The Ranked Play change only affects that particular season. The monthly season reset will occur as normal.

I suppose I understand what you mean, but it doesn't really change the statement. Decisions like how and when to launch in a different region and how to engage with different communities that play on phone or tablet are examples of things that business and marketing have huge impacts on and I would consider those things extremely important to our game. The executive team has little to no impact in terms of changing STB health from 2 to 1, but there are a multitude of things that happen outside the Hearthstone client that are quite important. This is just something I like to point out from time to time because it's usually designers are the most visible to the community, but with a game the size of Hearthstone there are hundreds of people behind the scenes that are equally important in the overall health/success of the game.

This isn't too far off. The hard part is determining how many rabbit-eating-animal decks will appear as a result of the increase of rabbit frequency, and if the introduction of said-animal-rabbit-eater introduces a new animal we've never heard of.

I'm not an expert in this area, but it has a lot to do with being a game on multiple platforms. In order to patch simultaneously on PC/Mobile there are a number of things that have to be submit and approved being we can release a new patch to the public.

To clarify, this is also just the design team I'm speaking to. There are many other people of various disciplines like art, engineering, production, community, QA, customer support, marketing, business, etc that make an equally large impact on the game.

Yes. Design team is around 15 people now. Live Content (Brawls, Firesides, Other Events), Initial Design (Card Designs, Mechanic Designs, Set Flavor and Theme), System Design (Ranked Systems, Tons of Other Systems), Final Design (Set Tuning, Card Design, Mechanic Design), and Mission Design (Mission Design, Card Design). We also have Ben that directs the ship and another sort of jack of all trades designer than works a lot on new player experience, matchmaking, and flavor things. That said, well all help each other out quite a bit and the real list of things each individual person does is more like 20 bullet points rather than 2. That's the general jist though.

Jade is fairly weak to aggressive strategies, and I don't think those are going to go away as a result of STB change. There is still some room between hyper-aggressive pirate things and heavy control things that will keep us pretty far from all-jade-all-the-time meta. At least that's the idea. If we thought as a result of these changes Jade would be all (or half of all decks) that were relevant, we would have gone a different route.

Answering a question about how Jade performs against X/Y/Z deck is a question that can be answered from a lot of playtesting. Answering a question about how Jade will perform in a future metagame doesn't come directly from playtesting, it's more of a prediction of how things will shake out. The question I was addressing was the latter.

Of course we do, what I mean by prediction is not predicting how good or bad particular matchups are, but predicting what people will actually choose to play. Jade decks still aren't great vs highly aggressive pirate decks, even after changing small-time buccaneer. If pirates are still played at the same volume they are now, I don't imagine Jade will be very strong. We can playtest every matchup in the game between the 3-4 of us but that won't tell us the exact rate at which each deck will be played on ladder, though it does put us in a good position to make a reasonable prediction.

This is something that is mostly a prediction rather than a result of testing. Whether or not Jade Druid and Rogue will be 'good' is meta dependent. I don't think these changes will magically make Jade decks strong against aggressive decks, but I think it's safe to say the meta slowing down at any % is a good thing for Jade.