Prepare your wallet for August 24. The Grand Tournament is finally arriving!
After a month of teasing the community by revealing a couple of cards every day, Hearthstone creator Blizzard has finally set the date for the new expansion's release. On that day, the current pre-order that nets you fifty packs of Grand Tournament Boosters and a card back will cease to be operational and you will simply be able to buy the boosters from the store for the regular store price of 100 gold/$2.99/£1.99/€2.69/149.00 р./R$ 6,50/A$3.79
This new set brings with it a pre-expansion event in Brawl mode, where players face off as either the mage Medivh or as hunter Alleria. This particular brawl will run for all of the five days prior to the release of The Grand Tournament, only ending on the 24th when the expansion goes live.
During the brawl, the mage gets a pre-made deck built around the idea of inspire, while the hunter's pre-made deck revolves around Jousting.
Inspire tends to make your cards stronger as you use your hero power, while Jousting draws a minion from both your deck and your opponent's deck. During the joust, you compare casting cost totals. If yours is higher [for the most part] then something good happens to you.
The Grand Tournament brings with it 132 new cards which feature both Joust and Inspire. As always, card packs contain five cards any of which could be rare or better. There are, of course, new legendaries to chase and a whole slew of fixes and updates to the game in general.
Some of these updates revolve around ranked mode, a mode that has - generally - gotten people to play until level 20 and then bail, mostly thanks to the card back that's handed out every month. Ranked mode now tracks your progress and saves your highest climb. At the end of each month, you will get rewarded based on how far down the ladder you managed to claw your way.
So, are you heading back to Hearthstone to check out the new expansion? Are you giddy at the thought of climbing the ranks now that there are actual rewards for you to obtain? Let us know in the comments :)
Scroll image courtesy of Pixabay
Legendary images courtesy of Hearthhead
Grand Tournament Banner courtesy of the Blizzard Entertainment Grand Tournament Press Kit
Yeah the chest thing was deperately needed for ranked play. I might play a bit more now that I can get rewards based on how well I do
pretty much.
i think the data was fairly conclusive: people were just ranking enough to get the card back and then bailing – or, at least, the greater majority of the playerbase was doing that.
“pros” would stick with it ’till the end.