zaphod79 wrote:
That's one of the things I think they are doing wrong - they end up with an overbalanced card and instead of buffing other cards to similar standards they just remove it - however if their complaint is that this card is *so* overpowered why have they done nothing with it till now - its one of the original cards and has been around forever - same with Rag - yes they are strong but neither is a must have in any deck (which i could argue that Doctor Boom at 7 was)
There are two issues with that approach though.
1) They've stated that they muck about with old cards by the absolute the bare minimum they can get away with, because they want the game to be a consistent experience for current and returning players, so that folks don't find decks stop working overnight, or after a break the game has changed a lot for a returning player, in terms of cards they'd previously used and learned.
2) And this is the more obvious (unspoken) one for me, in that if they just buff old cards then they're basically making new cards, for free. They want to sell you new cards in the form of packs, not magically make poor cards you've owned for months or years already competitive with something like Sylvanas.
Furthermore for Syl and Raggy specifically, they've stated that Sylvanas is limiting their Deathrattle design space, as Syl's Deathratte is so potent. For Raggy he's just about as solid an 8-drop as they can make, so they either go down the power creep route, or farm him out to Wild to give them more space to breathe in the 8 mana slot with other cards in Standard.
TBH I feel Trump, Kripp and Kibler all covered these changes pretty well in their respective videos - and all were on board with them, as am I.
But let's not lose sight of the commercial side of things, at the end of the day Blizzard want to sell cards, shuffling out really powerful cards to Wild and introducing 'similar' cards to Standard, is a very efficient way for them to do that.
I think it'll still be possible to keep up with 'gold only', as long as packs can be bought for 100 gold still, but it's going to be trickier now, and more people will probably have to drop real cash if they want to keep up.