Hearthstone Update Patches Over Patches

There hasn't been much news for the game of Hearthstone since the latest expansion, but with the year rolling on they gave us some big events and even bigger card changes. The first announcement? Wildfest is coming to a tavern near you. To lead the new additions in Wildfest is Wild Arena. As you can imagine, this is just arena with the addition of the "cards in the wild" set as draft options.

This also means that any arena run incomplete by February 19 will be auto-rewarded, so it's best to finish up those runs quickly. The first of your arena runs during Wildfest will be free, just to give everyone a taste of the new event. Team 5 is also adding two new tavern brawls, one of which is with preconstructed wild decks called "Venture Into the Wild." With this deck, you just choose your class and duke it out. The other, "The Wild Brawliseum," allows players to make their own wild deck and use it in an arena-style system to see who can get to either 12 wins or three losses. These Brawliseum runs will cost either real money or in-game currency.

Now for the big news: some cards have been changed, and some of these changes are huge. To start things off, the dreaded Corridor Creeper is now a 7 mana 2-5. This almost makes the card obsolete, considering it used to be a 5-5, but we may see this card return in some evolve shaman decks. Unfortunately, there isn't much room for it elsewhere.

Furthermore, the most annoying card of last year, Patches the Pirate, no longer has charge. This change is needed, and he is still very viable. How? Well, he remains a free minion but fortunately, he no longer places immediate pressure on the opponent.

Raza the Unchained now reduces the cost of your hero power to 1 instead of 0. This will cause many Priest players to rethink their Heartland decks.

Lastly the auto-include Bonemare has been increased to 8 mana instead of 7. This change doesn't seem huge but for a turn 8, there are a lot of tech cards as well as big body cards that could fit better late-game than Bonemare.

Alongside these card changes are changes to ranked play. Now, players' season reset will be four positions back from where they hit last season, all ranks have 5 stars to continue to the next rank, and Legends will now be placed at rank 4 with 0 stars at the start of each season. Those are the big updates to Hearthstone. Now go dust those Creepers.