Following the announcement yesterday of the STB and Spirit Claws nerf, Blizz came out swinging today, announcing some pretty big changes for 2017.

• 6 Classic Cards Rotating Out of Standard (into new Hall of Fame set)

Azure Drake
Sylvannas
Ragnaros
Power Overwhelming
Ice Lance
Conceal

• Blizz will automatically grant full dust refunds on these cards and you can keep the cards in your collection!

• No new adventure in 2017, new release cycle is 3 expansions of 130 cards each.

• Single player modes will be smaller, free and themed with each expansion.

• New alternative rogue hero, Maiev Shadowsong, to be awarded virtually for free.

• New daily log in rewards to be offered in the weeks leading up to release.

Full official announcement article can be found here: http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/blog/20475356

No adventures because they require more development time
At least there will be small single players with expansions

This post was edited by FroggyG on Feb 16 2017 05:29pm

They also allow you to get every single card for 20 bucks while expansions usually cost more to get all cards.

I'm sure that fact was considered during this decision lol.

More like no adventures because they make less money out of it..

Yeah this entire change just looks like greed

One benefit for players is that more expansions means more new cards will be released over the course of the year.

That said, adventures are cool and I like playing through them on normal and heroic. The guaranteed cards are nice too.

Adventures and Expansions tend to have the same amount of decent cards (expansions have more overall but at least half are shit)
Adventures gets the added bonus of the awesome heroic missions and stuff with guaranteed legendaries

Bad change across the board, imo

This post was edited by FroggyG on Feb 16 2017 06:06pm

There's definitely been some card quality issues in recent expansions, where they simply contain too many filler cards. Combined with the fact that there are now 3 xpacs a year, it does look a little moneygrab-ish.

This is an interesting article on frequency of cards played by set, which was released last month: http://www.vicioussyndicate.com/top-cards-played-during-mean-streets-gadgetzan-meta/

The chart that has been normalized for usage rate of an average card in a set is particularly cool. LOE is the pound for pound champ, which isn't surprising, while TGT (largely regarded as the worst xpac) and OG (somewhat surprisingly, I think) are least represented. Which speaks to card quality issues in those sets.

I think ONiK is interesting in that it's highly represented, but overall feels like it was a pretty underwhelming adventure in terms of card quality. Shaman got 2 amazing cards (Malestrom and Spirit Claws) which probably boosts those numbers. Hunter and Discolock got good cards, but they are dead now, Arcane Giants fell by the wayside, Barnes and Curator saw the field in different decks (particulaly Barnes in Kara midrange shaman, but that was largely due to a lack of quality 4 drops). Overall, it too feels like it had many filler cards pushing archetypes that didn't work (rip beast druid) and was probably the worst adventure overall (barely beating out BRM).

Hopefully they make overall card quality a higher priority in 2017, but MSG seems to have missed the boat, with only a handful of insanely powerful cards in every deck and the rest kind of meh (particularly the class specific legendaries).

On another note, anyone going to be crafting golden versions of the classic cards rotating out? It's not a huge windfall of dust if you already own regular versions, but it is a way to get golden versions on the cheap, I'm considering doing it, specifically for the non-common cards.

The only top 20 played card higher than 3 mana cost is Azure Drake wtf

◾This analysis gives us a sense of cards played, rather than cards used in decks. This produces a bias in favor of certain cards: 1.Low-mana cost cards, or mulligan priority cards, since they get played more often than expensive, late game cards.2.Neutral cards over class cards, since they can be played by all classes. This pertains to general tables (not to the tables that report each class separately).
3.Non-legendary cards, since you can have two copies of them in each deck.

Shouldn't be surprising if you can read right

This post was edited by Hepzibah on Feb 16 2017 08:29pm