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What We Know About Hearthstone's Next Expansion

BlizzCon is only a week away, and there's a very good chance we'll be seeing an announcement about the next Hearthstone card expansion during it. We have compiled information on everything we know about the expansion through interviews, the client, and promotions so that you have an idea of what is coming next for Hearthstone.

There Will be Over 100 New Cards

There have been several variations on the number of cards we'd see, but most recently, Eric Dodds, Hearthstone's Lead Designer, announced that "it's going to be over 100 cards". This comes after Senior Game Designer, Mike Donais, stated that it would be "not exactly 100 cards, but it's a lot". Start saving up your gold for those card packs.

Quote from Eric Dodds

It was recently revealed that the next set of cards will come out as part of a new booster pack. How many cards are we looking at? What sort of breakout can we expect in terms of new class cards vs. neutral cards? Anything you’re willing to spoil at this point?

Still working on the details of that. I mean, it’s going to be over 100 cards and it’s certainly going to be very different from Naxxramas, which was designed to put a smaller number of cards into play, because we don’t want to create this large number of cards, not overwhelm players, but at the same time, with this new expansion, we want to provide a large number of cards with additional options for the hardcore. So, exactly what those cards are and exactly what those ratios are, partially we’re still working on ‘em, and partially we’ll be talking about that in the future.

New Cards Will Come From a New Booster Pack

If you've been saving up your current Hearthstone packs from your arena runs in hopes that they would give you a shot at new cards, open them now. A brand new pack will be added to the shop that you can purchase, alongside the Expert Pack, which will give you the new cards. We know that the new packs will be purchasable for gold and real money, the only question yet to be answered is how much of each currency they will cost.

Quote from Mike Donais

The cards in the next expansion will come out of a new booster pack. You will still need to purchase Expert booster packs to get Expert cards. You'll have two choices in the store.

The Expansion Will Be Themed, Probably Mechanical

Much like the Curse of Naxxramas, the new expansion will have a common theme among the cards.

Quote from Jason Chayes

We are going to have a central theme for how that will all fit together.

Most recently, there have been some interesting developments from Blizzard which is pointing to a Mechanical / Engineering themed expansion.

The Goblin Card Back

On October 22, a patch was pushed to the download servers with a new card back which was titled "Goblin". Goblins, along with the Gnomes, have been at the forefront of engineering and all things mechanical for quite some time in the World of Warcraft, and their card back certainly shows it off. The Goblin card back is the ranked season reward for November, the same month that features BlizzCon. It's certainly quite fitting that an expansion announcement would come with a themed card back, kind of like how we had the Naxxramas themed card back as a ranked reward for July, Naxxramas launch month.

Engineering Blueprints

Further validity to engineering and mechanicals was added when several community members received blueprint promotional cards on October 30th. The blueprints featured artwork from many of the mechanical devices already present in Hearthstone, along with a card which read "Making plans for BlizzCon - I hope you like my invention!", a quote from Novice Engineer.

New Cards Might be Craftable With Arcane Dust

Ben Brode was asked on twitter a couple of weeks ago about expansion specific dust. He responded saying that "Lots of currencies can make things more complicated", which makes implies the new cards will be craftable with the crafting currency that we've already been using. We'd be silly to disagree, it really would make everything a lot easier.

Quote from Ben Brode

Can you think of any downside to keeping gold as a universal currency but changing dust to be expansion specific?
Lots of currencies can make things more complicated.