There has been some confusion surrounding the recent statement from Alec Dawson on the Hearthstone team and it's time to have a dedicated spot for some clarification. Earlier today, Alec tweeted that a note on Edwin rotating this year had missed the patch notes. This lead to the assumption, which includes us, that Edwin would be sent to the Hall of Fame. This is not the case.
- Edwin will be rotating this year.
- There are changes coming to gameplay and easing into playing with a limited collection.
- The Hall of Fame will no longer exist in its current form.
- There is no point in hoarding Edwin. There will be no benefit in doing so.
- Blizzard will announce details in the coming months.
Our bet on most information coming out will be next month during BlizzConline which takes place on February 19 & 20. Here's Alec's full clarification.
Quote From Alec Dawson Also sorry this didn't get into the notes but: Yes Edwin will still rotate later this year and yes we will be reverting the nerf (along with others) at that time.
Want to take a second to clarify our plan for Edwin VanCleef. There are big changes coming to Hearthstone in 2021. We aren’t quite ready to share the full details, but they will be positive changes for both gameplay and the ease of getting into the game with a limited collection.
As one small part of this, Edwin’s time in Standard will come to a close. However, Hall of Fame as it has existed will be no more. This means there is no additional benefit to crafting or hoarding extra Edwins today.
In the coming months, we’ll be sharing some more details about what the changes are and why you should be hyped for them no matter what type of player you are.
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Comments
MY biggest fear about this is that they do what MTG did back in the day and create more environments to play. With MTG, they had Type 1, Type 2, Extended, and Type 1.5. It worked with physical play because you could have as many decks as you had cards to play. However, with the online format, we are restricted in the number of decks that we have and doing this, while it would allow more versatility with players, would make it difficult to play ALL the environments. I have no doubt that whatever Blizzard decides to do, a lot of griping will happen and people will threaten to leave the game. It happens with every change to every game. You have loyalists that want it to stay the same forever. Then you have people that get so bored with the monotony that they fade out and then the game has to find new blood to play or risk fading out as well.
My best guess is they're replacing Classic and HoF with a rotating core set.
The best system would be a sort of card guarantee, where each Classic card has a specific "slot", and owning that card reserves that slot so you automatically get whatever rotates in to replace it.
The scummiest system would be having to craft 100+ extra cards on rotation, and keep up with the Classic set as if it was a fourth expansion each year.
Knowing Blizzard, it'll be somewhere in between.
The best system, in my opinion, would be to make a combined rotating core set from Basic + Classic + Wild cards and make that core set quick to unlock by game play, like Basic currently is. That would give new and returning players a good base to build decks from. And since the set would be rotating, it won't lead to the same strong cards being played in every meta.
That would be uncharacteristically generous for Hearthstone, so I'm not betting on it happening. But it's not impossible either.
I've never liked the Hall of Fame at all, so I'm hoping that there will be a bit of rotation during each expansion meta, with some of the basics and classics rotating in and out, something along those lines. . . the wild meta seems just too set in its OP ways for any real meta changes, so the HoF becomes a kind of permanent exile for any cards that don't make that particular cut (which is nearly all cards that rotate into wild). I think periodic returns of cards like Sylvanas and Edwin, or even Power Overwhelming and the despicable Ice Lance can only help in keeping the meta fresh and interesting in those 4 month stretches.
Unless those cards get changed inherently in design, there's no way that Ice Lance or Power Overwhelming being included in a set (even if for a limited time) is healthy. The reason that cards like Ice Lance, Power Overwhelming, Ice Block, and Leeroy (just to name a few egregious examples) were Hall of Famed is because of the unhealthy interactions it allowed. Ice Lance provided a class that inherently can easily control a board too easy of a way to deal large amounts of burst damage for relatively cheap (Imagine Ice lance in the current meta with Wandmaker.....yea I didn't think so)
Power Overwhelming in a similar vein was never used to trade, it was almost 100% used to find burst lethal, usually with a charge minion. Granted they've either rotated out most charge minions, or stopped printing charge as a keyword, but the point is that Power Overwhelming still enables too much burst capability, remember double power overwhelming, double soul fire. Yea 16 burst damage from hand for only 4 mana sounds pretty fair right?
I'm just pointing out that while I think that Hearthstone does need a change up (like a rotating classic/core set). It doesn't need those broken cards returning, at least not in the current forms.
Ice Lance was a problem in particular when played the turn after Alexstrasza. As long as those two cards aren't in Standard at the same time, I don't think it would be overpowered. It would still rate low on the "fun and interactive" scale, in my opinion, but if they want to do something about that, they could just change "character" to "minion" to make it a less flexible but more mana-efficient version of Ray of Frost.
I have used Power Overwhelming in egg decks, together with Void Terror. But those decks were never consistent enough, so in the meta it was indeed only used for burst. I would argue though that Soulfire is a bigger problem, since Power Overwhelming requires a minion in play and can be stopped by a taunt.
I liked being able to get full dust for any card going to the HoF. I guess if they make new dust sources it will be okay. No point in freaking out until we know their full plans at any rate.
Seems like they intend to abolish the Hall of Fame. Since Edwin is rotating then this pretty much means that the entirety of the classic set is getting rotated. I don't know what they are going to do but this is a major rework of the game as a whole. The first step was the economy (partially). Now, they are going to target what makes this game what it is: cards and their mechanics. I'm not enthusiastic about this. The whole Battle Pass fiasco just doesn't inspire any confidence.
Seems like a fair assumption.
No, it doesn't. They could easily rotate out specific cards without rotating the entire Classic set. In fact, I think the odds are extremely low that they would rotate out all of Classic at the same time. That would be far too disruptive -- and far too much dev work trying to fill in the gaps it left.
So an announcement of an announcement post from the devs. Yay.
Given how they royally screwed the last major update, I'm not looking forward to the next one.
Also aren't we getting cheated out of dust that we'd normally been compensated for for having a classic card being forcibly rotated out of standard? This fact alone makes me not optimistic for the future stuff coming.
On the contrary, they are giving you fair warning that you should go ahead and dust cards that have been nerfed recently.
If they hadn't mentioned this, a bunch of people might have held on to the nerfed cards and then not gotten the free HoF dust. THAT would have felt more like cheating people out of dust.
But in the end, it's important to remember that with any big change will come some edge cases where someone's particular situation becomes slightly worse even though the change is a good one for most people. You can obsess about the bad stuff if you want to, but you won't get much sympathy when things are obviously better overall.
If the upcoming changes to the reward track are any indication, I think it's safe to say that Blizzard isn't trying to make the game less accessible. Given how hyper-aware everyone is about gold and dust, they know they can't get away with screwing people over in the ways you seem to be imagining.
Of course, all of this could have been avoided if they had never gone down the treacherous free-to-play path, but that's a discussion for a different day.
"In the coming months, we’ll be sharing some more details about what the changes are and why you should be hyped for them no matter what type of player you are."
Man, this part really scares me the most. Anytime they´ve said we should be hyped or excited, something bad has happened afterwards :/
Yeah, it was terrible when they released Battlegrounds and Duels, just so horrifying. You really nailed it.
Ha ha, like no "you will be excited" but "you should be excited", because if we will not be excited the devs will argue again that we don`t understand the changes well enough and our math is wrong. XD
So now what? I got slightly drunk and crafted Golden Edwin boy thinking I'd be getting a good ROI from the dust bank in a few months. Now I'm confused and a little hungover. I think I'll dust Golden Boy and recraft Regular Boy to be on the safe side and have a little more than five (5) dust stored under my mattress.
They said “there is no additional benefit to crafting or hoarding extra Edwins” so I think the first one will still get full dust value. I dusted my regular one and crafted a golden one.
You can't craft extra copies of cards anyway: the game won't let you. So I think he meant there is no benefit to just "crafting" and not "crafting extra".
I think it's safer to not craft a golden Edwin right now, at least if you're doing it for dust value. There will be an announcement of the new system at some point and likely you'll still be able to craft one then if that will be beneficial dust-wise.
I mean unless you want to play edwin right now, there's no point recrafting regular boy, right?
I do want to play him now. I only crafted him a couple weeks ago anyway because I'm fairly new (1 year exp), didn't have him, have decided rogue is my favorite class, and thought (like everyone else) he'd get the HoF treatment, and I'd get my dust back.
I'm not mad. I just have the same questions and anticipation for what is coming with this future rotation thing. Blizzard does have a plan, and they're doing things that are consistent with it, but we don't see the whole picture and can easily get frustrated with the lack of clarity.