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First round of Blizzard micro-changes seem to be centered around Mage.

So I was waiting until there was enough time to observe the changes from the patch on July 10th, and at least for now, it seems that only Mage is being focused on with the micro-changes to offering rates. I've seen minor changes to Paladin and Rogue, but only Vilespine Slayer from Rogue seemed to see a substantial change in offering rates among the top 10 win% cards in Paladin and Rogue.

To start off with, I want to look at two cards: Flamestrike and Arcane Intellect. I point out both of these cards because I want to point out that their offering rates have remained relatively the same, with no significant movement one way or another. This also points out that there has been little variance in how much Mage is selected, which could be an alternate reason why many of these cards all dropped at the same time.

I'm not going to link all the cards, but if you want, you can go here and click on all the cards to see how much they've dropped. Also, since this is just the picked rate being measured on cards, I can't reverse-engineer the exact percentage changes other than that they're taken less by some percentage. Logically, if some cards are offered less, the other cards should be offered more to fill in the gap (and Flamestrike has seen a very minor increase in picked rate to back this up). As a more obvious example, look at Potion of Polymorph. There is no reason whatsoever Potion of Polymorph should see any sort of increase unless accompanied by a decrease of better cards. I divided into Substantial (seeing about a 1% drop in picked percentage, such as from in 9-8% of decks), Moderate (about .5%) and Minor (extremely small, may not even be impacted). Classifications might be off a little bit, but should be fairly accurate.

Substantial reduction: Babbling Book, Polymorph, Water Elemental, Flame Geyser, Frostbolt

Moderate reduction: Twilight Flamecaller, Meteor, Firelands Portal, Steam Surger, Fireball, Primordial Glyph, Shimmering Tempest, Blizzard, Sorcerer's Apprentice, Volcanic Potion, Mirror Entity,

Minor Reduction: Forbidden Flame, Arcanologist, Mana Wyrm, Pyroblast, Medivh's Valet

Of note: It appears that the biggest reductions in Mage were for their classic set. The cards that showed, to me, the biggest dropoffs were mostly classic, and a lot of other classic cards like Sorcerer's Apprentice which does not have nearly as high a winrate as compared to other cards, showed a decent-sized reduction as well. Meteor, as much as people hate it, does not have nearly the reduction that Polymorph has. I presume that by targetting the classic cards this is meant for more long-term stability in the Arena.

Note: Browsing the Warrior stats, I've noticed upticks in Fiery War Axe and Cruel Taskmaster, but there are so few Warriors that I can't really draw anything from it even if the cards are taken relatively more, and it might just be the class being more popular with the publishing of the Weapon rate increase. edit There is a definite increase to certain Warrior cards with the 8.4 patch, namely in weapons and certain things like Blood To Ichor, Grimey Gadgeteer, Execute, Frothing, although seemingly nothing to Arathi Weaponsmith and N'Zoth's First mage. I saw incredibly minor upticks in Warlock that were barely noticeable and nothing from Druid, so it seems the first round of changes is focused on Mage and Warrior instead of just Mage.

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