A Suggestion For Dealing With The Hall of Fame

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1

I doubt I’m the first one to come up with this, but I’d like to post this just in case because I’d love to see you guys do this, so here I go.

First some background.
Every year more cards are moved to the Hall of Fame, this year it was a couple of neutral and a load of priest cards. I understand why this is done and I actually agree with the reasoning behind it; having these basic and classic cards always around makes a class’ deck options stale. The issue with doing this, however, is that some classes will end up with fewer cards than others. For this reason the rotated cards are replaced, but to prevent the same issue happening with these new cards, they have to be made underpowered so they don’t dominate a class’ options. Not only does this force you to print more (mostly) useless cards every year to fill in these rotated slots, in the end you’ll be left with a very mediocre basic/classic set that no one wants to buy packs from and that puts you in a position where the cards that will make up the basis of any free-to-play players’ collection every rotation are trash.
One solution I’ve heard offered by people is to have a rotating base set like mtg, but this would create the issue of adding a 4th set worth of card packs for people to have to buy every year, which would make an already very expensive game even more expensive and undermine your recent efforts to,even if only slightly, reduce this hurdle.

So my idea is; have a rotating base set, but with a twist:

  1. Rotate the entirety of the current basic & classic sets to the Hall of Fame.
  2. Determine what size you’d want your new base set to be (i.e. how many cards of each rarity in the classes and how many in neutral.)
  3. Fill this base sets with what I’m just gonna call empty “card slots”.
  4. Every year, fill these “slots” with a selection of cards from the wild format. and release this rotation as a fourth set (released first of the four though)

Here’s how “card slots” would work:
These card slots aren’t actual cards, but can “hold” them.

For example, if you’d use the same size as the current classic set, every class would have 6 common slots, 5 rare slots, 3 epic and 1 legendary.
Say, in the next year’s rotation, you’d choose Icicle, Meteor & Pyroblast as the 3 mage epics for that rotation year; if I have 2x of all 3 epic slots, I’d be able to play all these cards in standard, regardless of whether I own them. If I own 2x of the first, 1x of the second and 0x of the last slot, I’d at least be able to play 2x Icicle, 1x Meteor and 0x Pyroblast (just going by mana order), but if I owned 2 copies of Pyroblast as well I’d be able to play 2x Pyroblast as well. And after the rotation of the year after that, I’d lose my ability to play Icicle, Meteor & Pyroblast and gain the ability to play copies of the new mage epics corresponding to the amount of copies I own of each card and the amount of slots I have.

As for how one would obtain these slots, I imagine you’d keep the size of the rotating base set similar to the current basic/classic set (maybe smaller for neutral.) So at the moment you first implement this system, you just permanently give people all the card slots that would be occupied by the cards they currently own in the basic/classic set and after that you can just have them be craftable the same way the basic/classic set currently is. (of course, you could just give them all for free to everyone, but I know who I’m talking to)

Whether or not a card currently “owned” in standard through card slots will also be available to that player in wild for the duration is up to you guys.

So why am I proposing this? What are the advantages?
In random order:

  • Releasing this rotation as a fourth set every year allows for more content and more changes in the meta without requiring the endless printing of new cards or balance changes, it’s basically a low energy investment for you guys with a decently high payoff for us.
  • This does away with the staleness that the current classic set brings to the game, while retaining a solid card base for budget players (even effectively giving them a larger card library over the years) and without having to print a mountain of underpowered cards just to fill the vacuum.
  • Part of the reason I mainly play wild is because there are a lot of cards in there that I like playing and I assume I’m not alone in this, however, most of them will never be good there because of wild’s high power level. This change could be a way to give older cards that never saw play or haven’t seen play since their rotation a new chance to shine in a different metagame and with new support cards.
  • This frees up a lot of design space because you no longer have to restrain yourself for fear of breaking a classic card, nor do you have to perpetually print new cards to patch class weaknesses existent in the classic set.
  • It allows budget players to play around with cool cards they otherwise would’ve been unable to play with, in essence functioning as a sort of yearly “free to play” rotation.

I hope this has made you guys think about this as a possibility and I’d be really happy if this was implemented at some point

2

You lost me when you basically contradicted your own statement about a 4th set every year.

MTG’s sets have reprints as well, so you don’t necessarily have to buy the new reprint when you have a version of the same card from an older set.

We could just give the Basic Set more “slots” than they currently do, from Classic, as uncraftable cards, like the DH initiate set is an example. Rotate some cards that are currently Wild in, etc. Essentially like a MTG reprint.

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Except I didn’t contradict myself, I expressly said that the issue with a 4th set is that people would have to buy the new set every year. In my idea, this isn’t the case. You get the benefits of having the rotating fourth set without the downside to cost.

And yes, I know you wouldn’t need to buy reprints of older cards if you own them, but I’m considering budget standard players who disenchant their rotating cards each year because they need the dust. For someone like that, or a newer player, doing it the way mtg does it would take away that part of their dust income, not to mention that there’d be 5 years of old sets that they didn’t own - and thus have to craft any cards from that rotated into the new base set. -