Flex Format - A Constructive Proposal for Constructed

As someone who could never get into battlegrounds, duels or mercs, I wish there was more emphasis on constructed. While I’m sure they’re fun for the players who enjoy them, and positive for the health of our game as a whole, it’s not why I play Hearthstone.

Let wild be wild: There should be a reasonable peak of how broken a deck could be allowed to get such as star aligner druid, Tamsin warlock or SN1PL0CK. Wild can be wild, with band-aids instead of 100% cures

BUT introduce a new format with gradually rotating sets. This new format, which could possibly replace the current classic format as it is, would start at classic and gradually add/rotate out expansions every month or so until a certain point and then reset in a cycle. Every Meta from Classic to whichever expansion they stop at replicated as they were then. Imagine how exciting it could be if it was updated multiple times a year.

Is Blackrock your favorite expansion? Are you getting boomsday nostalgia? Cthun warrior from old gods? Board based dragon priest that just feels so good? ELISE the trailblazer in ungoro control paladin?? I could have an hour long back and forth with you about our amazingly fun decks of old, you get the point.

Classic format is great, even to this day I play it. There’s something special about a format stuck in time: no discover, no 200,000 armor, no randomly genereated secrets that are near impossible to play around perfectly, no questlines. The familiarity is powerful and everyone has their favorite. All of those metas have flaws just like today which is expected and completely acceptable.

It would give people more of an incentive to buy old adventures or those wild bundles too, many cards you pull from those have no spot in the wild meta, regardless of how good they might have been in the past. Players may also be more tolerant of powercreep if another format existed where their powercrept cards have some sort of permanent home.

One other idea ive heard tossed around is a standard format minus the previous year of cards. This sounds interesting but I fear it would way too similar to current standard. Highlander format is something ive heard as well, I just don’t think it has the potential of what a new format could be. HL cards are introduced to standard once every couple years or so just like hero cards, after we get a break. Not super against those two ideas by themselves… but they would not be groundbreaking

In conclusion, I am not the only one advocating for something like this, this is a common suggestion brought up by players for years now, I just wish to expand on the reasons why it’s the best step forward for constructed hearthstone. Thank you for reading :grinning:

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You are just going to end up with one super overpowered deck having synergies that weren’t intended for “modified standard”.

If you silo off all the subsets of combinations there is going to be a very small player base for each. Long queue times and playing the same small pool of players everyday.

Wild is the place for all the lost sets, and there isn’t any expectation other than super highroll synergies and blowout wins.

Sorry if I wasn’t super clear about this point: I’m advocating for sets to be added and rotated out as they were in the past. When Old Gods is released, Naxx and GVG go. Hearthstone Classic, not piling xpacs ontop of eachother

There will not be large queuetimes and a small pool of players; the idea is to update this every month so there’s something new to look forward to. Current constructed very rarely updates like this and only a big one every year. Can you imagine this happening on a monthly basis?

Also you’re right, Wild is the place for lost sets. They’re so lost they are also forgotten, don’t see play most of these cards are absolutely lost especially if you expect to win-- lately wild has been mainly powerful standard cards with some outliers.

Classic is proof that there is no money in things people don’t hate. None whatsoever. Because there’s a fate fat worse than hatred: boredom.

There is money in things people have dreamed about. Even if half of those dreams are nightmares. Profitable content is hated. If it isn’t hated, it’s not imaginative enough.

Classic is proof that people get bored of the same meta frozen in time for nearly two years… that’s all it is proof of.

There is money in giving players an actual incentive to buy older sets. The craziest thing, these cards are already completely designed. No more work has to be done… just re-release things they’ve already made and expand classic format.

I’d honestly like a format that was a constructed format with randomly rotating sets each month. (Current set could stay as a fixed set)

It wouldn’t have the same power level of wild, it would have a different meta experience than standard, and if something was too strong, chances are good that it would only survive the month fully intact.