Hearthstone is formatting competitive play – here’s what that means

By Parker Wilhelm

Changes are coming…

Hearthstone is getting a massive update this spring in the shape of a brand new format, shaking up Blizzard’s online TCG more than when Warsong Commander got nerfed — or possibly ever.

Just announced on the game’s official blog, the standard Hearthstone experience will soon be bisected into two main ways to play: Standard and Wild.

2 Formats, 2 Furious

Standard, the new, er, standard for competitive Hearthstone play, will require decks to use only cards that were released during the current and prior year, in addition to the Basic set — the core cards all players start out with — and Hearthstones’s original Classic expansion.

Launching this spring, Hearthstone’s first-ever Standard season, dubbed Year of the Kraken, will only feature cards from:

• Hearthstone’s Basic Set
• The Classic expansion
• Blackrock Mountain
• The Grand Tournament expansion
• The League of Explorers
• Hearthstone’s unannounced Spring 2016 expansion

This means that cards from the Curse of Naxxramas solo adventure and the Goblins vs. Gnomes expansion, which both released in 2014, will be rotating out of Standard.

While Naxxramas and Goblins vs. Gnomes will soon be unavailable to purchase from Hearthstone’s online shop, players can still craft individual cards from those sets by spending Arcane Dust, which players can accrue from prizes …read more

Source:: techradar.com – Gaming