Whispers of the Old Gods comes out Late April/Early May with 134 new cards. It is themed around the Old Gods of Azeroth, ancient eldritch beings that have been bound deep underground but corrupts . In Warcraft lore, they are responsible for some evils, like Neltharion's corruption into Deathwing and Garrosh's madness. (My opinion: This all seems fitting with MtG's Eldrazi and then Shadows Over Innistrad/Eldritch Moon.)


A number of the new cards will be standby cards corrupted by the (title drop) whispers of the Old Gods. (My opinion: I thought this may be used to help replace cards moving out of Standard, but the previewed dark version of Antique Healbot doesn't do that.)






The four Old Gods will have legendary cards: C'Thun, Yogg-Saron, Y'Shaarj, and N'Zoth, the last of which hasn't appeared in WoW yet. The Old Gods will have cultists that empower them from afar, appearing to peer out at you when this happens. (My opinion: I am interested to see if there really will be four Old Gods and each with unique cultists. That seems like a lot.)





You get C'Thun and two Beckoners of Evil with your first Whispers of the Old Gods pack. You get three free packs when you log in during the promotional period.

If you preorder 50 packs, you get the Eye of C'Thun's cardback, which has a big eye in the middle with the Hearthstone swirl icon as a pupil looking around.

Edit: Updated/clarified some info and added images.

I'll probably spend money.

set looks neat

i will probably not spend money

You literally have no money

I have 5000 gold and 2000 dust just waiting. Plus ill spend money.

i have $150

It appears C'thun will be the only one with cultists and the rest will change in different ways. That is better for me, it would be the most parasitic set in any card game otherwise.

And I'm totally spending money.

I doubt they would give you a bunch of cards that require you to have a Legendary to do anything. Which is good, because the cultist mechanic is pretty dumb, since you have a bunch of cards that are useless in constructed if it doesn't pay off, and if it does, a lot of your card slots are too necessary. I like that the cards give a feeling of foreboding, but mechanically it interests me little. The thing I like the most about it is that it hopefully means they clean up their game mechanics so that Mistcaller's text actually means what it says, as opposed to "Whenever you draw a creature".

I hope this is the set that gives me a 3/4 for 4 with Deathrattle: Restore 4 health to your hero. Or anything with a Deathrattle that heals me, really.

Also hoping for the option to hand out Corruption cards that give drawbacks when held in your hand, but I don't expect much.

TGT was released on August 24th, 2015 and League of Explorers was released on December 3rd.

"Late April / Early May" likely means April 25th or later. With a decent chance of it being Early May. Let's assume it's the best case possible and it's April 18th (unlikely).

That means that Hearthstone will have gone 137 days without any new cards (give or take a couple days) and about 8 months with only 45 new cards. More likely to add a week or two onto that, making it even worse. This is before we consider that Hearthstone sets ALWAYS have bad cards in them, and LOE was no exception. A lot of LOE cards didn't see constructed play, so the actual size of the relevant set introduced was 20 - 30 cards in an 8 month period.

What this means is that the meta was getting really boring before LOE came out, and by the time they announced standard in early February people were already growing bored out of their minds. A month later? The meta isn't fun anymore, some streamers are growing tired of the game, and the Temostorm meta snapshot team (which despite all their flaws is still a valuable resource) is claiming they are done making snapshots until Standard comes out because the game is just that stale.

AND WE HAVE ONE AND A HALF TO TWO MORE MONTHS BEFORE THE META WILL CHANGE. This is just dumb as **** on Blizzard's part. It takes what should have been controversial but exciting things for the game and dripfed strung them out over such a long period of time that the hype is dying and or going to be dead by the time even April 1st comes around. This kind of thing happening to loyal players of the game can't be good for it. It's also likely that anyone who was going to spend money on the thing and who plays a lot is just going to have a crapton of gold by the time the thing comes out for no other reason than they've had 8 months to accrue gold and if they didn't they still have another 45 days.

All in all, the release date sucks and is extremely disappointing.

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The three non C'thun cards are probably going to be DOA in Wild. In standard... might still be DOA.

Corrupted Healbot: 1 more attack than a pit fighter in exchange for an awful deathrattle that some people are going to try and fail to make work consistently with Auchenai Soulpriest. Unfortunately, 5 health is the magic number, not 6, and the extra attack point just isn't worth it. Especially if C'thun decks become a thing and you have to actually try to win sometime before the apocalypse comes.

Validated Doomsayer: Do they know how hard it is for an unprotected Doomsayer to live on turn 5 NOW? Between that and Maexxna syndrome it's going to have a bad time. Interesting enough this means BGH might not be definitely getting a nerf, since most of the value here is it playing around BGH and paladin cards.

Polluted Hoarder: 3 drops right now with 4/2 stats aren't competitive. Making it cost 1 more and making it draw a card make it barely compete with the 2/4 battlecry minion, let alone other draw options like Azure Drake. There would have to be a really aggressive deck with absolutely nothing better to do (not going to happen because classic is sticking around) for this to work well in anything.

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C'thun is a different kind of disappointing. If it's not good enough to see play, then that will just feel freaking awful. That could happen if the battlecry doesn't do enough work, because it's not like cards like Hex are going anywhere. People forget that big minions without effects weren't that great even when BGH wasn't played alot, because cheap removal like Hex and SW Death just invalidates them reguardless and it's still too much of a tempo loss when that happens. So if he can't get reliably big and then reliably drawn, and his cultists aren't good enough to win on their own in decks that are bad at consistently drawing him, then he's going to be disappointing for that reason. Especially if face hunter and face shaman stick around as competitive things and make the notion of a turn ten play laughable.

On the other hand, if it IS consistent then it's an extremely binary form of play that's going to have one card dictate how a huge part of the meta plays out, and we'll be stuck listening to people bitch about C'thun for the next 8 months with like 50 new cards total. Furthermore, it's going to end up being like murlocs. Either there's one style of deck where you run every copy of one card, or there's a style where you run C'thun and X combo cards and just draw the whole deck looking for them. Either way I'm not that excited at the idea.

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The fact that C'thun will be free and that we will get 3 free packs is a very good thing and something I liked. But this is so far away that I'm having trouble focusing on anything but the negative. Mainly that it's so damn far away and the game has been stale since Febraury 9th when Standard was announced.

What else we know:
- C'thun gets up to 20+ attack in their playtesting. This may or may not be consistent. He has 16 cultists that will support him. The other 3 gods will appear but will be more independent standalone cards.
- C'thun and his cultists won't be in arena.
- Each old gold WILL be 10 mana and have some sort of deck that they encourage.
- Corrupted versions of old minions will be a major themed thing, with corrupted Hogger, corrupted coldlight oracle, and a couple other things being hinted at by the trailer.
- We will find out the classic nerfs in early to late april, timed to be a week or two before the thing releases. Standard will release at the same time as it.
- They are going to hock a few cards to get people to watch the tourney today and tomorrow.

There's a tourney?

https://www.twitch.tv/playhearthstone

American Winter Championships

whispers of the old gods: we just made everything bigger

I'm sad just because Yogg-Saron is in this expansion so the chance of having an Ulduar adventure becomes almost zero.

dunno, Ragnaros wasn't in Blackrock Mountain

Two new cards:

[Corrupted Hogger]
7
Legendary Neutral Minion
6/6
Whenever this minion is dealt damage, summon a 2/2 Gnoll with Taunt.

[Giant Sand Worm]
8
Epic Hunter Minion -- Beast
8/8
If this attacks and destroys a minion, it can attack again this turn.

Corrupted Hogger seems way worse than the original

Sand Worm seems fun

B E A S T I A L W R A T H

Honestly, C'Thun's effect being incredibly boring makes me really wary, because the Old Gods are some of the coolest thing about Azeroth. I do like the impending doom feeling it gives off, but I hope the rest of them are a lot more spicy. We haven't seen N'Zoth before, so it'll be cool to see if the speculation about the Emerald Dream is true. Maybe he'll give off some Dream cards. Y'Shaarj is also kind of exciting, since he's dead, so idk what will happen there. I hope he gets a lot of representation in the Sha, and I'd like to see a Shadowform card for Garrosh.