Like Overwatch, Hearthstone is making card packs a better time for everyone by ditching Legendary duplicates

By Brenna Hillier

Hearthstone changes suggest Blizzard is taking a company-wide look at RNG-based rewards.

Hearthstone players will soon find card packs more rewarding thanks to some sensible changes to how Legendaries are handled.

The key changes are:

• every time you open a Legendary in a card pack, it will be a Legendary card from the same set that you don’t already own
• you will never open more copies of any card in a pack than you can use in a single deck
• starting from the next expansion, you’re also guaranteed to get a Legendary within your first 10 packs of a new set

What this means for Hearthstone players is that they’ll no longer suffer the disappointment of getting a new Legendary only to find it’s one they’ve just laboriously crafted; they won’t get stacks of unusable duplicate cards in single packs; and they can quickly get onboard new, powerful cards after they release for the first time.

To celebrate this news Blizzard is throwing a sale on Journey to Un’Goro packs, but we’d probably recommend holding off on that until these changes are implemented in Hearthstone. Still, visit Battle.net if you want to take advantage now.

These announced changes follow hot on the heels of an Overwatch PTR update with changes to loot boxes which drastically reduce duplicates.

Fair rewards are more essential to Hearthstone than Overwatch because the former is a free-to-play game where the cards you own really matter, whereas loot crates offer cosmetic extras for Overwatch. But there’s a reason RNG loot drops are creeping into games everywhere, and it’s because it’s psychologically compulsive and therefore makes a lot of money.

Developers and publishers are coming under increasing criticism for practices that might be considered exploitative of the vulnerable, so anything they do to tip the scales back in the player’s favour is a good sign – especially in this era of nickel and dime-ing players.

Given both Hearthstone and Overwatch are making changes it looks like Blizzard is taking the problem fairly seriously. Let’s hope Activision takes the hint and gets Bungie to lay off with Destiny 2, too.