HEARTHSTONE! While the Curse of Naxxramas is still fresh in that collectible card game world, plans are already underway for more Hearthstone content to drop in and kill your mighty summons that you spent several turns painstakingly setting up because Geoff is a bastard who always seems to have a magic card or two in his hand and I’m drifting again. Expect the next expansion, to re-balance the game all over again.
That’s according to production director Jason Chayes, who wants the next Hearthstone game to have better pacing and even more content. “It will have a lot more cards. We’re talking about more than 100. We are going to have a central theme for how that will all fit together. That’ll be the next thing coming up,” Chayes told Polygon.
We really want to make sure the pacing is great not just for seasoned Hearthstone players but for new players coming into the game too. We really want to pay attention to how that is for the entirety of the player base. Does that feel like the right amount of content? Is it too little? Is it too much? We feel like this is a good starting point.
To further this approach. Blizzard is imagining a single-player side to Hearthstone and its major expansions that are “intermixed to have different sorts of experiences going out over the course of a year”. With a 100 new cards on the way, Hearthstone might be running into another problem that is all too prevalent in these kinds of games: The bloat.
Magic: The Gathering and Yu Gi Oh! have way too many damn cards, creating situations where some cards have to be banned or limited. What’s to stop that from happening to Hearthstone? “We have done some initial conversations about at what point will that be a concern for us,” Chayes said.
We think we have a ways before we have to worry about something like that, because there’s a lot of design space to experiment with ideas…. But that could be something that we need to be thinking about for Hearthstone down the road. If we do reach that point because there are just that many cards in the available set, one of the things we definitely want to make sure of is that there are ways to continue playing with all of your cards, and that it feels really good to be participating in these various modes.
There’s no definitive date on when this new expansion rolls out. But with Blizzcon around the corner, expect some news to roll out soon for Hearthstone.
Last Updated: October 1, 2014
Admiral Chief 0
October 1, 2014 at 08:17
He has a +10 up his sleeve!
Kensei Seraph - Staff
October 1, 2014 at 08:21
I will never forget dropping a 23/18 legendary creature and thinking “I win next turn :D” only to have my opponent play a “Battlecry: Destroy target creature with 5 or more attack power”.
I cried a little inside, congratulated my opponent and took my defeat like a man, fighting all the way down (a whole 2 turns later).
Matewis Jubilai
October 1, 2014 at 08:49
I try to keep an ‘o shit’ card handy late game for exactly that, ever since in I was stomped into the ground by Deathwing himself in one of my earliest games 😛
MakeItLegal
October 1, 2014 at 09:14
love this game ! my death rattle deck rocks
Ross Woofels Mason
October 1, 2014 at 09:47
The game is in desperate need of an expansion this size. I love hearthstone to bits but the meta game is all too easily set in this.
All it takes it one trip to hearthpwn and you can see 90% of the decks you run into, it’s always either flooded with Mages until someone counters their b/s, then hunters until some counters their bullshit etc….
Getting a nice fat stack of cards will help break the games meta up quite a-bit.