With another April comes another rotation, and another missed opportunity to really change Hearthstone in an interesting way. The new set seems to be pretty value-oriented, which is nice, and the aggressive Hall of Fame moves are welcome. But as we enter the third year of Standard, I think we'd all love to see some more fundamental changes to the game.

Blizzard, this bundling of completely original and never-before-considered ideas is yours free of charge. You don't even need to credit me.

More frequent card releases

This is low-hanging fruit. I understand that there are considerations like marketing budgets, art generation, encounter scripting for 1P content, etc. But I nevertheless believe this is probably the simplest way to improve Hearthstone. I would much rather have two large expansions and two adventures a year than three large expansions, even if the total number of cards were lower. Adventures had some really fun properties that expansions don't: 1) Weekly gating (creating week-long micro-metas); and 2) no pack filler.

Right now we get 3 x 135 = 405 cards a year. Two expansions and two adventures would be approximately 2 * 135 2 * 45 = 360 cards (apples to oranges, I know, because adventure card quality is higher). I would expect this change to have a 90 % approval rating from the HS player base.

A new constructed mode

Something that I'm 99% sure literally no one has ever considered, let alone proposed or prototyped for a Tavern Brawl or implemented for Arena, before is a constructed mode with a rotating block of sets every two months. For example, the two-month period overlapping with Halloween could have the spooky sets (Naxx, Witchwood, KFT, etc.). If this split the player base 50/50 and doubled queue times (presumably that would be the absolute upper bound on the impact of such a split), well, I think most Hearthstone players would be willing to pay that cost in order to have another way to play. It would be particularly nice to be able to use old cards without having to play Wild, which I'm told is balanced pretty high these days.

Challenges

Hearthstone actually already has these. Get 100 gold for completing the basic set. Get Ol' Murk Eye for collecting every basic murloc. Et cetera. Expand this and use it to reward card backs, heroes, "make a card golden" tickets, etc. Make some of the challenges hidden, or timed, or involve many steps (maybe this could be Elise-themed, or Molten Core-attunement themed, etc.). This would be fun, and the underlying infrastructure obviously already exists.

More one-off card releases

I'm talking about Volcanosaur, Marin, Vargoth, etc. You actually just did this, which is great. Keep doing it. Maybe do it halfway between expansions once in a while, and drop five or ten cards instead of one. Maybe tie them to challenges. Surprise us!

Alternative card art or UI mode

I understand it's really important to be able to learn cards and recognize them automatically, and a lot of that is based on art. But for some limited set of cards (neutral legendaries?), alternative art would be a thing that would add a little customization to the game. Maybe sell them as skins for $0.99 each - I bet people would buy them. Another thing you could do is sell different card chrome for legendaries (i.e. something other than the dragon). I doubt either of these things would significantly affect app size or art budgets, and in any case they'd more than pay for themselves.

Another thing you could do is have a UI option to have an art-centric mode that would look more like Gwent. I would turn this on and never look back!

Custom game modes (e.g. Challengestone, Rocket League mutator settings)

Give people an interface to build custom game modes and challenge their friends. Could be part of a tournament mode, could generate game mode codes (a la deck codes) for easy sharing, etc. The elevator pitch is "let everyone build their own Tavern Brawl." This is probably the lowest ROI of my suggestions, but it would be fun and social!

These are just a handful of changes that I think would help Hearthstone feel fresh. I doubt we'll see all of them in the next year or two, but it would be great to see some of them!