Eternally evergreen: The broken promises of Standard

It has been almost six months since Whispers of the Old Gods got released and Standard was introduced. I was never a fan of standard and when the first talks were had about introducing formats, I opposed it. When standard was announced, I stated that there was a lot of hurdles Blizzard needed to pass in order to make it work. I simply didn't think that it would be a sufficient means to push Hearthstone's meta forward. And with the recent balance changes, that just seemed to be all too correct. Therefore it seems like now would be a good time to do an evaluation on the state of Standard in Hearthstone.



The forfeit of Standard



I see the recent nerfs as a forfeit for the Standard system. It is a forfeit of the idea that the meta can progress healthy purely off the back of new releases of Hearthstone expansions. From the very start it was dubious whether Standard would be able to deliver on its prestigious promises. Blizzard advertised Standard as the way that Hearthstone meta would progress and that “new strategies are constantly evolving”.





Biggest lie in Hearthstone

A more accurate text for this hint would be “thanks to our twice-annual balance adjustments, new strategies may occasionally present themselves”. Because that has been the story of the meta progression in recent times, more defined by the old cards that are nerfed than new cards released, and now with the recent balance adjustment we will another spike in the meta progression.

That is is not the way of a standard rotation, it is a system of balance seasons. There is nothing wrong with that per se, heck, it is a system I advocated that Hearthstone should adapt last year. However, if Blizzard is not going to be open about it and advertise this element of their balance then they won’t get any of the benefits that follow from a system of regular balance updates.

Balance seasons are already not considered complementary to standard rotation setup because they are two conflicting promises to the community. For Standard the promise is that every card is available for two years and two years only, whereas once you got seasons there is in theory never a card that is safe but then you would usually keep having access to all other cards, because there is little reason not to. If a card becomes a problem due to imbalance or too much longevity, you just toss it in with the next batch of nerfs. It is the hands-off versus hands-on approach.

That being said, I wouldn’t mind if Blizzards ends up with this hybrid of a system with having both Standard and a twice-annual balance adjustment. No one says that you absolutely have to mimic one of the primary systems, and with the dust refunds on direct card nerfs, Blizzard is in better position than most to double dip on their balance tools. But as it stands, we need to know better if such a system is what Blizzard plans to go with. The biggest strength of seasonal balance comes from information. Information on the fact that balance changes are coming and when they are coming. This soothes the community because while it may not get to know the exact date the balance arrives (Software QA can be tricky like that), they will know most of the times when balance changes are NOT coming in the immediate future, thus complaining about balance becomes moot for most of the year.

Whatever ends up happening, to me it is clear that the “pure” Standard has failed as a system to bring the meta forward in Hearthstone and I would now like to go in more depth why this happened.



Nothing changed when everything needed to



Magic the Gathering has been running the Standard system for over 20 years and one of the primary reasons why it's successful is the sheer quantity of their card releases, over a thousand a year. Furthermore, each Standard “block” starts out with about 250 new cards, about as much as Hearthstone releases over the entire year.

The quantity is a completely essential part of Magic's release schedule. It allows for much higher variety within the same formats and it is how their packs cater to the multiple formats that Magic tournaments offer. Comparatively, the releases of Hearthstone have been on a completely different scale and that needed to change if Hearthstone was to have a chance of picking up the format structure of Magic without problems.

Now that we have all the sets for this year before Blizzcon, it is easy to see that not much has changed in terms of number of cards released. 134 from Whispers of the old gods 45 cards from One night in Karazhan is a completely insignificant change of pace from the Grand Tournament's 132 and League of Explorers' 45. The pace of card releases hasn't changed at all with Standard. In fact, if you count all the cards released since last Blizzcon, 224, you will find it is significantly lower than the number of cards released between Blizzcon 2014 and Blizzcon 2015 which was 286.

The pace of card releases was mostly unchanged with the introduction of standard.



This is the exact opposite of how releases in a Standard rotation are supposed to be. It is a system that allows for much more excess in card releases because you aren't going to burden new players with your entire backlog of cards, only those from the past two years.

Quantity has not been the only lacking change in card releases. Whispers and Karazhan also didn’t change much in the style of card releases. This can be observed by looking at Priest, historically a bad class for most of the history of Hearthstone. Standard was bound to be a massive blow for them too as a lot of their best cards were to be rotated out leaving them only with their mostly dysfunctional basic and classic set.

So what did Priest get post-Standard to remedy this? In WotG they got a mixture of C’Thun cards, N’Zoth support and combo healing. In Karazhan they got a card for self-sustain, one for revival shenanigans and one for silence synergy. Where is the focus? How is any single theme going to receive enough support when the releases for Priest cards are so split? The answer is, it is not.

This is hardly a new problem for Priest. Lack of focus was a recurring issue in the releases for Priest the entire 2015. It was something that needed to change, Standard notwithstanding. Instead, we got standard and no change and what little progress had been made to make Priest playable was pretty much reversed, and in its place were tiny tidbits of different deck themes without any of them receiving sufficient support. This leads to a massive waste of potential. The silence theme could be cool if it was supported sufficiently but now we are in this saturation where the best card for the theme, Wailing Soul, was already phased out months before the silence theme became a thing.

Even if this year's December set did a lot to remedy this, it would only be for a fledgling moment. Once the 2017 rotation kicks in, Eerie statue, one of the core cards in current silence theme, will be rotated out, meaning a new power card would have to be printed, and then isolated in 2018.

The priest cards released since Standard have lacked focus on individual themes.

This kind of split releases functions much better in a dynamic format where a core set allows for intelligent regulation of the cards available and for how long they stay available. It obviously also works in TCGs with no formats at all where the entire cardpool is permanently allowed in all competitive tournaments, but in strict timed rotations like we currently have in Hearthstone, synergies have to be printed within the same format if their decks are to have an impact on the meta. We can't keep having situations like the original Murloc Paladin that was only tier 1 for the three months it got to be playable at full strength. We need smarter releases than this. We have needed it for several months.

As it stands, though, with releases so distorted, way too much in Hearthstone is dictated by the evergreen Classic sets and this has been the biggest sin of Standard: The incapability of its sets to overcome the status quo that was set by the classic Hearthstone.

Ask yourself, what made Warrior good the past year? Removal options like Fiery war axe and Execute that are the most powerful reactive cards in the game. What made Shaman good? The answer would be the brilliant focus on individual themes. Tunnel trogg having its absurdly abusive statline when coupled with overload, together with minions like Totem golem that are actually on budget for a change. A lot of this didn't originate from Standard, it is either classic sets dating back to 2014 or from the 2015 sets predating Standard.

Something to observe is that Spell Druid is one of the exceptions to this. The massive nerfs to the classic Druid cards seems to have done well in making sure Druid decks would not remain evergreen. The core of the deck still uses a lot of classic cards like Innervate, Wild Growth and Wrath, but the deck's general plans now mostly revolve around plays originating from post-standard packs. Be it the amazing power plays that Fandral Staghelm produces, the unforgiving punch from sudden 0 mana Arcane Giants or, of course, the ultimate board nuke that is Yogg.

Yogg-Saron himself was less of a problem than the time where he was the only relevant thing from Standard and onward.



Now that I mention Yogg, let me make a brief note on him. I could make a longer article evaluating Yogg, but at this point it would be completely futile. The rage over the RNG of Yogg has long since reached critical mass and with the nerf there is not much left to be said. It was very rare he actually did much more than you should expect from a 10 mana card, but most of the community has since lost perspective about how high that expectation actually is. A 10 mana card clearing the board is not outrageous.

Suffice to say, Yogg was much less of a problem than people made him out to be. The real problem was how long he was the only thing of relevance we have seen from Whispers and onwards. Yogg and deckstyles mostly defined by classic sets have been the majority of what we saw in HCT tournaments.



The illogical April rotation

Something I would also like to bring up is how the current Standard rotation is out of sync with the competitive season of Hearthstone. For all intents and purposes, the Hearthstone competitive season spans from Blizzcon to Blizzcon, the end of all and the next beginning. But right now standard makes a jump, skipping over one expansion before resetting. As a result, one expansion only gets to see use for one season only because it is attached to a Standard season that is already over competitively.

With an april rotation, there will always be one set that will only get to see use for one Blizzcon

Think about it. The League of Explorers is widely regarded as one of the best expansions in the history of Hearthstone and yet it is this set that will only see use in one World Championship. Next time the short circuit expansion will be a full one, so we will have this waste for over twice as many cards.

Blizzard's official stance has been that they don't mind this too much and it just means that they get more courageous with the cards they release with the December expansion. I hate this explanation, because it feels more like the rest of the sets get gimped by this and we can’t wait a whole year without something as potent as Reno Jackson, not while a Standard rotation is in place. There quite simply shouldn't be a set that receives “increased courage” from its limited competitive window. As it stands we are severely lacking of some of that courage the rest of the year and we need all expansions to be more daring.

If standard rotated from December to December then every single set released would get to see use for 2 Blizzcons. There will obviously always be a set that gets to have a shorter run, but with this setup and the current release structure of Hearthstone this will always be the adventure expansion, which contains far fewer cards anyway. Much less waste overall.

I realize that this structure means that Goblins vs Gnomes should still have been a part of the 2016 rotation, which really didn't suit up with the demands of the times, but to jeopardize the entire format for sake of a needed band aid solution at the time seems like a terrible idea in the long run.





Moving Standard into 2017



For 2017 we need to do something about the basic and classic sets being the core ones for Hearthstone. I get the argument about ensuring returning players still have some familiar cards to enjoy and that is fine. The issue comes when the balance state determined by these sets dating back to 2014 becomes the permanent basis of Hearthstone that new expansions must compensate for. The expansions simply haven’t been potent enough in their releases to offset this deficit. Ideally, we'll get to see both a stronger core set and more impactful expansions.

Let me be clear and upfront that a solution for the core set is NOT to simply nerf all of classic. This was a theoretical answer that was presented by Ben Brode on Twitter as an example, and while that would theoretically solve most of the problems relating to evergreen cards, it would not solve the much more prominent problem of classes lacking in identity during each subsequent standard reset.

Priests would still be left with absolutely nothing of value from their base set and Paladins would still be left with few options but to look into ways of summoning Tirion a fourth time. Both of these classes would still largely depend on whatever themes would be enabled by the next expansions and as we have seen in the past it is a hit and miss to rely on expansions to build an identity without a strong base from the classic set to work with.

On top of that you run into the issue where the experience of new players gets more degraded as Classic gets nerfed further and further for the sake of progressing the meta. A switching core set solves most of this. It can hold meta-relevant cards without said cards having a risk of becoming a problem in the long run. Once a card has outstayed its welcome, it simply won't be added to the next core set. However players entering the game and/or buying the welcome package will still be able to get access to a good number of competitive cards for the time they are bought.

So this would be my prayer to Blizzard for the 2017 Standard rotation. Give us a proper core set or start making adjustments to the existing one. Insert more identity-giving cards like Quartermaster in the Paladin set and just go ahead and throw out some of the secrets in exchange. They are not needed, you are not reprinting Mysterious Challenger anytime soon. And for Priest, settle on a single theme to support for the year and don't be afraid of going all out on it. It is time to break the class hierarchy that has been present since launch. It is clear and more apparent than ever that we need to move on from 2014. 2017 would be a good time for that.

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