While almost every official event and close to the entirety of the professional playerbase focuses exclusively on Standard, Hearthstone’s rotating format featuring the Classic set and the last two years’ card releases, the game also has an eternal mode titled Wild, one that seems to have completely fallen through the cracks over the years. It’s currently dominated by one class to an extent that the top five cards played in the format are all from Druid – and the fact that three of them are from the game’s evergreen set is a sign of further problems. A classical symphony At some point, every card game has to contend with the fact that its pool of cards grows to an unmanageable size, a situation where the new additions either remain completely unplayed or need to be purposefully power-crept in order to make them viable in an ever-strengthening environment, making it exponentially more difficult for new players to catch up. Most often, the solution is to work with multiple formats, splitting off an eternal mode where all the cards are playable from another one that limits the available ones to a core set and the ones released over a specified period of time. This is the approach taken by Magic: the Gathering—one which Hearthstone has only partially adapted, and with mixed results. While the granddaddy of card games uses a “core set” of curated cards to form the basis of competitive play in their rotating constructed format (not counting a short period between 2015 and 2017), Hearthstone opted to maintain its original Basic and Classic sets as evergreen, using them and the last two years’ of releases to form the list of available sets. This was meant to ensue an easier transition, a lesser loss of value and a maintenance of established class identity – however, it also cemented the discrepancies between them as classes like Warrior and Mage had a much stronger set of such cards than Priest or Paladin, for instance, meaning they would always have to be artificially boosted by newer releases in order to keep up. The strength of the evergreen set also jeopardizes the goal of changing the Standard environment—a problem Team 5 is trying to combat with the Hall of Fame—a small subset of cards which are moved from Classic if they grow omnipresent, making them only playable in Wild, the game’s eternal format where every card ever printed is legal, removing them from the Standard environment. Of course, that comes with a host of its own problems as certain classes now have fewer evergreen cards than the other ones, increasing the discrepancy even further. Worse yet, no one seems to care about Wild, at least not from the developers’ side. A giant afterthought While it was already an astonishing admission that Arena—the game’s popular limited format that was around since the days of the closed beta—hasn’t got a single dedicated developer who is specifically assigned to it, one has to wonder if something similar is going on with Wild. This directly translates to community interest, at least on Twitch, where Wild-exclusive streamers can only garner three-figure viewership numbers, a far cry from the tens of thousands of eyeballs the top dogs can still attract even today – and the discrepancy is fairly similar in the tournament scene. Since its introduction in 2016, we’ve only seen two official Wild tournaments, both featuring a $25000 prize pool and limited promotion. In comparison, the ongoing Hearthstone Championship Tour doles out around $2.8 million this year. Wild has no representation at BlizzCon, plays no part in the buildup for the world championship and is never explicitly mentioned with regards to the promotion of the new sets. Still, perhaps the single most egregious example of Wild’s mistreatment was the stealth-buff of Naga Sea Witch, a card that sets the cost of your other cards to five mana as long as it’s on the battlefield. It never saw any kind of competitive play during its time in Standard but became an incredible powerhouse in the game’s eternal format after a mechanic change that made its cost-changing effect apply before any other cost reduction takes place as opposed to simply setting them to five mana. This meant that large and powerful minions that started with a prohibitively high cost (upwards of 25 mana) that would go down depending on the damage you took or the amount of cards you had in your hand would now start from five and go from there, reliably reducing their cost to zero. As such, obscene swing turns with five or six humongous creatures coming down in the mid-game were a regular occurrence, so much so that Chakki—a professional player who is now one of Team 5’s final designers—famously got to the last 8 of one of the two Wild tournaments by only brining decks that were built around this particular interaction. True to form, the developers defended it as an intentional consequence of the rule change for a long time before eventually increasing Naga Sea Witch’s price from five to eight. No other card changes were made to a Wild-exclusive card to date, though the twin nerfs to Patches the Pirate and Raza the Chained close to the end of their Standard life cycle was partly justified by concerns over their impact in the evergreen format. Currently, the five most-played cards in Wild are all Druid cards - three of which originate from the Classic set. For a game with a significant F2P portion of the playerbase, perhaps it’s understandable that an eternal format remains a luxurious afterthought; however, for most card games, it’s one of the many celebrated ways to play. It’s hard not to have a cynical reading of the situation; after all, the regularly rotating cast of characters in Standard are bound to bring in a lot more money than the comparatively stable experience of Wild.

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Follow the author for more Hearthstone content at @Luci_Kelemen. Image Credit - HSReplay.net