Marin and the Volcanosaur: staggered card releases are effective

We’ve seen over half a dozen cases over the course of Hearthstone’s lifetime when a specific subset of cards were made available earlier than they normally would have been. The unanimously positive responses make me wonder: why aren’t we seeing more promotions like this?

Once upon a time…

 It’s been a long time ago and not many people remember it by now, but the cards of Goblins versus Gnomes, Hearthstone’s first major expansion made their debut in Arena, shortly before they were made available in Constructed. It injected a new sense of intrigue in the game mode and allowed the players to experiment with the cards in a gated environment before the mech army was unleashed on the ladder. The effects of such a soft-launch probably were negative on marketing, and the whole thing may have been motivated by technical reasons, but it’s a good indicator of the benefits of making some cards available before the whole set is dumped on the playerbase.

Source: hearthstone.gamepedia.com

Adventures had a very similar effect on the metagame: the staggered, weekly releases meant that each set of rewards had a chance to shine. In fact, this is perhaps the most exciting aspect of releasing the occasional goodie like Volcanosaur and Marin the Fox into the wild: an unusual card release like this means that even the minions with a relatively low power level get to see some play simply because of the fact that they are new and interesting at the time.

…in an adventure far, far away

 One of the major concerns about such an approach is that it would disrupt the part of the content cycle when the metagame is stable and it wis possible to min-max different strategies. As someone who vastly prefers this to the experimental and wacky early portion, I would argue that this concern is unwarranted, provided the released cards aren’t game-breakingly good: based on previous experience, they function as a neat stress-relief for play on lower ranks and experimental decks while not having any effect on high-level competitive play.

A caveat: these cards need to either come early or be unique enough to encourage experimentation. We’ve seen the developers give out a free Fight Promoter… almost two months after Journey to Un’Goro was released, meaning the card’s been in the game for almost half a year and hasn’t seen any play throughout its existence. For most of the players, this was nothing more than an odd way to give out 100 dust and didn’t have the interesting effect like the Volcanosaur promotion or Marin the Fox did.

Source: hearthstone.gamepedia.com

The nature of the ladder system also means that external tools are very much needed to promote a wacky playstyle: essentially all your rewards come from winning games regardless of their length, the archetypes you use, or your overall winrate. Incentives like a bunch of special cards are sorely needed, and it seems like the developers are starting to realize this as well.

These promotions are also sign that Team 5 is putting an increased emphasis on player retention. Back in the day, a very similar BlizzCon-related promotion awarded you a golden Elite Tauren Chieftain – again, a fun card with a powerful symmetrical effect that never saw competitive play but at least had an extremely cool entrance animation to make up for it. At that time, the general playerbase did not receive a regular copy for free. With the adventures completely ditched in favor of more expansions, giving out more goodies is essentially a requirement to counteract the increased cost of the game to avoid incurring the wrath of the fans. (Looking at the tons of complaints flooding social media about the pricing, this is probably not going too well!)

In my mind, a revamped adventure system would solve most of the game’s current content-related problems. Have more wings or provide more rewards for the completion of each one, even at the cost of an increased price per wing. Add an extra wing or two later down the line, an epilogue of sorts a month and a half or so as an extra sort of card release with some wacky cards for the less competitive players to have fun with. It would certainly be an improvement over what we currently have.

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