In the past year, Hearthstone has made great strides to offer new content for players. A new Class, Dual-Class Cards, an achievement system, a Battle-Pass (that nobody asked for), the Duels mode, additional minions, tribes, and heroes for Battlegrounds. Now this doesn't look like much, but to be honest this is a lot of content in one year when you compare it to previous years' habits of rinse, wash, repeat. Unfortunately with all the strides that Team 5 has made to make the game better, I've felt an itch that just can't be scratched, and that's the lack of formats.
Everyone here, since this is being posted in the Hearthstone part of the site, is familiar with Standard and Wild. We know how the rotations work, what cards are legal, and what to expect in April of any given year. So I ask, is it enough? Is Standard and Wild enough formats to play on the ladder? My answer is simply no and there are two main reasons for this answer. The Metas, and the collection.
The Meta within Standard waxes and wanes depending on balance changes, combo & archetype discoveries, and obviously the new cards that roll in every ~4 months (with the exception of this and perhaps future expansion cycles). The Meta gets changed up quite a bit on the release of a new expansion which is expected, and can be changed drastically like what we're currently seeing with Evolve Shaman after Demon Hunter got rebalanced. Eventually when Team 5 either throw their hands up and discreetly decide that Standard has had enough balance changes or is more or less into full swing of expansion reveal to keep everyone occupied, the Meta settles and become monotonous. Of course they're trying to remedy this by releasing a mid-expansion set of cards to hopefully shake it up enough, but either way that Meta will settle and players will get bored.
The Meta in Wild, for lack of better terms, has its' roots more planted than that of Standard. We all know Raza & Rez Priest, we all know Odd Paladin, we all know Secret Mage, we all know Bloodreaver Warlock, we all know Dead Man's Warrior, and so on. The deck variety in Wild will always be greater than that in Standard, but that does not mean better. Of the decks listed above, I've never once said to myself "Oh boy! I get to go against (Insert Deck name here) again!" Yeah playing against Galakrond Rogue sucked for a time but at least it was only a Meta deck for so long, as opposed to Wild decks where these offenders will be present until there's literally a card printed out exclusively to combat them. So Wild has its own level of staleness, which funnily enough is at the same time worse, and better than the staleness of Standard.
The second issue is the collection aspect, this is more of a Wild exclusive topic. This topic more aimed towards players who don't/haven't disenchanted their Wild cards. Currently in the game we have ~2,500 collectable cards, and not many of them are playable in terms of being viable in the Wild meta. Additionally, some of these cards never got support after their release, looking at you Moorabi. Beyond cards not getting support we also have powercreep which is something that can't always be avoided and in a way is needed for players to become better, an example being Silverback Patriarch and literally any other 3-cost Taunt minion. Those two simple things combined with the vast amount of cards available in Wild makes wanting a complete collection that much less important.
The only slight remedy of the having a complete or near complete collection being almost useless is the new Duels mode. Some could say that this validates a reasoning for players to hold onto old cards, and it does, but not all players like the idea of drafting cards, myself being one of them. But that's a mode that comes down to personal preference.
So all that above culminating to the point I wanted to make. It's time for Hearthstone to get a new format, preferably this one ;). Joking aside, I, as well as other players, are tired of being stuck in between a format that has the tired same old gimmicks since a deck's inception, and a format that gets stale even when new cards arrive. Some of you may say "Well if Team 5 does add another format, it'll get stale, people will complain about it's imbalances, and won't fix anything long term." Which is true but if Team 5 were to not add just one, but maybe two new formats, it'll give players enough to shuffle in between without getting bored/burned out as easily. Let's also take a step back and brainstorm what those could be.
Explorer - A format in which cards, depending on the amount they were played, get rotated out until the new Hearthstone year.
Pauper - A format in which only common rarity cards are allowed.
Tower - A format in which "random" is not allowed, and in which cards that create other cards is not allowed.
Tribal - A format in which all minions must share the same minion type.
Two-Headed Ogre - Make a 15 card deck, combine it with someone else's 15 card deck, and you go against two other players with their combined 15 card decks.
Hell, maybe even a format that rotates with expansions. What if we had Classic, Basic, Darkmoon Faire, and Whispers of the Old Gods in their own format for 4 months until the next expansion? This could've also been done when Boomsday came out, it could've shared a format with Goblins Vs. Gnomes along with mechs from other expansions.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
