
I still couldn’t give a fetid skunk’s testicle for Wild, a format essentially used as a dumping ground for all of Blizzard’s balancing mistakes in lieu of actually trying to fix said balancing mistakes. At least this time they gave us the damn dust instead of just invalidating all the cards in question. Shame they wouldn’t extend the same courtesy to the adventures we bought with real money.
Why yes, I am a little salty that they are continuing to insist on utterly gimping combo decks. Why do you ask?
The thing is, I never had to spend any money on packs because I could always sub in Rag or Sylv as needed. Yes, I could craft the new legendaries, but they’re only be good for 2 years before rotating out. That’s a big difference.
When these recently announced nerfs / changes (intended mainly to reduce the prevalence of Shaman decks) take place we will see many more Shamans (Jade) as the Pirate Warriors switch classes.
When the new expansion hits we will see more new decks emerge that are very simple to play; just play on curve and win – with a couple new “pull it out your ass” emergency cards for those times you don’t draw well to stay on curve. The game is being designed for the casual phone players, not for skilled competitive players.
What happened to the whole “the Classic set will always stay part of Standard” line? First they nerfed some of the best Classic cards, now they’re just outright removing them. That’s pretty crappy.
The funny thing is a lot of the decks doing really well in Wild are pretty much the same as the decks doing well in the Standard meta, usually only with some slight variations (like Ship’s Cannon in pirate aggro decks, etc.).
Pirate warrior isn’t going anywhere. In fact, I predict even more Shamans due to Maelstrom portal - there are no cards that deal better with STB and the pirates than turn 2 Maelstorm portal.
@Rigamarole The OP nature of some of the Classic set cards and Blizzard’s insistence on keeping them is a huge part of the problems with the game.
@Tabby_Cat But you do agree that the nerfs are going increase the number of Shamans rather than decrease it as intended.
Me, I’m a shameless net-decker; been playing Wild Pirate Warrior with Ship’s Cannons for the past two months running right at 63%, which I figure is about the maximum sustainable win rate. No doubt it’s going to drop when the nerfs hit, so I’ll be going back to Shaman until we see what comes out in the next expansion.
I finally got a double digit win run in Arena. I was able to put together a nice Jade Rogue deck that was pretty well balanced. I got crushed when I drew my bigs and had no board control and then to awesome Warlock deck with two Abyssals and a Dark Bargain that pitched his two lowest valued cards. Still, DOUBLE DIGITS!!! Woo Hoo!
Oh, no doubt. I was just saying that expecting face pirate warrior to go away solely based on STB nerf isn’t realistic - it’s still going to be the fastest face deck, and the only classes that can really take advantage of this nerf are Maelstorm portal, maybe arcane missiles, that’s it. Everyone else still gets wrecked by turn 1 STB.
On the up side, though, I’ve found my love for the game again with OTK Djinni of the Zephyrs Priest. So. Fun.
Making arena cards draw from standard is not fun. A lot of people who like arenas like them because you’re getting away from the standard netdecks into something unexpected. Having all those weird old cards there is a great part of it. And it’s really hard to exploit them when you can’t choose your deck anyway.
I’m going to be cautiously optimistic. I’m not 100% thrilled by basically never seeing a lot of the old cards (I don’t think I’ve done a single game of Wild constructed, so … Tavern Brawls is the only place to see Shredder and company) but some sort of constraint on the size of potential cardpool is almost necessary IMO. As the size of the cardpool grows ‘what’s the punish for this play?’ get simultaneously harder to answer, and less important to skillful play. I think the Standard cardpool is bigger enough than the Constructed-viable pool that Arena will stay distinct from Ladder.
I’m happy to see more spells, and more of the higher rarity cards. Some classes were just unnecessarily punished for having their quality cards be rare/epic, while Mage/Rogue lucked out by having almost all of their good stuff in the common slot.
My one big concern is that Blizzard is still going down the ‘manually monkeying with individual cards in Arena’ road with the lesser occurrence of Flamestrike and Abyssal Enforcer. I’d prefer some kind of set-and-forget system to keep the classes on an even keel. For example you could force it by offering the more popular classes less to a player until they’ve played a few runs on the less popular classes, or probably better, give a bonus to people if they pick unpopular classes. Eg. Warrior has been picked < 10% of the time it’s offered over some rolling period, so anyone who does pick it gets a bonus box after completing a Warrior run. The less popular a class is, the better the box. Set the values for how you determine popularity, and the expected values of the bonus boxes and you don’t have to fuss about with individual cards.
I just opened Patches!!
Also, as I only have Sylvanus I’m busily saving up the dust to craft a golden Ragg for maximum free dust. I have a sergeant sally and nat the darkfisher - any point keeping them or should I just dust them?