Three months after releasing the Journey to Un’Goro expansion, Blizzard is kicking off the Hearthstone Championship Tour’s Spring Championship with the reveal of 2017’s second major expansion. The live stream is scheduled to begin at 7:00 PM PDT / 10:00 PM EDT, at which point the Hearthstone team will reveal the first details of the upcoming expansion, along with some of the new cards.
Blizzard had done an admirable job of keeping the expansion under wraps for the past week, but on Thursday, marketing materials for the expansion leaked online. Based on those materials, we believe that the new expansion will be called Knights of the Frozen Throne (or something along those lines).
Over the past few years, Blizzard has been slowly working its way through the Warcraft universe, bringing in characters and themes into Hearthstone from the MMORPG and the original RTS games. The Frozen Throne was an expansion to Warcraft III and also appeared in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion for World of Warcraft. It was really only a matter of time before it made its way to Hearthstone.
In addition to ~130 cards, the new expansion is also expected to bring back some of the elements of the adventures that the team abandoned last year. In other words, there will be single-player, story-based content that players will be able to participate in, but this time they won’t have to pay for it separately.
Providing that Blizzard follows the same formula it did for Un’Goro, we’ll probably only see a few cards from Frozen Throne during the stream. Expansion announcements typically come about a month or so before the actual launch, so expect to see more reveals in the coming weeks as well.
