Last month the Hearthstone Deck Tracker and HSReplay team got a chance to visit BlizzCon, learning about all the new and exciting things coming to Hearthstone over the next 6 months along with an exclusive dev interview. This was a special trip for us since not only was this the first BlizzCon in three years, it was the first Hearthstone esports event at BlizzCon since 2019.
While other HearthSim team members had been to BlizzCon in the past, this was a chance for our HDT/HSR Lead Developer Mateus (aka Molino, Twitter), Marketing Manager Rane (Twitter), and myself (Android) to attend for the first time. It was a great time to meet friends in person, meet new fans, and get a chance to speak directly to the devs about what they have in store.
On the first day we were treated to an opening ceremony with a whirlwind of news from all corners of Blizzard from World of Warcraft Forever to Diablo 5, but what interested us most was what came during the "Hearthstone - What's Next" panel. At the panel, Blizzard announced several exciting things: the next expansion, Reign of the Black Empire (coming October 20th), BG Season 14 Shakeup, the new Journal, new Events, and the long-anticipated brand new class coming at the start of the next Standard rotation in March 2027. Already a full day, we got to conclude our awesome Saturday with an exclusive interview with Executive Producer on Hearthstone Nathan Lyons-Smith and Senior Game Design Manager on Hearthstone Brenden Sewell.
New Expansion
The first big announcement was for the next expansion: Reign of the Black Empire releasing on October 20th. The theme for this set is a callback to two of Hearthstone's favorite minions of the past, Old Gods and Titans. Originally showing up in Whispers of the Old Gods in 2016, the big bad four have always had an impact on the meta when they show up. The Titans, originally appearing in the TITANS set in 2023, won't themselves be present in this set, but instead are going to be represented by their constructs, the "Titan-forged".
The first of the new core mechanics introduced in this set is "Old God" which is going to be very similar to the "Titan" ability, where before the minion can attack, it must use all of its abilities.
"In the past, when the Old Gods were at the peak of their power, we wanted to make sure that rather than just bringing back the Old Gods from some of their prior appearances on Hearthstone, that each one of these had a big impact the moment that you place it on the board. And so we wanted to see how far we could go and push that, obviously, without breaking into the game or creating problematic play patterns. And so that was a sort of starting design philosophy they had right from the beginning, kind of laser targeted into it. There were iterations that we had exploring the different usages of abilities that were more similar to how Titans work. And actually some that were further differentiated. We had explorations that involved, oh, you make some choices during deck building rather than within game. But we're really happy with where we landed with them having that big impact by choosing two of those abilities at once. And it ended up, we think, going pretty well." - Brenden Sewell
The few differences this time around are that Old Gods can choose two at a time, instead of one at a time, and have a total of four abilities vs Titans' three. In addition, there is one new deck restriction where you can only put one Old God in your deck during deck building.
"Broadly speaking, the behavior for either bouncing minions or similar effects like that, you can assume that if it worked that way for Titans... it will work that way with Old Gods." - Brenden Sewell
The next mechanic introduced, "Assemble," gave us quite the scare when first announced due to how many possible combinations might be available! The basic explanation of how the feature works is that first you are offered a "Base" card with a top text section and bottom text section separated, and then you are offered two "Supporting" cards. All cards in the Assemble pool (which is roughly 250) will have a top and bottom section of the card. You then have the option to replace the top half or bottom half of your base card with either the top or bottom of your supporting cards. This could result in millions of unique combinations, and while Blizzard won't be releasing an official Assemble pool, we will likely have some support for it on our website and in our deck tracker on release.
"So as we were going through that card pool, we're actually selecting the OK, what are we considering the top half, the 'trigger' effect and what is going to be the 'impact', the bottom half of the card text. Most cards, as you go throughout Hearthstone's history, end up having the OK, so 'What is going to be the trigger? What is going to be the impact effect on it?' And so that was a fairly easy split. Some of the cards ended up being a bit more ambiguous and you had to make some intelligent decisions there. But yeah, so as you're having that middle card, you have a top and bottom card effect for the middle card. And then you can choose one of the two card inputs that you have to replace either the top or the bottom. So you're going to preserve something from that middle card, the original card that you have, and then add either a trigger or an impact from one of those two other cards." - Brenden Sewell
The devs confirmed in a later Reddit post that for each expansion they will update the pool of Assemble cards until the mechanic rotates out of Standard.
New Journal and Events
Next up was an insight into how the dev team is trying to bring more narrative and lore back to Hearthstone to show players there can be more to completing quests than just packs and gold. The "Journal" is going to be the new UI element present in the main menu that combines a lot of floating UI/UX elements that Hearthstone has collected over the years into one coherent place: Quests, Reward Tracks, Feats, Seasonal Info, Brawl Events, Profile Information, and the new addition of "Journey".
The "Journey" can be a place to introduce narrative and lore elements into the game to try and give context to what a set means in the Warcraft universe, and allow Hearthstone to borrow more from the cinematic side of Blizzard with fully voice-acted visual-novel-style dialogues between characters (maybe we'll get to romance C'Thun in the future).
Even more exciting was the announcement of new Event types, one of which we've already seen and is active now ("The Black Market"), but also two new Tavern Brawls, and a re-imagining of the fill-bar-for-rewards seasonal quests we now have with "Boss Fights" releasing next year.
"We think of Black Market as an event 'type'. Meaning this is a tool in the toolkit that we can reskin, change the theme for, put new criteria, put new rewards in, and then like run it again. So about, oh, gosh, it was like a year and a half ago now, I think we said, 'Hey, just make sure that there's an event kind of running all the time because players like that.' And at the time the team said, Nathan, we only have the milestone event type. It is like go do event quests, fill bar, get reward. And once they get tired of it, they're like, 'yeah...'. Also, we have to start doing new event types. So go give the list of event types. And the design team went off and made a whole lot of really cool and exciting ideas. So we picked all ones off of there that we felt were different and fun. And so the black market event type, meaning, hey, go earn some currency and then figure out what you want to buy that's in this special event shop, is like a different flavor there. Brenden mentioned there's a boss fight coming, which is like a different form of like, go engage, do some other activity, get reward based on doing that activity in like a super fun and flavorful way." - Nathan Lyons-Smith
New Tavern Brawls
After talking with Mitchell Loewen, the Lead Game Designer for Hearthstone Battlegrounds, we learned that there's a lot of sharing between the two teams when it comes to mechanics. It was then only a matter of time before someone on the Constructed team wanted to bring Battlegrounds Duos over. Based on the early gameplay footage we got to see, it looks like it will largely work the same way with the exception that you can only pass one card per turn, and if one player loses, their team loses. This could be an exciting new direction for Hearthstone Constructed, but the devs wanted to present it in a Tavern Brawl format to get as much feedback as possible. On release, players will be limited to pre-constructed decks for the first week, and then will be able to craft their own during the second week.
In addition to 2v2, they also introduced "Warchief", which is Hearthstone's take on Magic: The Gathering's Commander format. Pick a special hero to be your Warchief and spend mana to summon them onto the field, along with a 99-card singleton deck. I personally feel 99 cards is... way too many cards for a deck in Hearthstone, which relies more on card generation than tutoring, but we'll have to wait until it releases to find out for sure.
"One of the things that is in the medium-term roadmap is like, 'Hey, what is a temporary version of gameplay that is shorter than a month-long season, like we had with Twist, but still gives that it's temporary, but engage a little longer than just your one win, right?' We have a lot of folks give me my one win and I'm done, but we also have a lot of folks that really love those Tavern Brawl experiences, and the reward right now for that is a counter goes up. I think we could do a little better than that. I think if we gave you a two- or three-week experience like a 2v2 and said, 'Hey, here's an event to go experience the Tavern Brawl,' that we'd get a whole lot of juice on that, and we could do that again between our content drops. We're heading that way with, again, three amazing expansions. Black Empire have got another one coming that is going to be monk-themed, you might imagine, and then one at the end of the year in June. We're really trying to add the tools in the toolkit along the way that will keep people engaged, and that's the types of events and also those different gameplay. That's our strategy to just really delight players as they're coming in every day." - Nathan Lyons-Smith
One of the additional topics that came up in our interview with Brenden and Nathan that could be borrowed from Magic: The Gathering Arena would be more competitive events. Something similar to Heroic Tavern Brawl, but not limited to just a brawl event, where there is more risk and buy-in and more reward.
"One of those things you might imagine is called 'Tournament Mode'. So the thing you describe we think of as a tournament event type, where you are opting into a more competitive environment, and depending on how well you do, you're going to get rewards based on that. That is also in the list of event types we think we could create, and I love that one because it's the competitive opt-in layer that can also be paired with the gameplay variety experience, right? So it's like, all right, let's go do that. Heroic Tavern Brawl has a version of that, it's an early, and we hadn't ever gone beyond that, so I do think there's something we absolutely should do there and then reuse as a different event type again in that toolkit. Nothing to announce now, we are in long-range planning. I'm super excited to build out a slew of these different event types and then modulate the content that's allowed there, the ruleset and the format, and then also the way you engage to just keep it fresh all the time between the Black Empire, between the new classes, and really that's an amazing, exciting future of Hearthstone for me and all of our players." - Nathan Lyons-Smith
Battlegrounds Season 14 Shakeup
We've had a couple weeks now to play with the Old Gods' first invasion into Hearthstone with their appearance in the Battlegrounds Season 14 Mid-Season Shakeup. The season introduces a new tribe (Aberrations), a new way to use the "Activate" mechanic, and the new Aberration meta mechanic "Deity". Deities were called as such specifically to hopefully open up the design space in the near future as opposed to just "Old God" as they are in Constructed. As part of this change, Blizzard has decided to stick with the ten minion tribes and rotate one of the existing ones out for the remainder of the season.
"So we're going to be rotating out Naga during the period in which Aberrations is in. That's actually introducing a new tribe rotation for the first time. Our goal there is as we were going and experiencing the addition of an 11th tribe there, the design team found that because there can only be, of course, so many minions that appear within Bob's Tavern, there is a threshold with introducing a new minion tribe was causing the amount of, like, percentage of time in which you were able to go and build toward a comp got to a threshold that was not delivering on what we were looking for there. And so we expect that we're always going to continue with this bound of keeping 10 tribes within the game. That gives us the ability over time to continue adding additional tribes and we'll keep up just rotating. If we add another new tribe out, we'll rotate two out at a time. And it's not going to stay with Naga. We have the opportunity to then replace one other, bring Naga back in. And so you'll see that there's another tool in the Battlegrounds tool belt to make each season feel fresh." - Brenden Sewell
New Class Announcement: Monk
After many years, the long-anticipated Monk class has been announced for Hearthstone, becoming the twelfth class, and the first new class since Death Knight's release nearly four years ago. The teaser was very light on details, not revealing much beyond just the announcement itself, leaving the hero power, release details, and more a mystery.
"A lot of questions there we're not ready to answer. So I think in a high level, we want to make sure that when the new class comes out, that there's a fun like full archetype for that class that everyone can play off the bat. And so you can imagine that experience of players who are coming back to Hearthstone thinking, oh I want to go play the Monk, that they're not like only playing with the common Monk cards. They're like no, there's some juice here, go have fun with one of the archetypes and then yeah, there's a bunch of Monk content in the expansion as well. And so I think that's probably a big one for us of that like don't maybe go broad across the archetypes, but like make that there's a bulky thing to go and play." - Nathan Lyons-Smith
That said, Nathan still gave us the clue that there may be a couple spoilers hidden in the cinematic they showed. We know with Death Knight, Blizzard tied the three talent tree identities into the deck mechanics of the class, should we expect something similar with "Mistweaver", "Brewmaster", and "Windwalker"? Could the icons in the background that are suspiciously hero power shaped be a clue to a class having multiple hero powers? We will have to wait and see when the class is released at the start of the next Standard Season, patch 38.0 sometime around March 2027.
Closing Thoughts
Thanks again to Blizzard, the content creators, and all the fans we spoke to. It was great meeting people in person and being reminded how warm and welcoming the Hearthstone community is. We look forward to BlizzCon in 2027 and all the exciting games between now and then!