So at BlizzCon this past week we got the announcement of a new Hearthstone expansion. The news that it was Goblins vs. Gnomes made everyone laugh, until they found out it was coming in December! Then everyone got excited, until they started playing with the new cards. One hundred and twenty new cards to be exact. That is a massive expansion and Blizzard’s Team Five is on a role with a huge success in Hearthstone until the Goblins and Gnomes blow the game up...literally.
When talking with everyone on the team they went into this expansion purposely selecting cards that were fun to play. Every time you sit down to play a Collectible Card Game you have to face the wall of meta which has come before you. For those who don’t know, Meta is the unwritten rules on how the game is played. Meta is used to build the best decks and drives players to copy some of the top builds to get ahead. With twenty million players and the endless information on the Internet about deck building, in less than a year Hearthstone’s meta rivals that of Magic the Gathering which has been around for over twenty years. So now that we know what meta is, Blizzard is about to break it with their new expansion.
Goblins vs. Gnomes is exactly as it sounds if you have played Warcraft. Crazy smaller beings building giant things that blow up. First it introduces the Mech card type. Think of the Mech as a Beast card type for a Hunter. If you play a full Mech deck you will have a lot of benefits for only using those types of cards. Mechs not only play off each other, they also form massive fighting robots like Voltron. Yes I said it, Voltron.
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Mimiron’s Head can be used as a mid-game strategy card which will in my guess create something extremely nasty and defensive in V-07-TR-0N. Wait for it. Combine him with these low cost cards which are extremely good and you have a clear strategy already by turn five.
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Just looking at Annoy-o-Tron is enough to get you angry, but then look at his stats. Also his summoning sound is said to be completely obnoxious. As you start to see a pattern here the cards are quick to play and have solid buffs right off the bat. It is almost as if they are designed to make the game go even faster. Oh by the way, here is V-07-TR-0N. Two words: Mega Windfury…
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But enough about building giant robots in a crazy fantasy world. Let’s look at a few lower cost cards that will really shake things up. Reversing Switch is really good because a lot of high health low attack cards cost very little. Take Deathlord for example, by turn four in combining these cards you are hitting your opponent for eight points. It all goes back to speed.
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The last main element to Goblins vs. Gnomes is the sheer amount of random damage many of the cards can do. Most summons have some sort of explosion attached to them. Goblins especially are unpredictable and can clear boards fast.
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Sorry, we just like the name Dr. Boom. These are some of the cards you will be facing off against as early as December in the game. There are a lot of them. Mech decks will become all the rage for a while and the meta will be reset. In many ways that is a good thing for Hearthstone. The team at Blizzard wants to keep the game fun before anything else. They also believe that the tournament scene will follow the new game designs and good players will come up with new plans to win. As we have also seen, Blizzard will then balance the game from there. Being away for two months I was surprised at the amount of changes to the game that had taken place.
My advice to Hearthstone players new and old is simple. Now is the perfect time to get into the game. If you had been avoiding it for months because of the steep meta that time is over. You will soon find a very different game to play and deck building will being all over again. Also, if you are a fan of Goblins or Gnomes well, do we really have to say anything? The take away from BlizzCon is that Hearthstone is alive and well and will change drastically in less than two months. The long winter we face will give us plenty of time to build new decks, create new combos, and simply blow things up.
