Prepare your winter coats, folks, because Hearthstone is about to get icy. Blizzard has finally revealed the next expansion for the card game Knights of the Frozen Throne, which is set to drop in August. This new expansion will send players to Northrend to battle the Lich King, with 135 frosty new cards. This release comes halfway through the Year of the Mammoth and follows in the wake of the last massive content drop, Journey to Un’Goro. Take a gander at the reveal trailer below.
Basically, the setup for the new expansion is that everyone dies…sort of. All of the heroes of Hearthstone will become Deathknights, which gives all nine classes a new hero twist with the introduction of Hero cards. The new card type will cost mana to play and will actually replace your hero when played. With it will come some bonus armor, a battlecry, and a new hero power.
The first one revealed was Deathstalker Rexxar (Hunter). This card costs six mana, deals two damage to all minions when it’s played, gives you five armor, and changes your pinging ability to Build-A-Beast, which lets you craft a custom Zombeast. This new ability will let you choose from three random beasts twice and then combines their stats and text boxes to create one strange abomination. As you can imagine, this has the potential to quickly become an overpowering ability at just two mana cost.
The new hero cards are definitely interesting. If the other eight heroes are powerful enough, I expect a lot folks will be building new decks around the cards—they’re just that powerful. Then we have to see whether any of these will work well with the quest cards that were introduced in the last expansion. This is definitely going to shake things up.
Deathrattles are also supposedly going to be making a strong comeback (staying in tune with the death theme), but more on that when more cards are revealed. You can also expect a brand new pivotal keyword to be introduced into the game: Lifesteal. Any card with this word on it will restore your health based on how much damage it inflicts. This keyword will also be present in spell and weapon cards.
Lifesteal feels like the answer to aggro decks. For instance, pirates should theoretically have a hard time with Lifesteal-based builds, but the question will be whether that type of deck is sustainable in other match-ups. We’ll have to wait and see how good the rest of the set is. But the good news is that aggro decks usually reign supreme in Hearthstone, so their time might be coming to an end soon.
Finally, Blizzard is going to give every player some free missions, including a prologue and two wings of three bosses. You’ll also get to challenge the Lich King. As a reward you’ll nab a free hero card when completing the prologue and a card pack for completing each wing and Lich King. I personally like that Blizzard is giving the missions away for free, but still wish they would give new players more cards. Baby steps, I guess.
Okay, that’s a lot of information, but it’s time to get excited, y’all. I’m hoping these new cards will be powerful enough to inspire some new deck types. It just seems like dragons are going to be left off the roster again, which is a real bummer. What do you guys think about this expansion? Is this enough to bring you back into the fold? Peep the brand new cards in the gallery below and reveal your thoughts into the comments section!
Image: Blizzard
