Hearthstone: Year of the Raven guide - Tournaments, Hall of Fame cards and a new hero
Our complete guide to the upcoming Year of the Raven in Hearthstone
The next season of competitive play in Hearthstone will be known as the Year of the Raven. The news was confirmed in a blog post and developer video by Blizzard a little earlier on this evening.
Right now we are at the end of the current Year of the Mammoth, so what will the Raven season bring to the game whent it commences with the first expansion of 2018?
In this article you'll find a recap of everything that's just been announced about Year of the Raven, so you can get up to speed nice and quickly. As new information is released by Blizzard, we'll add it in to this guide.
BREAKING NEWS! - A new expansion is coming! Our massive Hearthstone: The Witchwood guide contains details of the new cards, mechanics and single player content coming to the game.
Year of the Raven: Viable Sets
You can read more about Hearthstone's Standard system over at our rotation guide. To recap though, when Year of the Raven begins, you'll only be able to make decks using the following card sets:
- Basic
- Classic
- Journey to Un'Goro
- Knights of the Frozen Throne
- Kobolds and Catacombs
- 2018's first expansion
When the next two expansions - expected in August 2018 and December 2018 - are released you'll be able to add them to that list.
What about the older sets though? Well, when Year of the Raven begins, cards from the following sets will only be playable in the Wild format:
- Whispers of the Old Gods
- One Night in Karazhan
- Mean Streets of Gadgetzan
Fare thee well Jade Druid, in other words...
As for those three new expansions, Blizzard produced this cryptic image which provides some vague hints at the possible themes for this year's content (really, your guess is as good as ours on this stuff...):
Year of the Raven: Hall of Fame
More cards are being moved to the Hearthstone Hall of Fame too. These are cards from the Basic and Classic sets that are considered too powerful for the upcoming meta, and will make balancing the Standard game too difficult for the team.
Along with the three sets mentioned above, the following cards will be added to the Hall of Fame, and will only be playable in Wild.
- Ice Block
- Coldlight Oracle
- Molten Giant
Year of the Raven: Daily Quest changes
Changes are coming to the Daily Quest system as well. The team hopes that these changes will allow quests to be ticked off much more quickly. Not only that, all 40 Gold rewards are being changed to 50! Those quests rewarding more than 50 Gold will be made easier to complete.
Year of the Raven: In-game Tournaments
One of the most commonly requested features for Hearthstone is a means of organising tournaments from within the game client itself. The feature is finally coming with Year of the Raven.
The feature itself will not arrive until the middle of this year, but the team intends to iterate on the original version over time, adding new features based on community feedback.
Year of the Raven: New Hero - Lunara
A new Druid hero will be added to the game, although note that this is a purely cosmetic addition to Hearthstone. Meet Lunara:
You'll be able to unlock Lunara by winning 10 games of Hearthstone in either Standard Ranked or Casual play, and after the first expansion of 2018 has actually gone live.
The team has also made a note in this post that players will no longer be able to unlock the alternative Maiev Rogue hero once the first expansion of 2018 has been released. Time to get cracking if you've been away from the game for a little while.