What an incredibly busy year! At no point did it feel like we were getting a break and now the time has come for a moment of peace and quiet while celebrating the holiday season. On behalf of all the staff here at Out of Cards, I wanted to wish you all a safe and happy holiday.

Mrglgrgls, In My Fireplace?

It's tradition at this point that we have to link Hearthstone's Murloc Yule Log video!

Busy is an Understatement

This past year has been an incredible one, even if it was a constant rush of things happening. To start things off, the Hearthstone team has been doing a fantastic job at delivering on a live service game with the most consistent updates we've seen since the game launched 8 years ago. With that comes a ton of fun from the coverage side of things. Larger patches means more time spent datamining and fixing tools as the Hearthstone team breaks them with updates, more balance patches mean more time spent talking about changes and realizing that working on a deck spotlight article just a couple of days ago was a bad idea since it is no longer relevant with a ninja balance patch.

Riot has been keeping things interesting with Legends of Runeterra, which required some adjustments to how we handle patches. Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel has been keeping a steady flow of content coming, providing a ton of content for that side of the team to handle, and Second Dinner's release of Marvel Snap this year has seen a huge boost in traffic for the website - just not enough resources for us to keep it all handled.

We also undertook a major infrastructure upgrade that took months of planning. We had encountered slowness with the way the site was previously setup due to vital maintenance tasks running in our low-traffic times, but that was a less than ideal experience for some of our community members that were active during that time. Our upgrade gave us more computing power and better separation of our services to ensure our website was always available. The upgrade didn't go perfectly though, and unleashed a torrent of stress during the start of the March of the Lich King announcements, that we were unable to cover in a timely manner. It was unfortunate timing with how everything had worked out, Blizzard just had to announce an expansion that brought in a new class and a million other interesting things on the same day.

So, what's on the horizon for Out of Cards?

I've been teasing a major site update and we're getting closer to launching it. I'm still busy working on optimizing it for mobile devices and taking that final pass to make sure all our different features work the same or better than before. This update is going to drastically change the way Out of Cards feels and it will ultimately be for the best. I've never been very happy with how difficult it can be to navigate the site and how hard it can be to discover new content. This update aims to solve some of these problems and I hope when it arrives that everyone will enjoy it.

If you like what we're doing and want to see us continue, we'd love your support via Out of Cards Premium. You'll get no advertisements and we'll get more consistent income which helps us do what we do.

Open Your Presents

It looks like Santa arrived at some point during our slumber and left just enough gifts for everyone on the site. We're a little concerned by the logistics in dropping off so many gifts to one location, and we're going to need you to come pick yours up because the warehouse is currently overflowing. You have until December 31 to open them all on the Snowpocalypse event page.