Hearthstone’s arena synergy picks are being removed

After a month of experimentation, Blizzard is reversing a significant change to Hearthstone’s Arena mode.

In August, the game’s 9.0 patch transformed the first two rounds of players’ arena draft. After a patch in February changed the format of Arena from Wild to Standard, the August patch put synergy picks at the forefront.

The first two rounds of every arena draft were “synergy cards”, cards that generally required other cards to be in a deck with them in order to work. Murlocs, Dragons, Pirates—that sort of thing.

In theory, that means you have 28 further picks in order to build a deck around these cards, making arena decks more coherent. In practice however this never really worked. Despite being moved from Wild to Standard, the card pool of Arena was still just too large to give players a good shot at drafting the cards they needed to make, say, Servant of Kalimos or Book Wyrm a useful inclusion.

This has been in place for just over a month, and has been pretty much universally complained about ever since. Blizzard has been paying attention, and things are going back to how they were.

“This won’t be removed in the Balance patch as that was added as a quick bonus patch.” game designer Mike Donais said in response to a thread about synergy cards on Reddit. “It will be removed in a patch after that though.

“The first 2 picks will be the same as all the other picks. It is being removed.”

While the timeline for this change is unknown at this point, it should arrive within the next month or so. That’s a pretty quick turnaround for Blizzard to make changes, even if it just reverting one relatively recent modification.