Hearthstone Patch 10.4 - Special Arena Cards, Witchwood Pre-order, New Brawls, Free Card Packs
A new patch has hit Hearthstone today with some excellent changes and additions! Notably, you can now pre-order the new expansion, The Witchwood, in-game and there are some serious free packs coming to us.
20 Free Card Packs
The most important part! Now, please keep in mind this is all datamined information and is subject to change.
Datamining suggests that a special expansion event will reward players with a card pack for each daily quest they complete on a given day.
- There are 20 possible card packs available. Some of these may be a back-up in case they delay the expansion.
- Days 3, 7, 10, and 16 are all flagged to reward you with a Witchwood Card Pack
- The rest of the days reward you with a Kobolds Card Pack.
- "Enjoy this bonus for completing a daily quest!"
Not entirely sure if they have to be completed one day at a time or if you can let your daily quests build up and earn a bunch of extra packs on the same day. This should be announced in an upcoming blog post.
Special Arena Cards
Nine special arena cards have been added to the game. See our post on them, and a special developer insights video, here.
Witchwood Pre-order
You can now pre-order the new expansion, The Witchwood, in-game. You get 70 card packs for the price of the usual pre-order 50!
New Brawl Chalks
Three new chalkboards have been added to the game. Caw caw!
Official Patch Notes
Quote from BlizzardThis Hearthstone update introduces pre-purchase for Hearthstone’s newest expansion: The Witchwood! This patch also introduces Arena gameplay updates, including all-new Arena exclusive cards that were chosen by the crowd at BlizzCon. We’ve also laid the groundwork for the new Hearthstone Year, optimized loading times, and fixed several bugs.
Read on to learn more!
The Witchwood
Prepare to join brave heroes as they embark on a hunt for the source of an eerie curse in Hearthstone’s newest expansion. Read the official blog for more details!
- Pre-purchase now to receive 50 The Witchwood card packs. You’ll also receive the In a Dark Wood card back and 20 more The Witchwood card packs as a bonus! Use your new card back right away, and you can look forward to opening 70 card packs once the expansion arrives!
New Year Party!
- We’ve prepared a special event for you to celebrate the upcoming Year of the Raven! More details to come soon!
Arena Updates
We’re trying out a new Arena format to make choosing cards more interesting and skill testing.
- New Draft Rules: Each pick in an Arena draft will now feature 3 cards of relatively equal power level, but mixed rarities.
- Picks 1, 10, 20, and 30 will continue to have a guaranteed Rare quality card or better.
- The increased chance to draft cards from the most recent expansion has been removed until the launch of The Witchwood.
- New Arena cards chosen at BlizzCon are being added to the Arena for a limited time.
- All cards that are excluded from the Arena draft pool remain unchanged.
- All the other existing Arena rules in place that affect appearance rates are unchanged.
Bug Fixes and Updates
- Hearthstone now loads faster on many devices.
- Fixed several minor UI and visual issues.
- Players can now create Blizzard Battle.net accounts via Facebook.
- Rakanishu now correctly displays in history during the King Togwaggle Dungeon Run encounter.
- [Mobile] Alternate Heroes that you do not own should now display their names in the Collection Manager.
- [iOS] Due to changes in iTunes, it will no longer be possible to purchase one-time only items for multiple Blizzard accounts from a single iTunes log in. Each account holder must log into iTunes separately to make those purchases.
- [iOS] Older iOS devices are now more stable when changing menus.
Brode confirmed on twitter only Shaman is getting a new hero card.
What happened to adventures and getting a fixed set of cards instead of this rng pack fiesta? Well, at least we're getting some more free packs this time.
They announced last year that they were moving away from Adventures, and instead each expansion would include the new packs and a single player adventure (the dungeon runs)
"New Arena cards chosen at BlizzCon are being added to the Arena for a limited time."
Against Thrall with 10+ wins = Brace yourself for Crackling Doom. (Maybe even with some synergy like more Overload cards or/and Eternal Sentinel.)
The Snowfury Giant; turn 3.
That's what you get for buying phone with stupid notch
At least they found Dave Kosak.
I thought they were gonna find him standing in a basement facing the wall.......
The Brode Witchwood Project?
If they make the 20 additional packs a normal thing for pre-orders than i would order them alot more
Agreed, especially with all the price increases they did around the world this year.
I haven't pre-ordered once yet, but I'm very tempted to this expansion. Almost $.50 a pack is pretty enticing.
thx for additional 20 packs i want the prices to be lower or we get more packs every time pre-order or regular purchase
Note that these 20 free packs for completing quests were found from data-mining. I don't think that guarantees we'll see them. As they even said, 'some' (possiblly all?) could be 'just incase' the expansion is late to release, so don't get too excited yet. Although, as someone else already said, alot of players are moving to GWENT, Shadowverse, etc., since they're way cheaper, and there's less swing in expensive decks>FTP decks., so maybe Hearthstone is realizing they don't have the monopoly they used to, and might have to start competing to get their players back/get new players.
Check the ingame shop it says "50 packs and 20 as a bonus gift"
Yes... key words "upto" 20 free packs. I originally thought they referenced the buy preorder for normally 50, get 20 bonus packs as the 20 free.
Blizzard is getting very good at serving f2p players and rewarding those of us who only invest in the pre-orders during the year.
If they can give us a meta like or better than Un'Goro (almost every class had representation in the meta), then this rotation is looking incredible.
No free legendary this time?
whoops I just started an arena run does that mean I am going to play against decks constructed with the new format?