Big Changes Coming to Hearthstone's Arena

Hearthstone, surprisingly, has been losing momentum in the past few months, as people have started complaining that the game is getting… well… broken. Well, the year of the Kraken is ending, the year of the Mammoth is about to begin, and Blizzard has started making huge changes in the game to hopefully bring some balance – and players – back to the table.

And they’re saving some of the biggest changes for Arena, the mode that’s in theory a great equalizer, but in practice is an exercise in good luck depending on how many flamestrikes you can draft. While it certainly felt good to load up on legendaries and OP cards, more often than not you found yourself with a handful of crappy cards and maybe one or two worth their weight in mana.

Well, soon, Blizzard will be improving Arena by, if not removing the random elements, adjusting them to be a bit friendlier.

The biggest change is that the Arena decks will no longer be wild: now, they’ll all be ‘standard’, so you’ll only have the common cards and the latest updates available to draft. But amongst those commons, the ones that have no effects and are generally trash will show up much less frequently in your draft. Likewise, the RNG will ensure you get a more even split between spells and minions, so you don’t find yourself starved for utility.

And perhaps most important for some, Abyssal Enforcer and Flamestrike have been targeted specifically for a mini-nerf, ensuring they show up 50% less. That said, since we’ll have fewer cards to pick from to begin with, we’ll still probably see plenty of both when you play Arena.

So good news, and long overdue. Hopefully, it’ll be enough, when combined with the rest of the Year of the Mammoth changes, to turn Blizzard’s best digital TCG around.