Hi Hearthstoners...............

Since the addition of The Grand Tournament cards and their powerful effects, it's pretty outstanding to see Blizzard willing to flip the table of the game to keep it fresh.

However, if their answer is to keep adding new cards, and without handicapping players with older cards, how could Blizzard prevent card inflation?

Using Magic: The Gathering as an analogue, the answer is likely we will see additional "seasonal" modes in the game. The most drastic answer would be to release an entirely new Hearthstone 2.

What Magic ultimately did was create "type 2" (now called standard) a version of the game that only used the most recent 2 years worth of cards. As new sets of cards are produced the oldest sets fall out and become illegal for play in standard.

As even more and more cards were printed they further subdivided the massive amount of cards into different constructed tournament formats so today you have:

• Block (only the most recent 6 months or so)
• Standard (now 18 months just changed from 2 years)
• Modern (just about everything printed since mid 2003)
• Legacy and Vintage (just about every card ever printed)

The upside for players is that the standard metagame is constantly fresh and changing whereas the same types of decks have dominated legacy and vintage for a decade. The downside is that to stay competitive in standard you have to keep buying the latest good cards.

Blizzard could go this route, especially if they want to have a game where the current best deck changes from year to year but I doubt they'll do it because they don't have the same problem of having a very limited set of good cards that were printed once in 1993 and can never be printed again.

I could see them releasing new base sets, possibly updating some old cards and adding or removing some and make ranked play only available to decks with the latest base set.

They will prob do something like magic. So have a all card ranked mode and a tournament that only allows the most recent sets. This also gives them the added benefit making people get new cards to play. This also allows them like magic to print good cards that might dominate the block but will eventually rotate out. For example Dr. Boom is great but would only be in the tournament scene for a bit before being rotated out. This also stops the need to make constantly better cards because the old cards cannot be used.

This will have the effect of making the all card mode crazy like magic. Type 1 decks in magic can be insane.

Another option is something that FFG are doing for their LCG games like the new edition of A Game of Thrones, Star Wars and Netrunner. They want to keep it so that the core set and between 5 and 7 cycles are active at any one time. So when an the eight cycle starts, the first two cycles are made illegal for standard competition. It limits the pool to about a maximum of 1500 cards and a minimum of about 1300.

With the LCG games, the core set is always legal so everyone has the same starting point.

TGT changed very little actually, a few additions to already existing decks and a new form of cancer in Secret Paladin. It's just one really broken card (Mysterious Challenger) that changed things.

@psychopenguin: @jesus_phish:So it seems like we've awhile to go before we hit the limit to start budding off to new editions yet. It'll be interesting to see these strategies manifest in digital form/videogames.

Maybe they won't?

It is a tricky thing taking stuff from people. A natural way is actual just powercreep. I feel in this case this might feel better for a ton of people then denying them the usage of their cards in certains mods.
Then again there are hugs number of old cards that are not competitive that noone cares about.

@cheappoison: You present an interesting argument in that maybe in the digital format, a card game can handle that volume of cards. It would be valid for them to create a better way to parse cards by Release and just keep them in the back log regardless of their use.

I think the bloat is already affecting Arena pretty badly, because it's really hurting the likelihood that you actually get decent class spells. There are just so many random neutral minions that you don't really want, or some new class cards from Naxxramas/GvG/Blackrock/TGT that aren't all that great, and it's really hurting the chances that you get any of the backbone cards of your class from the Classic set.

As for ranked, yeah, by keeping every set active all the time, new players have a pretty big hill to climb to compete with the players (F2P or paying) who have been playing for like 2 years at this point.