If you’ve been reading any of my weekly roundups of Hearthstone (Free) news, you’ll know I’ve been waiting for the next expansion (and the shift to Standard) for weeks now. Well, we finally have an official announcement about the official announcement of what’s next for Hearthstone. Yesterday, Blizzard announced that something inside the Tavern stirs, and Lead Designer Ben Brode and Senior Producer Yong Woo will let us know what that is on March 11th at the Americas Winter Championship. The announcement of the announcement stops short of offering any clues on what will be announced; the only information is that the announcement will take place March 11th, 10 am PST and will be streamed live on the Hearthstone Twitch Channel.
We know that Blizzard is going to talk to the press on March 9th about something Hearthstone-related, and I expect that to be info about the upcoming expansion since we’ve already heard almost all there is to hear about the format shift. Now, the hope is that Blizzard will pull a League of Explorers by announcing the expansion on March 11th and releasing it the next week. Will that happen? Hard to know, but I wouldn’t rule it out since Blizzard has repeatedly said it liked the LoE release. That would be the ideal scenario, but even if it doesn’t take place, we still expect the expansion to hit in March, so there wouldn’t be more than 3 weeks of wait between announcement-release (although I see the latter scenario as quite unlikely, to be honest).
When it comes to the possible expansion, we should be getting quite a big one (possibly over 200 cards) since the introduction of Standard will see Naxxramas and Goblins Vs Gnomes retire to the lands of Wild. As I wrote a few days ago, there’s a possibility that an aura-like mechanic will make its way to the game, but it’s hard to know because Blizzard might simply be experimenting with this mechanic for a future expansion/adventure. We’re also waiting to hear about the nerfs to a number of basic and classic cards, but I’m not sure we’ll hear that on March 11th. Well, not too many days to go before we know for sure what Blizzard has in store for us.
