Blizzard aim to release more cards per year to accommodate the Standard rotation

Polygon’s summary of their trip to the Blizzard campus gives a peak at how the company is approaching the biggest shift in Hearthstone to date.

The arrival of the spring expansion – and with it the new format called “standard” and the rotation of Curse of Naxxramas and Goblins vs Gnomes from competitive play – is something a lot of players are looking forward to. By mimicking the set rotation in traditional card games like Magic: The Gathering, this rotation is part of Blizzard’s plan to keep their game fresh and ever-changing.

Experts, however, have their worries. In a recent article, GosuGamers editor Stefan “Sumadin” Suadicani spoke of the biggest hurdles Hearthstone will face when standard is made official. The item on top of his list: too few cards. He wrote:
 

[Having too few cards] was and has always been my primary argument against Hearthstone picking up the standard format. There just not enough cards being released. Under this system, Magic releases almost a thousand new cards each year, while cycling out about the same number.

In comparison, Hearthstone released 208 cards in 2015. That doesn't even meet the numbers seen in other formatless TCGs. Quantity is an essential cogwheel of the Standard format both in Magic and in the old WoW TCG and I would be concerned about Blizzard trying to fit a square into a circle if they try to implement standard without the proper quantity.”

Sumadin will be now happy to know that increasing the number of released cards is in fact on Blizzard’s schedule. According to senior designer Mike Donais, Blizzard’s aim is to move away from the current 1-to-1 ratio of pack expansions to adventure expansions, the latter being significantly smaller in terms of cards released. Instead, the goal is to have two pack expansions at the start and end of the year, with an adventure sandwiched in between.

It's not what we've done so far, but maybe that's the right thing for the future. We haven't decided whether adventures should be as common as expansions or not. Maybe the rate of 1-to-1 is not right.”
 

Another worry that pros and experts alike are having is Blizzard’s determination to keep the original classic set in rotation. In the eyes of the community, it means holding to a set of cards which are in heavy imbalance when it comes to the classes. Heroes like Paladin and Shaman most notably lack strong tools to deal with their opponents, while others such as Druid, Mage or Warlock possess a frightening arsenal. If the classic set remains in standard forever, it would mean the developers would have to accentuate on fixing the class flaws with every single expansion release.

According to Donais, however, Blizzard has good reasons for not exiling classic. They do not want to create an exit point where a player leaves for two years, returns to Hearthstone later and finds that all of the cards he had are now essentially useless, a problem observed in Magic: The Gathering, for example. If the classic set is allowed, however, they at least have an existing foundation that they can built upon and re-enter Standard more easily.
 

If a returning player's most stable cards or most of the cards they bought first — cards in the Classic and Basic sets — are still allowed, then they still have something to play with. They can at least make a face hunter deck or something like that. They can start playing and getting back into it, and it's a lot easier. When you quit Magic for two years and everything rotates out, you come back and have literally nothing. That's jarring. It's very hard to come back when that happens.”

The full article can be read here.