I recently caught up with Hearthstone’s to chat about the new Whispers of the Old Gods expansion , but I also took the opportunity to find out more about the changes that the team are planning on making to the Classic and Basic sets to address problem cards and combos heading into the new Standard format. Read on to find out what they had to say...

“ We plan to announce them about a week before the set comes out.

Just add Muster or Imp-losion.

The old versions are on the left. Both the new designs are rarely seen.

“ Big Game Hunter, I think pushes in a little bit of an unhealthy direction... all the big, high attack minions we ever print will get hit by this...

So very, annoyingly, powerful.

“ I like the general idea that if people really love a card maybe it could come back or maybe it could go in the Basic set.

One of the crazier reward cards.

We have specific ones in mind that we’ve been playtesting, but they’re not really final because I still have the ability to change them at any time, so they’re not super final. We plan to announce them about a week before the set comes out.Sure, that sounds about right. Yeah, right in the middle – right around the 10 to 12 range, basically.The players have been complaining about specific cards, so we’re concerned about anything that they’re concerned about, so just look to see what people are worried the most about. That’s the kind of thing we worry about too.I mean, there’s a lot of options we have when we change how a card works. We can increase its mana cost, we can decrease its attack and its health, we can change exactly how the power functions, so all of those options are available to us. We’ll take advantage of them wherever the situation is right.Generally if a card has a specific build-around part that we think is fun and flavourful and it’s part of the soul of the card we’ll try to keep that, unless it pushes in an unhealthy direction. Like, if it gives a bunch of minions charge that’s kind of unhealthy so we just got rid of that [on Warsong Commander] entirely. If it’s multi-card card draw, that’s really unhealthy, like [Starving] Buzzard was, so we got rid of that card – we hit that card pretty hard. But if it’s not too unhealthy we’ll try to keep that part of the card intact.I think Dr. Boom is a good example of a card that the community has been worried about for a long time, and I think it’s a very strong seven drop but it doesn’t push in a really unhealthy direction. It doesn’t make games really un-fun, it does claim space in lots of decks though. I’m happy to see it rotated out, but it wasn’t a big problem.Big Game Hunter, I think pushes in a little bit of an unhealthy direction because it means that all the big, high attack minions we ever print will get hit by this, and it sort of limits our design space.It’s high on our list.There’s always cards that don’t get played very much, like Paladin secrets for example, a year ago were never getting played at all. And the nice thing is we can design cards that make those cards more playable, like we can make Mysterious Challenger, and suddenly, cards we thought were bad are good. We love doing stuff like that and the community likes it too.I like the general idea that if people really love a card maybe it could come back or maybe it could go in the Basic set. We don’t want to do that now, but we don’t think we’ve solved how this whole thing works, so every year we’ll keep talking about it again and see if there’s a better way to do things. I would hesitate to put a very powerful card like Sludge Belcher into a set that sticks around. I actually would rather the Basic set not have as many powerful cards so that when a new expansion is released it has more of an impact and mixes up the meta game more.That’s definitely an option that we would consider, but it’s not really the goal of those promo cards. The promo cards, we found, were adding some complexity to the game because they had their own set listed and people wondering how to get them, and I don’t think they added that much fun to the game for the complexity that they added, especially once we – in the Hearthstone collection, we had to add, like “here’s Standard, here’s Wild” plus “here’s the promo cards”, “oh and here’s some more cards” the list there got really complex and long and adding more complexity to that once we have Standard and Wild was not a thing we want to do, so I don’t see this as a very likely option for us to pursue.

Cam Shea is senior editor in IGN's Australian office. Read his full conversation with Team 5 about Whispers of the Old gods here.