Hearthstone’s Journey to Un’Goro Announced

The new expansion looks to hit hard with in-match Quests and a cool new keyword: Adapt.

By Cam Shea

Blizzard Entertainment today confirmed the rumours that the next Hearthstone expansion will be themed around Un’Goro, “a prehistoric region of Azeroth preserved in time” that will be familiar to World of Warcraft players. Called Journey to Un’Goro, the new set will add 135 new cards to the game and be available sometime in April.

Only a handful of cards have been revealed so far, but we’ve already seen two big new mechanics. Quest cards reward players for building their decks a particular way, with a set of requirements that need to be filled in order to be rewarded with “a card of monstrous power!”

If this is a taste, I can't wait to see the other Quests.

Importantly, the Quest cards will “always be available in your opening hand” so Quest decks won’t be reliant on drawing the Quest cards to set off the quests. Once played, they will “sit around your hero portrait until a trigger condition occurs, like secrets (though in this case, your opponent knows exactly which quest you are on!).”

The other mechanic is a new keyword: Adapt. Adapt functions a little like Discover. When it’s triggered, players are presented with three choices to choose between, drawn from a pool of ten cards. The choice is then instantly applied to the base card. The idea is that players can adapt to the situation at hand, which is potentially incredibly powerful - you can make tech choices mid game, essentially. Verdant Longneck (below), for instance, sacrifices +1/+1 in terms of vanilla stats, but the possible upside is huge.

So far we’ve only seen six of the ten options that will be presented (again, below), but that's not the only integration of Adapt, as "some spells will also trigger minion adaptation, so don’t let your guard down!"

Adapt - it's like the more sophisticated, cooler older brother of Spare Parts.

Another notable inclusion in Journey to Un'Goro is the new "Elemental" tribal tag, which you can see on this awesome Pyros card (below). The team will also be adding to tags to Elementals that are already in the game, but that list is yet to be confirmed. Obviously there's Frost Elemental and Fire Elemental, but perhaps we'll also see the tag added to the Rager cards. You heard it here first - buff incoming to Magma Rager!

Could be good against Jade. Flexible against everything from aggro to control too.

As you’d expect, Journey to Un’Goro packs can be won in Arena or purchased with in-game gold or real money. From tomorrow, players will also be able to pre-purchase a special 50-pack Un’Goro bundle for the price of a 40-pack bundle, and receive a themed card back in the process.

The release of Journey to Un’Goro will usher in the Year of the Mammoth, i.e. the next Standard rotation, which means cards from Blackrock Mountain, The Grand Tournament and League of Explorers will no longer be playable in the Standard format. (They will, however, still be available – along with other legacy cards – in the Wild format.)

Blizzard has detailed a number of other changes that will accompany the release. Six cards from the Classic and Basic sets – which form the bedrock of the Standard format – will be moved out of Standard and into a Hall of Fame collection; again, only available to play in Wild. The cards in questions are three neutrals: Azure Drake, Sylvanas Windrunner and Ragnaros the Firelord, one Warlock card: Power Overwhelming, one Mage card: Ice Lance, and one Rogue card: Conceal. Players will get the full dust value for each card (up to the amount that can be put into a deck, so full dust for one copy of each legendary, and full dust for two copies of the others) in addition to keeping the copies they currently have.

Finally, a new Shaman spell.

The Year of the Mammoth will also be structured differently to last year, with three back to back 130+ card expansions instead of an expansion, then adventure, then expansion. The PVE adventure content will instead be integrated into the expansion releases, starting with the second set for 2017.

A number of other changes are coming to Hearthstone in its upcoming 7.1 patch too. As announced earlier this month, Small-Time Buccaneer and Spirit Claws – cards that have negatively shaped Hearthstone’s recent meta - are both set to be nerfed, while the ranked play system will be tweaked so that once a player attains certain ranks they can no longer drop back. Previously the existing rank floors were at 20 and Legend, but now similar floors will exist at ranks 15, ten and five.

Also announced for the next update, Arena will change from Wild format to Standard, common and basic cards will show up less in drafts, neutral classic cards will show up less and spells will show up more. Exciting times!

Cam Shea is senior editor in IGN's Sydney office. Please be nice if you tweet at him.

Let's block ads! (Why?)