Hearthstone's Masquerade Ball event starts today! We've got a big week to start things off so let's jump right into it! The Masquerade Ball runs throughout the first three weeks of October.
You can find a full schedule of the Masquerade Ball event here.
New Legendary Quest - Play Dual-Class Arena
We've got a new legendary quest available today. Playing in dual-class Arena will earn you three card packs from sets in Hearthstone's standard mode.
- 1 Scholomance Academy pack
- 1 Ashes of Outland pack
- 1 Year of the Dragon pack.
Elementals Join Battlegrounds
Much like the Pirates that invaded Battlegrounds during the Felfire Festival this summer, the Elemental tribe is doing the same this autumn. We're not going to go over all the new changes because we have those recapped over here, but here are the Battleground highlights that kickoff with today's patch.
- 16 new cards are being added to the Battlegrounds Minion pool.
- 4 new Elemental heroes have been added to the pool.
- Ragnaros - (Passive) After you kill 20 enemy minions, get Sulfuras. (At the end of your turn, give your left and right-most minions +4/+4.)
- Chenvaala - (Passive) After you play 3 Elementals, reduce the cost of upgrading Bob's Tavern by (2).
- Rakanishu - (2) Give a random friendly minion stats equal to your Tavern Tier.
- Al'Akir - (Passive) Start of Combat: Give your left-most minion Windfury, Divine Shield, and Taunt.
- Fixed a Battlegrounds bug where Micro Mummy would cause a crash when tripled. Micro Mummy has returned to the Battlegrounds minion pool.
- All external ratings will be reset to 0, which will serve as the new baseline and rating floors will be introduced.
Card Nerfs for Tortollan Pilgrim and Guardian Animals
Two cards are receiving nerfs!
- Tortollan Pilgrim - No longer creates a copy of the spell and instead fetches it from the deck.
- Guardian Animals - Cost increased to 8 Mana (from 7).
Turtle Mage is effectively dead with the changes, which is probably for the best because playing against a raid boss wasn't very fun. Check out Firebat's analysis and community recap on the changes.
Dual-Class Arena Begins
As we've seen for a few years now, Hearthstone's Dual-Class Arena makes a return for Halloween. All the Heroes have dressed up for the occasion and everyone is getting a free Arena run because of it!
- A special quest rewarding 2x Golden Transfer Student will require playing dual-class Arena.
- You'll pick your Hero first followed by Hero Power.
- Build decks using both of your chosen classes and Neutral cards.
Pre-nerf Jaina Artwork pictured above. Not indicative of in-game experiences.
Horseman Uther Bundle
The skin resembles the Headless Horseman, a Warcraft classic for Halloween, with a slight bit of that Paladin flair that we all know and love. The bundle that Horseman Uther comes in won't be cheap at $25 USD, though you do get a decent deal out of it if you still have cards from Scholomance Academy you want to collect.
The Horseman Uther Bundle contains:
- 25 Scholomance Academy packs
- 1 random Scholomance Academy Legendary
- Horseman Uther Hero skin
Are you considering picking up the hero? We'll have more details once the patch drops tomorrow to help you make up your mind - hopefully, the hero has some unique voicelines unlike Scholar Jaina and the upcoming Rexxar skin.
Rise of the Zombeasts Tavern Brawl - Starts September 30
The only piece of week 1 content not dropping today, September 29, is the Tavern Brawl.
It's a monstrous mirror match! Take control of a deck teeming with random Zombeasts and spells while using a discounted hero power to craft your undead army!
We last saw the brawl a year ago at the end of September, so it's a great time to bring it back!
That's it for Week 1 of the Masquerade Ball. We'll be busy today with datamining the game patch, so stay tuned for any fun stuff we find that didn't make the patch notes.
Comments
Has anyone gotten the golden Transfer Student yet?
I think you need to play rexxar's story in book of heroes to get it. I have done everything else that you need to do. But of course we need to wait until rexxar's story comes out.
Also of note, for those who don't have the Battlegrounds Tavern Pass, the cost was reduced to 1250 gold/$9.99.
Yeah that's quite a big deal, I never bought the pass cause all my gold was going to standard or arena, but 1250 for Battleground pass and 4 arena tickets is suddenly much more interesting.
Horseman Uther looks pretty dope
Pre-nerf Jaina is best Jaina. I couldn't be "Proud More".
Ah, this event looks fun, I look forward to this coming month of Hearthstone
we get a free run? thats insane!!! Blizzard is so generous...
Edit: guys i was making a reference to Blizzard not giving a free run at the Brawliseum. Ppl like to jump on the hate train without even considering if the comment was made as a joke to something.
A free run is at least one pack, plus you can get two additional packs by letting a run expire before and after the event. Add 3x3 packs from legendary quests and you can get a total of 12 packs for minimal effort, more if you bother finishing Book of Heroes and win some Arena games before you reach 2/3 losses.
Blizzard has never been super generous with Hearthstone freebies. Compared to other Hearthstone events, I think this one is well above average.
and 3 packs per week,new free battlegrounds content and another free Book of heroes chapter. But I quess you can always complain about something if you really want to.