Coinciding with the launch of Year of the Phoenix, Blizzard has announced that it will roll out duplicate protection across all rarities in Hearthstone. At the moment, duplicate protection only applies to Legendary Cards and nothing else. When Ashes of Outland — Year of the Phoenix’s first expansion — launches every single rarity will have duplicate protection.
This means that, in effect, Hearthstone will be a cheaper game. Any time you open a card pack, you’re guaranteed to get one you haven’t already gotten.
When the ‘no duplicate legendaries’ rule came into effect, Blizzard said;
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. Once you own either the golden or non-golden version of a Legendary card, you won’t get a duplicate of it until you own all the Legendary cards from that set
Once this applies to all rarities, players will be able to more easily collect all of the cards from an expansion and have more options for crafting decks.
Hearthstone Duplicate Protection
At the 2020 Hearthstone Summit, Game Director Ben Lee said that he wants opening card packs to be the most exciting and rewarding that it can possibly be. “When you have more cards, you have more options to have fun,” he said.
Duplicate protection in Hearthstone, across all rarities, will also apply to all expansions and card packs, including the ones you already own.
We passionately feel that this is the right thing for the game. We’re really happy with this change and we hope that our players will be too.
The more cards you have, the more decks you can play and the more options you have the more fun Hearthstone is generally and we fundamentally belive that.
Ben Lee – Game Director
Speaking with Liv Breeden (Game Designer) about duplicate protection, she was excited about the potential and the way it will change the game.
Oh, that’s actually great. Hearthstone has always been this game that people would say “I’d love to play, but it’s super expensive.” We just want to get more people to play Hearthstone.
We want it to be easier to get more cards. Hearthstone’s just more fun when you have more cards.
Duplicate protection for Legendaries was announced in 2017 and Breeden says it’s a point that players frequently bring up. She said players would ask for duplicate protection on Epics and point to the Legendaries but she always thought “why not do it across the board?”
“It’s not that big of a change but it’s huge for player sentiment,” she told me. “It feels good for me, opening packs and knowing that it’s brand new stuff every single time.”
Duplicate protection goes hand-in-hand with the revamped Seasonal Rewards which will see players earning packs and Rare or better cards instead of Dust and common cards.
With the implementation of duplicate protection launching alongside Ashes of Outland, Hearthstone is about to get a whole lot cheaper and a whole lot more fun to play.
Leo Stevenson travelled to Irvine, California as a guest of Blizzard. Travel, accommodation and meals were provided by Blizzard.
