Forged in the Barrens is just around the corner, along with the entirely new Core Set. I'm so interested to see how different the game is going to be in a few days; such a massive shake-up is sure to get creative juices flowing. Imagine trying to design a whole Hearthstone Year now - you need to pick what cards make up your Core Set too!

Conversation this week will be all natural, with maybe a few added cards.

Top of the Class

Congratulations are in order for our first WCDC winner of Season 3. Well done to DestroyerR and their Multi-Talent Magician!

As always, our WCDC winners get to choose the theme for a competition - look forward to what DestroyerR has in store for us in 3.03.

Groundwork

I don't get a chance to talk about it a lot in these articles, but Battlegrounds is quite possibly my favourite mode in Hearthstone right now. It's also what I watch the most Hearthstone content for after the initial rush of a new expansion wears off. The unique interactions that present themselves and the interesting new mechanics that can come about from what is essentially an entirely different game within Hearthstone are so fascinating to me - even if I'm not that great a player myself.

The reason I'm talking about it now, of course, is because we have some fan created content for it! The latest Fan Community Spotlight takes a look at Cydonianknight's Treant Tribe, a brand new custom tribe introduced specifically for Battlegrounds.

I think in light of the brand new Quillboar tribe being introduced with Forged in the Barrens, it's very interesting to see a fan's take on introducing a new tribe from before we'd seen how Blizzard would do it.

  

The base idea for the tribe is pulled from Greybough's Battlegrounds Hero Power, which buffs minions summoned in combat. As such, many of the Treants provide ways to produce more during combat, or to buff Treants summoned during combat for the rest of the game. I love this, because it's something so unique to Battlegrounds - the vast majority of these cards would make no sense in Constructed.

Of course, they also provide some basic utility Treants as well - while some tribes like Murlocs focus entirely on synergy within themselves, most tribes have many more generally good minions or minions with unique effects like Hangry Dragon or Nat Pagle, Extreme Angler. I like the idea to tie some of them to the Refresh mechanic, very flavour appropriate.

It's perhaps more difficult to tell when something is balanced appropriately for Battlegrounds than it is for Constructed - or maybe I'm just not a good enough player to judge that. I think the concept is amazing though, and I'd love to see more people tackle custom Battlegrounds content.

Click the link above to see the full interview, which includes a link to the full set - including three new Heroes!

Full Bloom

Of course, we have the new competition this week. Link has asked us to help out with their garden, so click the banner below to start planting!