Hearthstone’s Scholomance Academy expansion is now live

Following a shorter reveal season than usual, Hearthstone’s Scholomance Academy expansion officially went live today on PC and mobile.

Scholomance Academy is bringing a wealth of powerful cards to make the second set of Hearthstone’s Year of the Phoenix fresh and exciting. The expansion brings two major mechanics, Spellburst and dual-class cards, as well as a minor mechanic in Studies.

Spellburst allows your minions and weapons to activate a potent effect after you cast a spell with them on the field. As the name suggests, dual-class cards are long-awaited cards that can be constructed into decks for two specific classes. Each class has two sets of four dual-class cards, leading to 40 possible cards for players to experiment with. Studies are cards that cost one mana each and let you Discover different categories of cards, discounting their mana cost by one until you play a card of that type.

Related: The 10 best Hearthstone Scholomance Academy cards

Later in the expansion’s cycle, a new Solo Adventure corresponding to Scholomance Academy’s theme, similar to Ashes of Outland’s Trial by Felfire story, will be released. Blizzard also promised a new major feature for the popular game mode Battlegrounds. While the feature hasn’t been confirmed, there’s been data-mined content that points toward potential custom friend lobbies. Additionally, a seventh type of minion also has a chance of appearing following the most recent one, Pirates. Even though there are only two minion types left, Elemental and Totem, it’s more likely that the next minion type that can be added to the shifting pool in Battlegrounds will be Elemental due to the former type having more substance to draw from.

In addition to all of these speculated and teased features, an entirely new game mode is on the horizon. While the amount of details made to the public is even vaguer than the Battlegrounds knowledge, we do know from a previous AMA that the next game mode won’t put restrictions on any cards played within it. That means the mode should put equal emphasis on both the Standard and Wild collections of players. While early speculation and hope from the community points toward the next mode potentially being Tournament Mode, it’s not likely that a tourney-style mode will be coming during phase two for Year of the Phoenix, if it’s supposed to come at all.

You can hop on your clients on PC and mobile now to open your packs and try out all of the new cards from Hearthstone’s 19th set, Scholomance Academy.