With the Year of the Kraken now over, Blizzard is outlining the changes they plan on making to Hearthstone in this “Year of the Mammoth”. This year is named like this because there is just so much going on with Hearthstone.
Once the first major expansion for this year drops, Blackrock Mountain, The Grand Tournament, and League of Explorers cards will become exclusive to the Wild game format. Certain cards from Classic will now be put in Wild too, to help balance the two game types. The cards being moved to the Hall of Fame set in Wild are Azure Drake, Sylvanas Windrunner, Ragnaros the Firelord, Power Overwhelming, Ice Lance, and Conceal. By pulling out powerful and heavily-used cards, Blizzard hopes to add more variety to decks.
Blizzard is also offering Dust refunds for people whose cards are being moved to Wild, saying, “Up to the maximum number of cards you could put in a deck, we will give you the full dust value of any cards you have that are being added to the Hall of Fame set.”
The release cycle for expansions will change too, with 3 ~130 card expansions being dropped at the beginning, middle, and end of the year. They hope that this change will allow them to tell a better story with their expansion decks, and keep the narrative fun and coherent.
There will be a login event to celebrate the new year, awarding players with a new hero: Maiev Shadowsong, to be rewarded once you win 10 games in casual or standard mode after the next expansion drops.