The Year of the Raven is fast coming to a close, and the tavern is gearing up for some new changes. The new year, called the Year of the Dragon, promises a lot of new additions to the game.
Nine cards will be removed from Standard play for the new Year – Naturalize, Doomguard,Divine Favor, Genn Greymane and Baku the Mooneater,Gloom Stag,Black Cat, Glitter Moth and Murkspark Eel. Genn and Baku, despite being launched in the Year of the Raven, are being rotated out to make space for new decks and for a more diverse meta game to flourish without them. Odd and even mana cost decks have dominated the ladder for quite some time now, and it looks like Blizzard have finally caught up. All cards using the “odd-even” mechanic like Gloom Stag, Black Cat, Glitter Moth and Murkspark Eel are being rotated out along with Genn and Baku, and it only makes sense to do so, since there are no more support cards for continuing with “odd-even” decks.
All expansions released in the Year of the Dragon will be part of one large, continuing storyline instead of being set in different places. Adventures are finally returning as singleplayer content, where the first ‘wing’ is free, but the rest can be purchased for 700 gold each, or the entire story at a cost of $19.99. Each ‘wing’ unlocks 3 card packs from the new expansion, and on successful completion of the adventure, a card back and a golden Classic pack (in other words, a pack from the Classic set which consists of all golden cards). The adventure will use the format of the singleplayer content added to the game in the Year of the Raven, so one doesn’t have to rely on having cards in one’s collection to beat a particular boss.
Arena players get some special love in the Year of the Dragon. Arena will have a particular pool of cards to choose from, to make the format exciting to play with. These sets of cards will be changed twice as the Year progresses. With the first rotation, the Arena draft pool will contain the following sets: Basic, Classic, Curse of Naxxramas, Whispers of the Old Gods, Mean Streets of Gadgetzan, The Witchwood, and the first expansion of this year.
The game comes with several new basic features. The game will add the option to re-roll legendary quests, ones added on account of special events throughout the year. It was occasionally mildly annoying to forego gold for a legendary quest which isn’t really a quest one wants to focus on. Players also get the option to go for a “rotating card back”, where one gets to play with any one of the card backs in the collection, chosen randomly. An improved deck builder based on machine learning that trains on games played by players and gives better suggestions for card replacements based on cards already in the player’s collection as well as scoring wins towards the golden heroes through arena wins are other decent additions to the game. Blizzard strangely remains silent on the tournament mode that they promised in mid 2018, though (here’s to hoping it comes through soon).
There will be a farewell event shortly at the end of March till the beginning of April, with daily login rewards as well as a tavern brawl to commemorate the memories for the Year of the Raven. Frankly speaking, Year of the Raven wasn’t really as eventful as the Year of the Mammoth, and the expansions, while featuring some amazing design ideas, did feature long stale metas at different times throughout the year. Here’s to hoping Year of the Dragon proves to be better.