Hearthstone: New Classic Cards!

Whole bunch of news just dropped, and perhaps most interesting among them is the addition of a bunch of new cards to the Classic set to replace those that have been sent to the Hall of Fame.

In addition to that, we've gotten a bunch of extra news. New ranks are being added for new players, up to rank 50, which is... it's neat and definitely a great quality-of-life addition, but one that doesn't really impact me. Tournament Mode has been put on hold, which is unfortunate, but I'd be lying if I said that I really cared. There are some extra fluff bits like Fireside Gathering brawls and the return of dual-class arena, both which is nice. We also get another paid hero skin, Sir Annoy-O, which... yeah, I do love Annoy-o-tron, but this particular one looks way too annoying and not charming enough, so I'll skimp out on him for sure. We're also getting the return of the welcome bundle, albeit with the dragons instead of class legendaries? Eh. I am guaranteed to get a Malygos or Onyxia out of the dragons, so it's a coin flip to get a good card.

Also, no balance changes are happening, which... I'm not sure how the standard meta is, but I kinda want the wild meta to have some changes. Mostly in lieu to the insane Kun Aviana combos out there.

It's not the most exciting thing, and I can hear the pitchforks being raised in response to the tournament mode being cancelled, but I dunno. It's really hard to say that I care.

The new classic cards made me go "whaa?" before just sort of shrugging it off. It's cool to have these, don't get me wrong, but these are just so... so god damned boring. 


Take these three cards -- Mage's Tome of Intellect; Warlock's Call of the Void and Rogue's Pilfer -- and they are all basically just 1-mana, add a random thing into your hand. Call of the Void is particularly bad because there are so many bad demons out there, and you're better off slotting in your Doomguard or your Voidlord into your deck instead of playing around with this. Tome of Intellect at least has some uses since Mage spells are generally more good than not, and Pilfer at least works with Burgle Rogue -- plus both Mage and Rogue like cheap spells -- but it'd be a stretch to call any of these really good. Especially in Wild, which is the mode I'm playing currently, where all three of these are just kind of straight-up bad. Probably not something Blizzard considered, mind you, since Wild gets to play with the Hall of Fame'd cards.

The epic card Icicle, though, is just straight up a worse Frostbolt,  huh? You deal only 2 damage for 2 mana, and you don't even get the freeze effect or hit face. But if you spent mana to freeze the minion previously, you... draw a card? Yeah, if it read "deal 2 damage to a minion and freeze it. If it's already frozen, draw a card" it'd be awesome, sort of like an Ice Lance/Frostbolt hybrid,  but this way it's just never going to be used.

Oh well. They tried? I dunno. Not a big fan of any of these new cards. I like that we're getting new cards, though, so in spirit, I think they're doing the right thing even if what they think constitute interesting new cards needs some real work.