New Hearthstone Adventure Launches Thursday

Today at Blizzcon 2015, the next Adventure was announced for Hearthstone, Blizzard’s card game centered around characters from World of Warcraft. The adventure is entitled League of Explorers, and is themed around a team of explorers headed by Brann Bronzebeard, bent on searching for legendary artifacts. The Adventure will add several new cards to the game, as well as some interesting new game mechanics. Here’s the intro trailer:

League of Explorers adds “Discoveries” as a feature to Hearthstone to go along with Battlecries, Deathrattles, and the like. Discoveries allow you to “discover” three different deck-appropriate cards and choose one of them to add to your hand, adding another layer of controlled randomness to play. You’ll also run across fellow explorers in the form of cards, who can add artifacts with incredible power to your deck. As featured, the Golden Monkey is particularly lethal–it turns all cards in your deck and hand into legendaries.

League of Explorers is imminent–it releases on Thursday. Presumably the adventures will cost the same as they have in the past, with 700 gold for each “wing” in-game, or $24.99 for the entire set, but that’s still up in the air. Certainly it will add plenty new cards to Hearthstone’s ranked play as they are earned in Adventure Mode, shaking things up considerably after the recent demise of the Patron Warrior.