Hearthstone will add three 130-card expansions next year, no adventures

Hearthstone will add an enormous, wallet-busting 390 cards this year as part of three 130-card expansions. It's the first time in the game's history so many will arrive within a 12-month period.

There are no smaller Adventure-style releases, which weave a story around the new cards and provide bosses to beat. Some elements of this format will appear as part of the expansion updates, however, Blizzard has said.

The coming 12 months of Hearthstone will be named the Year of the Mammoth - which fits with a recent leak that suggested dinosaur cards were on the way.

As part of the game's annual card rotation, older sets Blackrock Mountain, The Grand Tournament, and League of Explorers will become exclusive to the lesser-played Wild mode, and ineligible in competitions.

But, for the first time, several old favourites from the game's base set of cards are also being binned off - Azure Drake, Ice Lance, Conceal, Power Overwhelming plus legendaries Ragnaros and Sylvanas.

The Hearthstone blog has reasons for each, although most boil down to combating power creep in the game - and the need to keep new incoming sets interesting.

Hearthstone has had a patchy year - last April I praised its Whispers of the Old Gods expansion for shaking up the game. The following Karazhan adventure was fun, but the addition of a second big expansion at the end of 2016 - Mean Streets of Gadgetzan - has gone down like a lead balloon. Many players felt like two huge dumps of cards in the same year was too much. This year will bring three.