Mean Streets Of Gadgetzan: Get On The Hype Train!

We all knew that the upcoming expansion was going to be something related to Gadgetzan and Blizzard has been teasing us with images and other teasers since the past few weeks, and we finally have official confirmation that the new expansion is going to be ‘Mean Streets of Gadgetzan’. We already have seen about a fourth of the new cards and it seems like there are some really pleasant changes on the way for us next month.

Priest To Make A Comeback?

We are going to get a full expansion early December complete with 132 new cards with each class getting some cool new cards. While we did not get to see too many cards for a lot of the classes it seems that Priest is getting quite the attention and we have already seen 5 Priest-exclusive cards. pint-size-potion and shadow-word-horror might just be Priest’s equivalent of Equality and Consecration in the coming months, or if you happen to be a part of the Dragon army then Dragonfire Potion has you covered for a massive 5 damage AoE to purge all of those non-Dragon minions. There is a lot to look forward to for the class and I personally love the fact that Priest just might be on its way to redemption after being in the lower tiers for quite some time.

Crime Families And Multi-Class Cards

Those of you who have played other card games might have bumped into cards that are playable across multiple classes and it’s been a mechanic that would have come into Hearthstone sometime down the line for sure. We now have 3 groups of classes that are a part of 3 ‘crime families’. 

The three crime families and the class card combinations are as follows:

• Grimy Goons: Hunter, Paladin, Warrior
• The Kabal: Mage, Priest, Warlock
• Jade Lotus: Druid, Rogue, Shaman

These crime family cards are basically multi-class cards and each of these families will have one legendary to lead the gang wars in Gadgetzan. So far we have seen only one of them and it sure impressed everyone! Kazakus is a part of the Kabal crime family and he helps you brew potions using the discover mechanic. You can choose from 3 mana costs and combine 2 effects to form one spell based on your needs. There are 9 options for each mana cost and you do not get repeat choices so you can get exactly 162 possible combinations! According to the devs, the legendary can brew over a hundred potions based on the combinations you choose. We witnessed a 10 mana Kazakus potion that deals 6 damage to all minions on the board and summons 3 friendly minions from the ‘graveyard’ which is absolutely crazy. I am looking forward to how good the cheaper potions are and what they do. The other two crime family legendaries will be announced in the coming weeks. And as usual we also have the usual class cards as usual. Blizzard also mentioned even outside the class affiliations there will be unique twists to each of these families and we are yet to see what the other two families are going to bring to the table to Hearthstone.

Discover Is Here To Stay

Discover has been one of the best implementations of randomness in the game has been the Discover mechanic and Blizzard is pushing the mechanic that was first introduced in League of Explorers and it has been one of the few much appreciated mechanics that offer randomness by the community. What’s more is that this time around they have diluted the power levels of Discover cards at least when it comes to the multi-class cards released so far. You will get to choose from 3 cards from the 3 classes that are affiliated to each other with one from each class. This reduces the power level of the mechanic in a way but it also allows you to access a larger pool of cards, making the mechanic feel less oppressive while maintaining the right balance of strategy and randomness. We also get the very first discover card that allows you to duplicate cards from your opponent’s deck – Drakonid Operative. Being able to get intel on your opponents deck and being able to use their tools against themselves is a really interesting idea and I like how the card has been designed.

Tribal Legendaries Make A Return

We also got to see cool new Pirate and Murloc legendaries. finja-the-flying-star is a Stealth murloc that summons 2 murlocs from your deck each time it attacks and kills a minion. If that does not impress you, he’s a murloc AND a ninja, does it even get any cooler?

Patches the Pirate automatically comes to the fray whenever you play a Pirate from your deck and it’s the first Charge minion to come out since The Grand Tournament! We have not seen any Charge minions since over a year now and this little guy seems to be ready for battle.  It’s good to see tribal legendaries make a return and we just might get some more of these tribal cards that make allow us to make fun decks, if not competitive ones.

There hasn’t been much information with regards to how Blizzard wants to shape the class identities of each of the classes and if we will witness new archetypes, but one thing that the community has appreciated so far is the lack of high level RNG and well designed cards. We still have about a hundred cards to go and you can expect new cards to pop up every day across various streams, blog posts all over the internet. Make sure you keep your eyes out for those shiny new legendaries being announced. We all can look forward to a fresh meta and plenty of deck building going around on ladder for a few months at least before the meta stabilizes. We hope new decks break into the upper tiers of the meta and shake things up for all of us.

Availability and Pre-Order Information

If you want to pre-order the expansion, you can do so for $49.99 on the Battle.net client or on the website, it seems that pre-orders are going to be web only according to a tweet by developer Yong Woo so if you were planning to use Amazon Coins or Play Store credit, it seems like you won’t be able to pre-order this time around. Instead of the usual 40 packs you will get access to 50 packs immediately up for opening as soon as the expansion launches. There will be no cardback thrown into the package unlike most of the other content updates for pre-ordering this time. Let’s hope the 101 cards that are yet to be revealed are just as exciting, we can expect all of the cards to come out by the end of this month. What cards are you excited for so far and what do you want to see this expansion? Let us know in the comments below!