Even though August 31st will go down in history as the long awaited day of the Hearthstone Mercenaries reveal, our beloved Duels received some attention as well. In fact, Patch 21.2 will brings a single, but very crucial change to the Passive Treasures pool. 

Meek Mastery, released in the pre-United in Stormwind patch, will be moved from the Passive Treasures Pool 1 to the Passive Treasures pool 2, meaning that it may be offered to you only after your third game of the run.

Meek Mastery Card Image

Even though it's been around for roughly a month, every Duels player has witnessed Meek Mastery's tremendous impact on the mode; Its almost as if they reprinted All Together Now, but made it better.

Unlike All Together Now, Meek Mastery's effect spread to summoned units too, which was great for cards such as Party Replacement's Adventurers or Locusts. The possibility to reduce costs down to 0 also made it particularly difficult to play against.

Mana cheating together with stats buff were a combination too broken for even a swingy mode like Duels: people were able to consistently generate a rather large board on turn 1/2 without needing to spend much mana and, obviously, without many chances for the opponents to recover from that point. Far too often, games were decided in just a couple turns, and the losing player always had a feeling of impotence in  front of these shenanigans.

Moving Meek Mastery to the Passive Treasures pool 2 means that players will have a couple more drafts in order to build their decks and to withstand Meek's impact. Therefore, this treasure won't be able to decided many runs' fate (either yours, or your opponents') as early as it was able to do in the last month.

Another relevant consequence of this changes is that, from now on, you won't be able to pair Meek Mastery with other very strong Passive Treasures like Rally the Troops, Party Replacement and Battle Totem anymore, since they'll all be in the second pool. 

This is definitely a healthy change for the game mode, as well as an deserved one, but there may be a couple more things to be change for the sake of balance: fortunately for us, Team 5 has planned a much larger Duels update, which will come later in United in Stormwind's expansion cycle.

Quote From Blizzard

We will continue to monitor Duels and make small adjustments as needed while we work on a much larger Duels update, planned for later in this expansion cycle.

While we still don't know what the devs have in store for us, it is nice to know that Duels will receive a shake up very soon!