14 DAY TRIAL // Hearthstone, the Warcraft-themed collectible card game from Blizzard Entertainment, is bound to overwhelm players with close to 100 new cards sometime in the near future, when the game's first expansion drops.
The news comes from Value Town, a podcast about anything Hearthstone-related, featuring one of main creative forces behind the card game.
Senior Designer Mike Donais revealed some very interesting pieces of information, related to Hearthstone's next expansion. Among them, the most interesting by far are the number of cards contained ("around 100 cards") and the fact that players will be able to get them mainly via booster packs.
"It's not adventure mode, it's a lot of cards. It's not exactly 100, it's a lot of cards though… It'll be booster pack format," Donais explained when asked about the next planned expansion for Blizzard Entertainment's popular card battling game.
Donais pointed out that the new cards would come in different packs from the ones currently available, in order to prevent unnecessary duplication and to allow gamers to get them more easily, but he provided no prospective release date for the massive expansion.
"We are working super hard… Sweat, tears, really hard… But we don't have a date for it yet," Donais concluded.
The latest expansion, coming in the form of The Curse of Naxxramas: A Hearthstone Adventure, a single-player only affair where players earned cards by defeating thematic bosses from the Naxxramas raid, dating back to vanilla World of Warcraft, contained only 30 cards, and it still managed to cause a stir among the card game's community.
Players could earn 21 neutral cards by defeating the challenging bosses of the adventure, with 9 additional class-specific cards unlockable via special class challenges.
Although the cards were all themed around deathrattle and the floating necropolis of Naxxramas, they still managed to find their way into many solid decks, and gamers all over the world are experimenting with different combinations as we speak, at all levels of play.
The best cards will gradually make their way to Legend-level decks, but in the meantime deck builders all across the world can experiment with new and innovative ways to utilize some of the least-used cards, which is one of the game's main draws.
Pulling off neat and difficult combos and running non-conventional decks that are not necessarily chock-full of legendary cards, but instead focus on rewarding and innovative interactions have been a big part of collectible card games since the advent of Magic: The Gathering, the greatest in the card-battling genre.
If 30 new cards can bring this much excitement to Hearthstone, there's no telling what the close to 100 new cards will be able to do. We'll keep our ears open for any news on when the future expansion is likely to drop and will come back with the information as soon as it becomes available.
