Hey all,
I think it is important to announce that we won't be causing our usual trouble during April Fools this year. We've always had a lot of fun preparing content to share with you and get some laughs around this time of the year, but there are more important things taking place in the world that deserve attention.
While it may be true that we could all use a bit of humor to lighten the mood, laughter really is great, it is incredibly important that things stay factual during this epidemic and that we're not one of the people creating noise, making people question what they are reading. It is my belief that it would be incredibly irresponsible of us to put out anything for April Fools. Please use this knowledge to your advantage and know that everything on our homepage and various game portals will remain factual.
I hope everyone is keeping their distance and staying in as much as they possibly can to lessen the burden on medical systems around the world. Please stay safe so we can continue to enjoy playing and talking games with each other for many years to come.
We'll get through this mess together. If you want people to talk card games with or have random conversations, join us over on Discord.
- Flux
Previous April Fools Day Content
We'll end things on a bit of a lighthearted note by revisiting old April Fools content we've done. First off, some Hearthstone art remakes by myself and ShadowsOfSense!
Last year, following Wizard's War of the Spark announcement, Shadows wrote a War of the Dark article for a fictitious Hearthstone expansion. The scariest part about it is how it was sort of correct in that the expansion was all about hero cards - those damn Galakrond!
Patch notes? You bet! We wrote these 2 years ago in 2018. Click the spoiler to expand.
Quote From Definitely Not Us Beta
- The Hearthstone Beta has finally concluded. Subscribers may purchase a copy of the game for $49.99 at select digital retailers.
- Deck draws are no longer weighted and are truly randomized now.
General
- All text in-game is now in Mandarin.
- Developer Note: Internal statistics and community provided feedback have shown that 18 deck slots weren't too difficult to manage so we've decided to increase the complexity of the game by changing the language you play in.
- The gold cap has been reduced to 150.
- Developer Note: Not enough players were pre-ordering the recent expansion which we determined was not very fun. Any gold over 150 has been converted into dust at a rate of 1 dust per 100 gold. This may take up to two weeks for your dust to be delivered to your account via the Blizzard Gifts feature, though your gold has been already removed. Mobile players can log in to the Battle.net website to collect their dust.
- Additional deck slots remain $9.99 each and may only be found on the Battle.net web store. Keeping that UI clean!
Hall of Fame / Standard
- Coldlight Seer, Ice Barrier, and Molten Reflection have been added to the Hall of Fame.
- Developer Note: Back in February we announced our intentions to add a few cards to the Hall of Fame rotation. We, unfortunately, got this wrong due to an internal miscommunication and will not be rotating those cards. Instead, here's the correct three cards which are rotating.
- Unstable Portal and Primordial Glyph have been added to Mage's Standard Rotation.
- Developer Note: Mages have lost many cards to Hall of Fame over the years so we decided they needed compensation. To do this, we've added some of their most popular cards over the years to the Classic set.
Card Changes
- Burgle now directly steals credits from your opponent's Battle.net Balance.
- Carnivorous Cube now correctly creates 4 copies instead of 2 on death.
- Snowflipper Penguin will now stream snowboarding classes on Twitch every Monday from 12 PM PDT until 4 PM PDT.
- Jade Shuriken has been renamed to Glass Shuriken due to a lack of funds.
- Hex now transforms targets into Murlocs instead of Frogs due to possible endangerment of the species.
- Bloodreaver Gul'dan will now correctly be discarded whenever possible.
- Freezing Trap has been renamed to Chilly Trap due to global warming. Targets of the trap now cost 1 more mana instead of 2.
- Fireball now deals 7 damage due to demand for basic card buffs.
- Deathwing's art has been replaced.
- NEW - Karazhan has two new cards, [Hearthstone Card (Deadly Spoon) Not Found] and [Hearthstone Card (Deadly Knife) Not Found] have been added to allow you to have a deadly dinner set.
- In keeping with the theme of adding new animations to our best cards, Millhouse Manastorm has been upgraded.
Keywords
- To help with RNG, Adapt will now allow you to choose any buff from the pool of 10.
- As part of our removal of the Enrage keyword, certain cards have taken Anger Management classes. Their names are now Tender Chicken, Annoyed Worgen, and Garrosh Hecktalk.
Tavern Brawls
- Due to positive reactions from the community, the Banana Brawl will no longer rotate and is now the new face of Tavern Brawl.
- Tavern Brawl menu option has been renamed to Banana Brawl.
- 100% more nanners are now available in Banana Brawl. Go crazy!
- Winning your first Banana Brawl of the week will now reward you with a pack from The Grand Tournament instead of a Classic pack.
Events
- NEW - Clownfiesta! is an event coming to Hearthstone which only allows cards with "random" in their text to be played.
Tournament Mode
- Tournament mode has been added to the game.
- Players may only use their cards from The Grand Tournament set in tournament mode.
- Developer Note: Since The Grand Tournament is still a Wild-only set, you may only purchase packs via the Battle.net shop, no gold.
Bug Fixes
- Resolved an issue where the game wouldn't crash when opening Friend list
- Resolved a visual bug where your opponent's hero portrait didn't explode after Turn 4 Barnes.
- Resolved a bug where Ice Breaker didn't help you on your Tinder date.
- Resolved a bug where community website HearthPwn received exclusive card reveals.
- Resolved an issue where players may not like the golden animation.
It would be almost criminal to not mention Blizzard's World of Warcraft video from 2016 "Hearthstone: The MMO Unveiled".
Comments
I don't quite follow how a joke about card game(s) could even remotely contribute to misinformation about a pandemic. However, if you're just tired of seeing misinformation about said pandemic and don't want people to experience a similar feeling when looking for news about card game(s), that makes sense. You don't sound self-righteous about it (i.e., shaming others for participating in April Fools), so I can respect your decision. I'm torn between not underestimating this disease while also keeping it in perspective and trying to maintain a sense of normalcy.
Much love!!
Awwww, and here I thought that would have been the 1st April fools joke. =*(
Thanks for keeping it factual. Love the Deathwing art.
Does not matter, I will get fooled anyway
What if this is the fool? An infinite logical loop of fooling and unfooling could be the most fooling possible in one fool... I have to make plans for next year.
Honestly deep down I was hoping you'd replace everyone with Shadows of Sense. Mostly because of that joke I made that other time.
Thanks for keeping it serious and for sharing the taking care of each other!
Plot twist: THIS is the april fool. :D ;)
Will we at least get some more information what you have planed for this year? Or will you save your ideas for next year?
Such a caring post.
Thanks !
Big if true
Joke for today:
What's the most powerful card in Hearthstone?
Clever. Made me chuckle :)
This article just further solidified my love of OutOfCards and this entire community. I am terrified of what horrible April Fools jokes people are going to pull tomorrow (today if you're reading this on 4/1). It really touched my heart to see your stance on this.
Thank you for writing this. It is so important for nothing but facts to be available, especially right now. There is already a war on truth going on that unfortunately has made this situation a lot worse than it needs to be. I really hope others will do the same as you tomorrow.
Thank you Flux and Co. for all you do each and every day. I spend more time on this website than I'd like to admit, and it's because of the good hearts of the people who run it, and the community who supports it.
Everyone please stay safe and healthy... and WASH YOUR HANDS!
This post actually touched me. Nicely written and well expressed. You are all doing a great job on this site!
Everything in the article sounds reasonable and sensible in the current climate.
However, I hope there will be plenty to make up for it this time next year and we're all still here to enjoy it :)
So that Hearthstone MMO was an April Fools joke?
Aw man, I actually think Hearthstone could do an MMO. There's a lot of really cool characters in Hearthstone and their lore would be a pleasure to experience. There's a lot of interesting ways you could experience the universe. You could play as one of the Hearthstone classes, and maybe the spells in Hearthstone could be used as abilities for the classes in the game. Since its a game based in the world of Warcraft, you could even call it World of Warcraft and give it WoW as an acronym. It's great because then you could say "wow, that's a great game". There's so much potential here.
I respect what you guys are doing for this. I also would have found it great for you guys to do card stuff like
"Dormant: Stay Home til this blows over"
"Battlecry: WASH YOUR HANDS!"
"Summon a video game to pass the time"
A light hearted, informative style OoC April Fools ;)
Then I'll expect TWO jokes next year! ;)
There was something absolutely insane I wanted to do for this year's April fools day, but it would have taken at least 2-3 months of development to be really good. I wish the time was there!