During BlizzConline, Hearthstone team has announced that the game will be getting a new expansion called Forged in the Barrens. With it, the game will receive 135 new cards, a new core set, a new mechanic called Frenzy, and a reorganization of Hearthstone’s spells. Sounds interesting? Read on!
In case you’re new to the Warcraft universe, you should know that Barrens was (and to some extent still is) the place where most Trolls, Orcs, and Tauren spend the majority of their time leveling their character. All Hordies in WoW Classic will have plenty of memories from Barrens, so it’s fairly safe to say that Forged in the Barrens will be a very Horde-centric expansion for Hearthstone. Alliance fans shouldn’t worry about Horde-bias since the developers confirmed that more similar card sets are planned for the future (Year of the Gryphon) and some of these will be all about the blues.
Forged in the Barrens brings tons of new cards and you can already check some of them by pressing this link. However, this new expansion also tackles a few old-school cards to repurpose their effects for the modern game. Blizzard made some changes to cards such as Malygos the Spellweaver, Ysera the Dreamer, Vol’jin, and so on.
However, minions cards were not the only ones that got some treatment. Spells got reorganized too as Blizzard decided to add Spell Schools to the game. Now each spell in the game will fall under Arcane, Fire, Frost, Holy, Nature, Shadow, or Fel category which will allow Hearthstone developers to expand spell-slinging possibilities and add more depth to the game. While this might seem a bit complicated, Hearthstone team hosted a special deep-dive panel explaining all of these changes that are coming to the game with Year of the Gryphon.
Finally, there’s something entirely new coming to Hearthstone with Forged in the Barrens – an all-new game mode called Hearthstone Mercenaries. It will be an interesting strategy RPG game mode that feels like an extension of the game’s single-player campaigns, where you level up your selected character and fight increasingly difficult challenges along the way.
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