Hearthstone: A brief look into the Goblins vs. Gnomes expansion

Blizzard’s announcement of the newest Hearthstone expansion Goblins vs. Gnomes is set to bring Hearthstone players another exciting breath of fresh air. Roughly five months after the release of Naxxramas, Blizzard will be injecting Hearthstone with a whopping 120 more cards for players to use and tinker with. Of course, tinkering will be done with this expansion as the core theme around it involves goblins and gnomes. Both of these classes are renowned for their expertise in engineering and mechanical creations in the Warcraft universe. Although we don’t have access to all of the new cards that we can expect to see in the new card set, Blizzard has kindly teased us by releasing, slowly, a few cards to look at and get a feel for what we as players should expect to see in the upcoming set. With that being said, we’re now going to take a look deeper into a few of the cards to get a feel for the different themes that are brought out with the new expansion.

Randomness is fun, when done right!

For those who never played World of Warcraft, one thing that all engineers knew about their creations was the fact that they weren’t always reliable creations. If you crafted yourself some rocket boots then most of the time you’d see yourself zoom by everyone and escape some sticky situations, yet sometimes those rocket boots will instead propel yourself high enough in the air that death is imminent upon landing. Thus, the designers for the cards took full note of these interactions and a lot of cards you’ll see in the expansion due have some randomness added to their effect. Two examples of this randomness are the Madder Bomber and Unstable Portal cards.

The Madder Bomber, stats wise, isn’t particularly deadly for a 5 drop. Having 5 attack and 4 health makes it weak to turn 4 Chillwind Yetis and other low cost removal spells. It’s not a card that’s likely to see play much in constructed due to its low stats and risky battle cry, but it does have the ability to be incredibly potent with the right amount of randomness going in your favour.

Unstable Portal is another card which is incredibly dependent on decent RNG. For 2 mana you can get any non-token minion in the game to cost 3 less mana to use. A lot of people see this card to be incredibly potent because of the potential to bust out a turn 5 Ragnaros or other similarly large creature much earlier than anticipated. Although the cards seems incredibly strong to get an earlier late game card down on the field, this comes at the sacrifice of your turn 2 or 3 being completely void. Thus, using this against a rush deck still wouldn’t be that strong of a play as you’d want to mitigate as much damage as you can as early as possible.

One note to talk about in terms of the randomness being introduced into the game is the fact that the RNG isn’t necessarily all that toxic to play against. I find the more hard-coded situations of the Ragnaros coin-flip or Animal Companion draw to be much more rage inducing than a Mad Bomber going horribly wrong or incredibly right. Thus, even though the expansion is introducing a lot of randomness element to the game, it isn’t as bad as players are making it out to be.

Neutrals, Class cards, Mechs oh my!

With the introduction of the new expansion, a new subtype of unit is being pushed through the assembly line. A healthy portion of the cards will form the "mech" type and have cards dedicated to buffing and interacting with other ‘mech’ type cards. This will be the first subtype introduced that won’t be class specific, meaning that each and every class will have the ability to create their own mech decks, using some of their brand new class cards which, in some cases, also interact with this new subset.

For many players this will bring a breath of fresh air to the game because as it stands right now, most early game openers involve an undertaker along with a few particularly "icky" death rattle effects. I definitely look forward to the new expansion and the new subtype that it brings, and will definitely be crafting a bunch of decks to try and fully utilize the mechanized miscreants.

With the introduction of class cards like the Shrinkmeister for priests, which will allow them more flexibility to deal with those pesky 4 attack minions, the new expansion also looks to tackle flexibility to classes without the involvement of "mechs".

Concluding Thoughts

Overall, I expect that the 120 new cards being introduced to Hearthstone will help shake up things in both constructed play and arena. As with any new expansion, experimentation is key into finding certain cards that click best with each other. But most importantly, card diversity is always important in order for a card game to succeed, and if Hearthstone wants to compete with the likes of other big name card games, new expansions will constantly need to be rolled out every so often.

Brandon Rendina