During BlizzCon’s opening ceremony this past weekend in Anaheim, CA, Blizzard revealed an entire new expansion for their digital card game, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. The new expansion will be the fourth full-sized expansion to the card game and the third add-on just this year. According to IGN, the new expansion, titled Mean Streets of Gadgetzan, will introduce 132 new cards into the game along with an entirely new gang theme.
Here’s Blizzard’s official trailer of their new expansion:
The name comes from the city of Gadgetzan from World of Warcraft, it’s a desert outpost that has exploded as a center of trade. Cards from the new deck will reportedly explore the underbelly of Gadgetzan. The expansion theme (gangs) will revolve around three major crime families that are at the heart of the crime in Gadgetzan.
The three gangs are: the Grimy Goons, the Kabal, and the Jade Lotus. The Grimy Goons faction, which includes Hunters, Paladins and Warriors, is a faction that features a new hunter called the Piranha Launcher. It summons a 1/1 Piranha whenever your hero attacks. The Kabal includes Mages, Priest and Warlocks. This faction focuses on spellcasters who brew potions. This gang also features a minion known as the Kabal Talonpriest – a priest card with a battlecry that gives a minion three extra health. And the Jade Lotus faction includes Druids, Rogues and Shamans. This faction focuses on more shadowy syndicates, including the Lotus Assassin card, which is a rogue minion with stealth that regains its stealth whenever it kills an enemy.
The expansion will also introduce a tri-class cards. This means that the Kabal will have mage, priest and warlock cards that can be played in any one of those decks.
Gadgetzan focuses on the common riff raff in Azeroth’s most mechanical city, so most of its minions aren’t going to be huge, powerful heroes of past expansions. Instead, they’re small and nimble. Yet there are a ton of Discover cards in the set so this means that Blizzard wants players to become adaptable. The Gadgetzan expansion also includes several cards for Priest, the dreaded classes gamers tend to not favor. Some of these include: Kabal Talonpriest, Drakonid Operative, Kabal Courier, Kazakus, Potion of Madness, Pint-Sized Potion, and Dragonfire Potion. Each one of these cards is either strong on its own or as a part of a deck. Many believe that this new expansion pack will now help give the priest class a whole new amount of respect amongst competitive Hearthstone players.
Here is some gameplay showing off some of the new expansion cards: