It’s time for the yearly shake-up of Hearthstone’s meta, and as the Year of the Kraken goes out, the Year of the Mammoth comes – and fittingly with huge changes.

The most obvious of those are the rotation of certain sets of cards out from Standard to Wild. Joining Naxxramas and Goblins vs. Gnomes are the cards from The Grand Tournament expansion, as well as the Blackrock Mountain and League of Explorers adventures. This should see the Wild meta become vastly different from the one in Standard, as more sets are now Wild-exclusive. Adding to this, there will be a few of the Classic cards made Wild-exclusive owing to how often they pop up in play right now:

• Azure Drake
• Sylvanas Windrunner
• Ragnaros the Firelord
• Ice Lance
• Conceal
• Power Overwhelming

These six cards the developers feel contradict what they’re trying to do in the creation of Standard and Wild; to diversify the cards used and make the meta more interesting for players. Because these six were often seen as auto-includes, Blizzard feel that it’s time for them to rotate out into what they’ve dubbed their ‘Hall of Fame’ set of cards. While they had entertained the notion of allowing a full dust refund for these cards, they have decided that goes against their other goal of making Wild seem like fun – so if you own any of the cards that are going out in the Hall of Fame set you’ll get the full dust value of that card (up to the number of cards you can put into a deck) the first time you log on after the Year of the Mammoth has begun!

The next big thing for the Mammoth is that instead of going between Adventures and Expansions, this year we will have 3 inputs of expansions that add around 130 cards – which means a LOT of new cards coming this year. But for those who enjoy the colourful stories of Adventures (I’m one of them), never fear – the storytelling is coming to the expansions to help make them even better and cooler. These will be in the form of option single-player missions that expand the lore behind each expansions card set. Additional details about this new idea will be revealed at later dates.

Blizzard are also going to be trying to incentivize Wild, with them collaborating with third-parties to promote additional Hearthstone tournaments that use the Wild format, as well as an upcoming Heroic Tavern Brawl that will utilize it.

Also before the next expansion (theorized to be Un’Goro themed) Hearthstone will have for a short time, daily login rewards to claim. Dust, gold and packs will all be on offer, as well as “a few other surprises” before the expansion’s launch “to blaze a trail for everything our next expansion has to offer.” One of these could even be the new Hero that Blizzard are planning to release. New Rogue Hero Maiev Shadowsong will be available to gain after the next expansion launches, just by winning 10 games of Heartstone in either Standard Ranked or Casual modes. Given that all the others have required payment of some sort or to use another game, it’s nice to have one we can just earn by playing this game.

And that is basically what we can expect from the Year of the Mammoth, as far as Blizzard have announced. It sounds like a lot of fun is in store.