Blizzard made waves when it decided to exclude one of Karazhan's new cards from Hearthstone's Arena draft to keep the Priest class from having its average strength dragged down by it. In its continued effort to strike the right class balance, it's going to be excluding even more.

In an announcement on the Hearthstone Blog, Team 5's Dean Ayala explained that for a while now, Mage and Rogue have been in the top tier of Arena classes, Paladin just below those two, and the other six swapping positions at the bottom. Ayala said the goal is to have any class choice feel like a valid option, so they'll be removing more cards to strike a closer balance between the classes with an upcoming patch.

Interestingly, though, the types of cards being removed are serving different functions. Mage and Rogue are having some powerful tools removed, like Snowchugger and Goblin Auto Barber, respectively. The less powerful classes are instead having much larger numbers of weaker or strictly synergistic cards removed. Those include cards like Totemic Might (Shaman), Sacrificial Pact (Warlock), Savagery (Druid), Charge (Warrior), Call Pet (Hunter), and Convert (Priest).

The end result will be to make the Mage and Rogue card pools less powerful on average, while making the less dominant classes have a stronger average card pool to choose from. Paladin, which has consistently remained in the middle, won't undergo any changes.

Overall Blizzard will be removing 45 cards, which represents a significant chunk of the nearly 900 total cards currently in the game. The studio says it may still make further changes, like the suggested idea of weighting certain cards to appear more or less often, without removing them entirely.