The new legendary questline to celebrate the "new year" is now live in Hearthstone. It's a bit too soon for the Lunar New Year and its a bit too late for the 2021 New Year but hey, we're getting free packs so who cares?
Update: Live Worldwide now!
- Each quest that is completed rewards you with 3 packs:
- 2x Darkmoon Faire
- 1x Scholomance
- No experience appears to be rewarded for these quest completions.
Read on for details on the three different quests you will be completing, in order, to obtain your whopping 9 packs.
Quote From Out of Cards Datamining Happy New Year
- Play 1 game of Battlegrounds.
Happy New Year
- Play 5 Duels.
Happy New Year
- Play 5 games of Standard Ranked.
![All The Great Dark Beyond Card Reveals for October 12 - Day 2 [Finished]](dark-beyond-reveals-day-2-thumb.webp)
Comments
Just like with all the new quests, instaconceding matches will count, so if you really dislike playing Ranked you are not forced to.
The issue I have is not with playing ranked. It's that they're forcing Wild players to scrap a deck just so they can queue for Standard. Wouldn't have been hard to make it Play 5 Games of Ranked. Hell, if we're all about catering to all play modes (Battlegrounds, Duels, Constructed), where's the next quest after that: Play 5 Games of Ranked Wild? Kinda tired of how obvious they are at treating Wild players as second rate citizens while choosing not to incentivise Standard players to occasionally try Wild as well. Wild players get dragged over to Standard but never the other way around.
I play both Standard and Wild, and I definitely agree with you that Wild gets less attention than other game modes. I do want to point out a couple reasons why Blizzard is incentivized to promote Standard over Wild, though.
1) By its very nature, Standard incentivizes longtime players to acquire more cards than Wild does. Even though Wild decks definitely still incorporate new stuff, the percentage of cards per Wild deck from the most recent expansion is inherently lower than in Standard decks. Blizzard, by its very nature as a for-profit company, is incentivized to maximize profits. By encouraging players to acquire more new cards as opposed to working with cards they already have (i.e. play more Standard than Wild), Blizzard maximizes the money spent on the game.
2) Hearthstone Esports use Standard format. I would surmise that encouraging players toward Wild could/would prevent at least some potential esports competitors from ever making it into the competitive pipeline because they end up maining Wild. Research would obviously need to be conducted to determine whether that number would be large enough to actually have an effect on the pipeline, but it does make logical sense that it would have at least some impact on the number of players being funneled into competitive Hearthstone. (And unfortunately, although I do believe Wild would definitely work as a competitive format, I don't think Blizzard will ever introduce it as another league or another division of Grandmasters because it has less potential entertainment value--the competitive meta in an evergreen format like Wild would likely change far less than the meta does in a rotating format like Standard. "Freshness" drives curiosity--it's how our brains' reward systems are wired--and curiosity means greater engagement, and greater engagement means more people spending money on the game/more money from advertisers. For a for-profit company whose primary goal is to maximize profits, Standard is the only way to go when it comes to esports. Incidentally, this is also probably why Blizzard funnels players toward Duels, Battlegrounds, and even Arena [before they deleted that quest] but not Wild.)
The morality of this profit-above-all motivation is obviously up for debate, but the point that Blizzard has little to no incentive to funnel players toward Wild still stands, regardless of the morality of pure capitalism. So I would ultimately say that the intention of treating Wild players as second-rate consumers has almost certainly never crossed Blizzard's collective mind; rather, what drives the decisions of Blizzard shot-callers is a commitment to maximizing profits for Blizzard and its shareholders. The Hearthstone devs clearly love the game and pour their heart and soul into making the game they love as good as it can be--they even engage with and listen to the HS community, which, while we may have come to expect and/or demand it, is something they definitely don't owe to us! However, Blizzard investors don't care about Hearthstone--they care about maximizing the value of their investments. And because Blizzard investors care most about Hearthstone's profitability, Blizzard brass also cares most about maximizing Hearthstone's profitability. Until Wild becomes more profitable than Standard, Blizzard will direct the dev teams to funnel players toward Standard, and there's not really anything we or the Hearthstone devs can do about it.
Step 1: My Collection>New Deck>Pick a Class>Custom Deck>Complete My Deck>Yes>Done
Step 2: Click Play>Pick the deck you made>Ranked>Click Play.
Step 3: "I choose death!" (i.e. Concede)
Step 4: Repeat steps 2 and 3 four more times.
Step 5: Profit.
Now addressing your other complaint: the inherent reason that "Wild isn't supported" is because Blizzard realized that they couldn't sustain the game balance with that many cards. Every other card game I've ever played has also had sets rotate out. It's not a new concept. Not to "young shame" but have you ever played any other card games? Because if you did, you'd realize that this is not a foreign concept. So this forced blizzard to maintain standard balance, but allow "anything goes" in wild. But, to counter your point, they have been looking more at wild over the last year and made adjustments to the cards to prevent them from overwhelming the wild meta. (Genn and Baku as a glaring example).
And they aren't treating wild players as second rate citizens, treating them as second rate citizens would be reducing the gold for quests if they are completed in wild, or having wild only quests that offer lower gold than standard quests. So FWIW, I don't think you understand the concept of "Second rate citizen".
Young shame? Bitch please. I've played MtG pretty much since it came out. And no I'm not talking about Arena, I'm talking about cards on paper with pictures of them. Do you even remember what that is? So to counter your argument with your own quote, eternal formats are not a foreign concept.
Also you seem to have skipped over a few steps there. It may be difficult to imagine but there is in fact more than one viable deck per class in Wild. Standard players may be sitting cosy on 10 free deck slots but Wild players don't. So what you meant to say was: Step 1: Pick a deck to delete and make sure it's saved in your third-party programme of choice. Step 6: Reimport the deck into Hearthstone from your third party programme (cause god forbid Hearthstone was actually able to store all your shit), repick your card back of choice, repick your hero portrait, rename the deck (cause importing saves none of that), then reposition the deck back where it belongs in your collection.
Literally all it would have taken was to omit the word Standard from the quest and it would be fine. There is exactly zero reason to force Wild players to only complete quests in Standard.
Dawg: just save your deck-share code in any text editor, and then copy it back in to reconstruct your deck.
Also: there are not multiple competitive decks for every class in Wild. Your deck slots are full because you feel like it, not because the format demands it. Your complaints are incredibly petty.
Or if you use any deck tracker it’ll probably be saved there already.
The difference being that newer players literally CANNOT play wild unless they own some wild cards (someone please correct me if I'm wrong about that). I agree that Blizzard should support wild more, but it's clear that they can't offer rewards that not everyone is able to access ... and who needs free packs more than new players?
Enjoy the free wins those who I queue against :)
I mean, thanks, but ... were you aware that at Copper rank, you may actually face easier matchups than in Casual?