Hearthstone will receive more than 100 new cards when the next expansion arrives

Hearthstone players were understandably very excited when Blizzard announced that Curse of Naxxramas will add about 30 new cards to the game. Well, it seems like that was only the beginning as the company plans to add more, a lot more. Blizzard recently said that the next Hearthstone add-on will be an expansion in the true sense of the word and will add more than 100 new cards. Curse of Naxxramas is also considered to be an expansion by many, but the truth is that Blizzard announced that it’s just the first Hearthstone “adventure”. I won’t lie to you, I was pretty impressed with the new content added by Curse of Naxxramas, but it seems like that was nothing compared with what the upcoming expansion will bring.

“I think we’re going to mix it up a little bit with this next release, which will be our first expansion,”  Hearthstone production director Jason Chayes told Polygon. “It will have a lot more cards. We’re talking about more than 100. We are going to have a central theme for how that will all fit together. That’ll be the next thing coming up. One of the things that we spend a lot of time talking about is pacing. Not just the pacing of the game as it is, but pacing of the rollout of new content. We really want to make sure the pacing is great not just for seasoned Hearthstone players but for new players coming into the game too. We really want to pay attention to how that is for the entirety of the player base. Does that feel like the right amount of content? Is it too little? Is it too much? We feel like this is a good starting point.”

Elsewhere, Chayes talked about game modes for Hearthstone and how the team is looking into adding some new ones in the future. However, at the moment Blizzard is looking for ways of expanding the existing modes so new ones will only be added further along the line. As for the new cards, 100 is certainly a big number and might prove to be overwhelming to some player. Similar CCGs such as Magic: The Gathering feature so many cards that certain restrictions have to be put into place in order to make sure than players don’t abuse some of them.

“We have done some initial conversations about at what point will that be a concern for us,” Chayes said. “We think we have a ways before we have to worry about something like that, because there’s a lot of design space to experiment with ideas…. But that could be something that we need to be thinking about for Hearthstone down the road. If we do reach that point because there are just that many cards in the available set, one of the things we definitely want to make sure of is that there are ways to continue playing with all of your cards, and that it feels really good to be participating in these various modes.”

Chayes didn’t say when we can expect the expansion to hit Hearthstone, but he did mention that more details will be announced “very soon.” Presumably this means that we’ll hear more at BlizzCon 2014, which kicks off on November 7th.