The Situation
With the release of the Standard format, a lot of people have been talking about how useless their Wild cards (cards not currently in the Standard format) are going to be. Many of them are very upset about how their Naxxramas and Goblins vs. Gnomes cards are losing their value, especially the ones they had to craft themselves. Many people have professed that they will cut their losses by disenchanting everything from these expansions (the Naxxramas cards will be available for disenchantment after Standard drops).
This is Wild!
When it comes down to it, there are still a few major uses for your old cards. The biggest one is the Wild format that Blizzard has announced alongside Standard. Wild is basically what the current Ranked system is, any card goes. So all those cards that are no longer playable in Standard, are still every bit as valuable in Wild. Many players believe that Standard will be the only format that matters, but many people have said that they will go out of their way to continue giving relevance to the Wild format.
A big concern is that Wild will simply be unbalanced and not fun, much like what the current Ranked system has started to devolve into with Dr. Boom, Shredder, and Mysterious Challenger. Ben Brode, Hearthstone Lead Designer stated in a tweet: “If Wild isn’t as awesome as we think it will be, we’ll make changes until it is”. This means that if we find Wild in a place where there are some incredibly broken decks, Blizzard will eventually fix them. Although their time frame for fixes isn’t great. So Wild will continue to be relevant from a gameplay aspect.
Another concern is that since Blizzcon will be done with the Standard format, all tournaments will take this format as the only important one, and Wild will never see competitive play. Reynad, owner of Tempo Storm, has come out and said several times that he is excited for multiple formats, and he will be sure to host Wild tournaments to keep the format relevant.
There’s Still Room in the Tavern
There is one other major reason to hang on to your old cards. That reason is Tavern Brawl. Now, Tavern Brawl does change every week, and there’s no guarantee that any specific card will be necessary or even useful for any given brawl, but due to the random nature there’s also no guarantee that one won’t be used. For example, in the Miniature Warfare brawl, a key card in my deck was Shadowfiend, a card that I had literally never used in any format beforehand. Suddenly an incredibly niche card was useful to let me have a blast for a week. Kripparian even made a video of him using the deck. Many other decks in the same brawl included Hobgoblin, one of the cards that will be going out of Standard. A few weeks before I actually crafted a second Enhance-o Mechano for another fun Tavern Brawl deck, another card I had used very rarely before that, yet wanted to play around with for the week.
Tavern Brawl isn’t a serious format by any means, and if this kind of fun doesn’t appeal to you, then it’s probably not too relevant to you personally, but it’s certainly something to keep in mind before you disenchant anything. Down the line you could really want to play your Tree of Life + Foe Reaper 4000 combo brawl deck, and regret disenchanting them both. Okay, unlikely scenario, but you see what I’m saying.
Completion!
This is one of the biggest reasons that I don’t disenchant anything I don’t have more than two of. When it comes down to it, eventually I’d like to have two of every card in the game, ideally two golden versions of them as well. Since that’s my final goal, disenchanting anything that I may have to craft in the future is very wrong from a completion standpoint. Sure, I may want those new Legendaries, but I’d rather wait a week now and earn the dust myself than take three extra weeks down the road earning what I gave up to have the new Legendary a day early.
Do What You Want
In the end, it’s your card collection. If you don’t see yourself ever playing Wild, if you don’t care about Tavern Brawl shenanigans, and if you don’t feel the need to fill every hole in your collection, then by all means go on a disenchanting spree. But don’t just listen to the naysayers who say that every card not in Standard is irrelevant, there are still a lot of uses and a lot of fun to be had with the cards we used to treasure.