The next release for Hearthstone will be a 100-card expansion, Blizzard have indicated. It’ll begin a new cadence of single player updates and expansions for one of the best PC games of 2014 so far, set to play out over the course of the next year.
“I think we’re going to mix it up a little bit with this next release, which will be our first expansion,” production director Jason Chayes told Polygon. “It will have a lot more cards. We’re talking about more than 100. We are going to have a central theme for how that will all fit together.”
Chayes said Blizzard had been discussing the pacing of new updates for Hearthstone – in an effort to find a compromise that satisfied existing players without overwhelming newcomers.
Hearthstone’s first add-on was Curse of Naxxramas. The single-player campaign was rolled out across five weeks beginning in July, and added a total of 30 new cards to the game. It also brought on Hearthstone’s strongest week ever.
“We could imagine a future where we do a combination of [single-player] adventures like Naxxramas and expansions kind of intermixed, to have different sorts of experiences going out over the course of a year,” said Chayes.
Beyond that, Chayes suggested the possibility of new modes. But Blizzard are wary of expanding the unusually accessible CCG to the point where it becomes unwieldy.
“If we do reach that point because there are just that many cards in the available set, one of the things we definitely want to make sure of is that there are ways to continue playing with all of your cards, and that it feels really good to be participating in these various modes,” he said.
A proper expansion will be welcome news to the eSports faithful among Hearthstone’s 20 million players. But what about you? Have you got your head around the game’s existing cards yet?