This weekend, there was news that a dinosaur themed expansion would be coming next. A reddit user discovered this information when a Blizzard voice actress updated her resume on her personal website. The resume included a section under hearthstone for voice work on bunch of dinosaurs and a minion from a dinosaur themed area in WoW. That area is called Un'Goro, which is a crater filled with jungles and dinosaurs as well as other creatures.

Blizzard is also planning balance changes sometime during the end of the month (Source). It is expected that Small Buccaneer will be heavily nerfed. Blizzard has said in different interviews lately that pirates are starting to become a problem and they would nerf Small Buccaneer if nerfs were to happen.

Dinosaurs are Rad. Hearthstone is Rad. I don't see how this isn't good news. Guess it's time to start saving my coins for the next expansion nice and early. Thanks for the heads up!

This next expansion should be huge, isn't the next expansion the day when TGT, Blackrock, and League rotate out of Standard?

@zombie2011: Yep, it's gonna be interesting for sure.

I look forward to the nerfs. It's been a weird metagame. There's some deck varieties, but things have gone to weird extremes. The strength of Mean Streets of Gadgetzaan cards have pushed out a lot of the earlier deck types (N'Zoth and C'thun are much more fringe than they used to be, Midrange Hunter is nonexistent, for example).

Every deck is either super aggro because of the strength of pirates, or super control because of the strength of Reno Jackson/Kazakus. There's a few somewhere in the middle that play more of a consistent keep-decent-minions-on-the-board kinda game, like Dragon Priest just kinda tries to keep playing efficient dragons while also Discovering new cards, and Jade Druid gets incredible long term value from Jade Golems as long as it can stay alive in the first few turns. But for the most part midrange decks are almost gone entirely because none of the Grimy Goons cards were really good enough, so Hunter and Paladin got almost no really worthwhile class cards from Mean Streets of Gadgetzaan other than like, Alley Armorsmith.

So yeah, hopefully the nerfs will shake things up, along with all of the cards rotating out of Standard in a month or two. But yeah, Small-time Buccaneer and Patches are going to be in Standard for a long time, so they really need to do something about pirate aggro or else pirate aggro will just be everywhere for the next two years.

@captain_max707: Aggro wins on turn 3 instead of turn 4/5.

Kripp had an interesting discussion of how this got leaked and then proceeded to go like 0-4 in arena (2-3 into 0-1), highly entertaining stream.

Somehow people are still positive about HS as evidenced by this thread? Truly baffling. Not that the next expansion won't be interesting but it is sure to be netdecked to death within 1.5 months or so; and I think the 40% shaman meta is simply indicative of waning creativity in a playerbase that had virtually no creativity to begin with. Card reviews are still fun though. Shaman doesn't even have a particularly good win rate as these things go; a massive 52%, but still it's almost everyone on the ladder above like rank 15.

Pirates literally made me quit playing Hearthstone. It wasn't fun to play it. It wasn't fun to play against it. Mean Streets just hasn't been a fun expansion at all.

Hopefully, Un'Goro can fix that. However, until they offer a genuine rotation to Standard rather than this ridiculously long list of sets allowed in Standard, I don't think I'll have much interest in it again anytime soon.

I still play Hearthstone almost everyday, so more cards are always welcome. I guess I should try to make a good pirate deck before the changes.

I want to be excited for dinosaurs, but I'm still tired of the constant "aggro is finally going to be toned back and we'll see more variety" to "aggro is actually even better than ever" cycle that happens every time they release new cards. Reno is on his way out now too right? That's going to suck for control.

The post-Gadgetzan meta to me is an absolute disaster from a game design standpoint. The excitement that Blizzard displayed over the idea of gangs confronted with it turning out insignificant or worse (forces a deck archetype for six classes and makes literally every gang card from the remaining three unplayable) combined with the past history of the overhyped predicted impact of expansions makes me have zero trust in the studio's ability to do anything that would noticably improve Hearthstone in the long run.

I'm also getting tired of this game. After two years of playing the game, I am playing less and less each week. Part of the reason is fatigue, but another reason is that I have seen everything that there is to offer from the game. Everything has been too routine. Like @mezza, said even the community response to what the developers have put out have become too routine.

The Cycle

Blizzard hints at new content >people hope for new tools for control decks > Blizzard teases out strong control card > everyone assumes control will finally be dominant > expansion/ adventure releases and there's a week at best where everyone is willing to try experimental decks > someone discovers the top agro/midrange deck > everyone plays that deck till we are all sick of it > Rinse and repeat for the next expansion/adventure

@acura_max: Don't forget to put in 'nerf staple cards from skill-intensive archetypes along with staple cards from aggro decks>immediately print new staple cards for aggro decks'

So i've been playing since the Beta and still love the game, however, the big change in how i play is that now i play on my phone. I'm gonna guess most the players are phone users who don't want hearthstone games to be 20 minute control fatigue battles, since they are mostly logging in when they have a little downtime. I think the streamers that review the cards and always are hoping for the control decks to become prevalent are the people Blizzard need to cater to least. Personally i think it's in their best interest to keep the games in the midrange, the vocal community may hate it but it will probably keep the most players engaged in the long run. The game has been out for 2 years and they keep introducing powerful 1 drops so they must have the data to back it up.