HEARTSTONE's Year of The Phoenix, New Class and New Expansion Reveal
When the Hearthstone team shows their new content, it is usually only a handful of cards and some new themes. However, today we received a huge amount of new information. To make this easy for you to read (and for me to write), I’m going to break down their one and a half hour live stream into six categories.
Year of the Phoenix
With a new year, we are saying goodbye to 2018, which wasn’t super influential, but we will be losing those mech decks, so be prepared for hop into an all new meta. There is a pretty hefty roadmap with a lot of quality of life changes. One of the biggest ones is the implementation of “Duplicate Protection.” This means we should not get more than two copies of any card of any rarity in any given set until we have all of that rarity. This is great for filling out collections and allowing players to have a diverse choice of cards early in each release.
Demon Hunter Class
FINALLY! A NEW CLASS! The Demon Hunter, Illidan, is coming with his blades of fury, ready to attack at a moment’s notice. His hero power is the only one that costs 1 mana. It gives him +1 attack for that turn. This makes him extremely aggressive, and his cards really push this idea of high aggression, high reward. He also comes with a class-specific Keyword: Outcast. Outcast is an added effect to a card that can only be activated if the card is the most right or left card in the player’s hand. We are so excited to have a new, brutal class in our possession on April 2nd.
Ashes of Outland
Coming sooner than we expected, April 7th will be the release of the new expansion: Ashes of Outland. It is supposed to be an exploration into various relics and powerful items or upgrades for us to use to crush each other. We didn’t get a whole lot of other information on the major themes, story or new keywords, but we did get a lot of cool new card reveals with some seriously awesome legendaries. The new keywords, Dormant and Prime Legendaries have some killer effects, but we would love to see more of those newer cards for each class. Looks like a pretty fun expansion with a wide variety of tools of destruction.
Priest Changes
Everyone’s favorite healer is getting some major changes, buffs and nerfs. With staple cards from day one being retired with a load of new cards coming in, Priest will take some time for players to adjust accordingly. A number of basic and classic Priest cards are also getting cost and text changes, check out the link here for more details.
Hall of Fame
Our beloved Leroy Jenkins is finally being retired along with other deck regulars. As we know of, the classic pack won’t be getting any replacements for these cards, so we will be leaning a lot more heavily on the new cards this year a lot more than in the past.
Rank and Reward Changes
Lastly, we are going to see a lot of adjustments to ranks play, rank rewards and climbing ranks. When getting into new ranks for the first time in the month, players will receive some more worthwhile rewards. Also, at the end of the month, instead of receiving some dust and a few cards, we will be receiving packs depending on how far we climb in ranked mode. Check out more details in the live stream.
The Hearthstone team has presented a lot of really impressive, new content and changes in the game to spark back life in the game. We’ll see how the new class and cards will feel after the first few weeks of release. Let us know what you think and which part of this gigantic update you’re most excited for in the comments below.