In the patch notes for tomorrow's Hearthstone patch, Blizzard has announced that Battlegrounds is getting a huge update to how minions work!
Instead of rotating minions out, there are now pools of minions that will make each game of Battlegrounds feel a bit different! When the game begins, it will tell you which minion tribes are present in that game of Battlegrounds. With 6 currently active tribes in Battlegrounds, only 5 of them will be available each game. When a tribe is removed from the pool for that game, you won't see any cards that have the tribe or certain heroes which were designed around those types of minions.
Since Pirates have just been added, they will always be included in the pool of minions, though Blizzard has stated they will eventually join the shifting pool. Here's what Blizzard has to say about the new feature.
Quote From Blizzard Battlegrounds Shifting Minion Pools
At the start of each game of Battlegrounds, five of the six currently available minion types (Beasts, Demons, Dragons, Mechs, Murlocs, and now Pirates) will form the recruitment pool for that game. The active minion types will be displayed while you’re selecting a Hero—you can also check anytime during the Recruit phase by hovering over Bartender Bob’s deck. To keep things fair, Heroes designed with synergies around a specific minion types will sit out if their corresponding minion type is unavailable.
Pirates will always be available in the minion pool until they join the rest of the shifting minion pool in a future update.
Comments
Potentially good... I wonder how many people are going to be salty about the change though?
Kripps queues BG
Sees Murloc not in the pool
Bottom Right
Kripps queues BG
(Rinse and repeat)
That seems like a really bad idea to me. There are minions in the game that are good and useful outside of their tribe that will just end up getting randomly cut out of the pool. Menagerie is already a highly inconsistent strategy and revolves a lot around both whether you can get the appropriate buff engines and the appropriate minions to buff. Now imagine trying menagerie when Cave Hydra is out of the picture. How much harder is it going to be to make this underpowered composition work? Similarly, you don't need to play a dragon build to want the 2/1 Divine Shield Reborn guy for your Divine Shield/Menagerie line up. You don't need to play Demons but Mal'ganis can be useful if you happen to be playing Baz'hial. You'd appreciate a Cave Hydra if you're Putricide. It's one of the few cards that make his hero power have some value. Etc etc. Essentially, the underpowered heroes that benefit at least a bit from various cute synergies will likely end up becoming even weaker when some of those synergies are unavailable, so the heroes that already steamroll the early turns through some busted early advantages will become that much stronger in comparison. And even though you'll know what is and isn't available at the start of the game, that doesn't make it much better when your picks are between Putricide and Wagtoggle and you know Beasts are out of the picture.
Even though you make a good point, it's also true that the current minion pool is very diluted, imagine it with one more tribe in it!
Great idea. This will make for slightly more variety between games. Also it won't be too hard to make certain builds work.
This change makes me think that maybe we could see some form of Nightmare Amalgam again in the future. Who knows? We'll just have to wait and see.
Sooooo... elementals next, and then Totems!
I didn't know I wanted to play a Tribal strategies so much until I thought about Totems in Battlegrounds.
And then Alls*.
This sounds like a great idea, instead of constantly removing parts of the minion pool. Lets them add more and keep the synergies somewhat consistent. Good job Blizz!