Blizzard shakes up Hearthstone with a new game mode

In a competitive card game like Hearthstone, the developer has to keep releasing new cards each year to keep things interesting. This comes with a variety of problems, such as increasing the learning curve for new players and increasing the number of cards players need to purchase before they can put together a viable deck. Developers also often have trouble coming up with new cards that aren’t outperformed by existing cards, and find it difficult to shake up the metagame.

To combat this, Blizzard has announced the creation of a new game mode named Standard in which players can use only cards released in the past two years in addition to basic and classic cards. The current gameplay is being repackaged as Wild mode, which allows any cards to be used. The coming year will also see balance changes to basic cards, and players will get an extra 9 deck slots so that they can have separate Wild and Standard decks. Read on for a video from Lead Designer Ben Brode with an explanation of why this change is necessary for the future health of Hearthstone.