The duplicate protection against Legendary cards that we've enjoyed so much in Hearthstone since its arrival back in 2017 has been extended to Epics, Rares, and Commons!
This is the single largest economy update Hearthstone has had in the entire history of the game. No more cursing at your card packs when you open up that same epic 5 times during the opening of your pre-order bundles. This also means that Hearthstone has become much cheaper to get into on the lower-end of things because your money will consistently go into new cards!
Here is how it works:
- When you open a card pack, if you already own 2 of a particular Common, Rare, or Epic card, that card cannot appear in the pack.
- As soon as you have opened all the cards from a certain rarity, you will begin to receive duplicates again.
Keep in mind that cards and their golden variants are considered the same, exactly how this worked with Legendary cards, so don't expect to open a golden version of a card if you've already opened the maximum playable copies of that card - that is until you've opened all the cards from that card's rarity.
What do you think of the changes to rarity drop protection?
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Comments
If I'm remembering correctly, people would advise that you don't disenchant a bad legendary to ensure you don't get it again. I guess it would be nearly impossible to take advantage of such a loophole with legendary cards.
Yes, it sounds like from that quote, that if you have all rares for example and you dust both copies of one that gets nerfed, you still have all the rares for the purposes of duplicate protection, and you won't have any better chance of getting that card than any other rare you have.
This is a game changer for me! Now I can finally get those Blood Knights that I haven't been able to unpack since I started playing six years ago.
Best change from the entire announcement.
When is this update live?
See https://playhearthstone.com/en-us/blog/23319441/welcome-to-the-year-of-the-phoenix
This change is the biggest announcement for me today. Holy shit.
There IS a slight catch to this. It is easy to miss. Do not expect to open packs with 3-4 legendaries and obtaining complete collections with ~45 packs. The protection applies separately to each rarity. So if you get all 96 commons from a set, that doesn't mean you will only open rares, epics and legendaries now on. The number of 40 dust disappointments will stay the same. It's just until you get those 96 commons, every one of them will be unique. Then you will still get commons, but they will all be duplicates.
In summary, this only really helps in obtaining all rare and common cards. If we calculate with 1 epic/5 packs and 1 legendary/20, then you will still need to open 240 packs to get all 54 epics and 440 for 22 legendaries. (Not counting dust) For example, I opened ~100 Descent of Dragons packs, and I'm missing 4 commons and 8 rares. I opened 2 duplicate epics. With this change, I'd only be richer with 14 cards.
I've opened 6 duplicate epics from 120 packs of one expansion. That's a lot of disappointment I won't be getting from future expansions. It also means I might actually get all the Classic epics through the weekly tavern brawl reward before I shuffle off this mortal coil. I've been with Hearthstone since it's launch and I have 5 Twisting Nethers, 5 Far Sights, 8 Doomsayers, and not a single Pyroblast or Doomhammer; that's just bloody ridiculous.
to be fair this is already a huge bonus. I can't count how many times I ended up missing like 2 or 3 crucial rares (and sometimes even commons) that I really didn't want to craft (since it's a huge dust loss overall) so I had to wait and buy more packs until I got to actually build decks.
It also means that dusting golden commons/rares is now much safer since you'll basically guarantee to get all of them with enough packs.
Finally, the real factors here is the one to Epics. Opening excess epics feels awful, because the dust-rarity rate is pretty bad. Now you'll get a larger amount of epics on average and that makes up for a lot of dust.
this sounds way too good not to have a catch.
I mean, they have to finance themselves somehow. I really hope this isn't being used as justification for more insidious monetization later down the road.
In any case....KEEP ALL YOUR CARDPACKS NOW AND DON'T OPEN THEM UNTIL THIS GOES LIVE
I actually agree with you on this.
Better to not open packs right now until the duplicate protection is in place.
Great for rares but especially epics as we all hate that feeling when you need like 10 epics from a set but just get your 3/4/5th of an epic you don't want at all.
They didn't touch on their expansion their paid adventure strategy as far as I know (or I missed it). I'd like to know so I can budget for it.
Good thing I haven't opened any of my packs on my f2p account
In every instance of pack mechanincs changing it has not included packs purchased before the change has been implemented. I see no reason for thme to change that now.
What do you mean? When this was first applied to legendaries it worked for any packs you had saved as well. The content of a pack is determined when you open it.
Yes and no: there was a server problem some years ago that led to pack openings being rolled back. People who re-opened the packs after the servers were restored reported that the packs had the same rarity distributions the second time around (same packs contained epics and legendaries), but the exact cards they got were different. So it seems Blizzard has an RNG seed for each account (or possibly one per account per set) that determines the rarities in a pack and upon opening they pick the cards you get using a different RNG while looking at your collection to avoid duplicates.
But I agree that the no-duplicate rule most likely depends on the time you're opening the pack and not the time you got the pack, since they wouldn't go through the trouble of complicating their server software by having two versions of the card selection algorithm just to give you worse pack openings.
Somebody pinch me, please. Tell me its not a dream
I think Runeterra had something to do with it. Like that (still waiting for my 8 Tortolam Pilgrims nerf)... but I also think that they are going to increase the number of cards for each upcoming expansion. Otherwise, this will be a great loss of income... imagine seeing much more players with full (or near full) standard collections?
All I ever wanted.
Finally! Probably adding another class made the realize the economy needed to change.
Amazing news, when will this be in effect?
Holy finally.... i was kinda sad the last exp. got 8 copies of ALL neutral epic (literally)... and 0 of some class epic (like fate weaver and toxic reinforcements)