Hello everyone. It's a new month. What are you all up you? There's not much in the ways of new games for me, but what I have been doing is making progress on my custom Hearthstone year, Year of the Serpent.

The Eldritch Fate (Set 1) - Lazul predicts (or more accurately, manifests) a terrible tragedy for everyone with her skills as a fortune teller and her corrupted tarot deck. - All 22 cards of the Major Arcana have been adapted into Hearthstone cards. When there's Lazul involved, you can bet that the Old Gods are only a step away from spreading havoc across all of the land. Foretell is a new mechanic that gives you the option to place a card in your hand on top of your deck to activate an optional bonus effect. With the dark, disturbing sounds and stories constantly beaming around in your head, Echo has come back for the entirety of the standard year and all three sets will use it.

Last, but certainly not least is the new Aberration minion type, and their gimmick is that they copy the gimmicks of every other minion type. Some of them have the "holding a Dragon" condition. Some of them have the "if you played an Elemental last turn" condition, etc etc, you get the idea. A secondary gimmick is that they also have two effects chosen at random, but are worth roughly equal amounts of mana (i.e Upside Down Mothergate) because they're a bit chaotic.

Ascent of the Redemption Peaks (Set 2) - Throughout Hearthstone's many years, there have been several archetypes and class mechanics that have failed to make any real impact on the game and/or were abandoned by the developers. Archetypes like Freeze Shaman, No-Spell Mage, and Heal Druid. Left in the dust long ago when people stopped caring about them. Some of them died after the first wave of support, never to be returned again. Each class represents a past archetype or mechanic in the class that the team doesn't support anymore and give them one more chance at glory.

Those who seek a new chance at fate climb Mount Everset, a mountain known to have magical properties, and legend has it that those who reach the top of the mountain will reach enlightenment and change the course of their life itself. Kaytu is a pandaren monk who lives on the mountain whose job it is to help guide climbers on their journeys to the top. He knows better than anyone that everyone and everything has a story to tell. Legacy is new keyword that gives you a second Hero Power with the base card's effect when you play it. It expires after one use, but if you play more Legacy cards, their Legacy effects will stack onto your existing Legacy Hero Power. The mountain range also has stories to tell all around it, with each class getting a Sidequest that summons a location when it's completed.

Jackpot at Casino Rafaam (Set 3) - After the League of EVIL disbanded, Rafaam sought new job opportunities, and opened his own casino in the process. Casino Rafaam became the most popular gambling paradise across all the lands, though given Rafaam's past evil nature, we wouldn't put it past him if this was part of a scheme. As you'd expect from a casino run by Rafaam though, the fairness is a bit questionable. Cards with Marked are visible to you while they're on top of your deck. From here, you can either pay 1 mana to draw them or play them straight from the top of your deck as though it were in your hand. If you're feeling really lucky, there's a secondary Raise mechanic which puts an effect into a prize pot and if you win, you get the effects Raised into the prize pot. There are only a few of these cards, but feel free to use them if you feel like high-rolling.

Where is Rafaam in this? He's not only running the casino, but he's also gathered some of his Ethereal friends to help run the place up. Ethereals are a new minion type coming to Hearthstone in this set. As traders and collectors of all sorts of weird items, Ethereals are largely about giving you extra cards. Lots of Ethereals have effects that draw cards or create them into your hand, and if a card was put there specifically by an Ethereal, it may have an additional synergistic bonus.

How about you? What are you all doing?