The next major Hearthstone update, patch 20.0, will be the largest in the game's seven year history so far, cementing the upcoming Year of the Gryphon as one of the most important for the popular card game. Hearthstone launched in March 2014, and has since carved out an identity for itself not just as a card game, but as an umbrella under which spin-offs in other genres can find a platform. Hearthstone Battlegrounds the most prominent example, but the upcoming Hearthstone Mercenaries arriving soon to further deepen the brand's offerings.
While Hearthstone has undergone plenty of change over the years already, 2021 is earmarked to be the most dramatic of them. Year of the Gryphon will begin with Forged in the Barrens, the next Hearthstone expansion, and two major shifts in design philosophy: Hearthstone Core Set and the introduction of the Classic format. Core Set will do away with Basic and Classic cards and instead provide players with a free 235 card curated collection to help them play, while Classic format will revive the 2014 metagame and only use cards as they were then.
Naturally, with so many changes coming, players expected some hefty updates on the way, and Senior Game Designer Alec Dawson confirm that would be the case on Twitter. Hearthstone patch 20.0 will be the biggest patch "to date" according to Dawson, who discussed the scale of the patch while notifying players that a minor balance update would be postponed due to the massive undertaking.
While there have been concerns over a stale Hearthstone Standard meta recently, Dawson's follow-up tweet indicates that Blizzard is largely okay with the meta at the moment, though if the minor balance update were to go live, it would apparently address "gameplay feelings related to burst damage." The biggest takeaway is that the Hearthstone team is being as transparent as possible not just with proposed minor changes, but the big ones, too - and it wants to get the massive shifts in gameplay coming with Hearthstone patch 20.0 right at launch.
For those who have been following the updates from Blizzard and the proposed changes coming to Hearthstone in 2021, the news that Hearthstone patch 20.0 is going to be the biggest in the game's seven year history is probably unsurprising. Getting confirmation that's still the case this close to launch is exciting, however, and Hearthstone is poised to make another run at the now much more crowded digital card game genre it was once the trend-setter for.
Source: Alec Dawson/Twitter