I'm really digging the Disco Gatsby vibe they're going for

I appreciate that they named it one night in karazhan if only for the Chess reference.

It's really funny how this is going to be like fun-times party Medivh, when the Warcraft movie came out pretty recently with grimdark I've-become-corrupted-by-The-One-Ring Medivh. I mean, he'll turn out to be a dick somehow, but the tonal difference is still pretty funny.

So similar to League of Explorers, this is an adventure not based on a raid, right? Never played WoW, but I have a hard time imagining a raid set during a dinner party at Karazhan.

Also, kinda surprised it took them this long to make a 1-mana 2/2. They jumped right to the 1-mana 2/3, which is kinda overkill and way too powerful, but thankfully it's not in standard anymore. Also, I'm glad they've realized that Discover is the single best mechanic they've come up with (that works in a digital card game but would be nightmarishly difficult to support in a traditional paper CCG), and it keeps making appearances in future sets. R.I.P. Inspire; it could've been good, but sooooo many of the cards were overcosted other than Savage Combatant.

@bisonhero: No, this is 100% a raid, which was sorta disappointing after the introduction it had. They introduced it as a new take on Karazhan, and the first wing is mostly something new and interesting, but then everything else is basically re-creating the WoW raid encounters in Hearthstone. I don't really know what to think of it. Either they couldn't think of a way to do the first parts of the raid (which admittedly are sorta bland) so they came up with the 70s party theme thing to skip over it, or they ran out of ideas for their take on it really quickly. The whole theme almost comes off as being disingenuous.

@bisonhero: Karazhan was a raid in The Burning Crusade expansion.

There is actually a dinner party during the raid, hosted by Medivh's steward Moroes - who at this point is undead and all his guests are also undead. Medivh is also long dead by the time you get there and doesn't actually appear in the raid other than his "spirit" during what's know as the chess event boss fight.

Think of Karazhan a bit like the castle in Beauty and The Beast - except instead of everyone having been turned into living objects, everyone is dead.

@jesus_phish: @ares42: Bummer. Having skipped WoW, I couldn't give 2 fucks about them recreating raids in the adventures, and honestly most of the Hearthstone playerbase seems like people that just heard it was a good digital CCG and not WoW players, so their continued aping of raids seems unnecessary.

@bisonhero: Well if you look at it that way, aping their raids a bit makes more sense no? If most of their player base are people who just like the CCG part and have no reverence for the source material (which I don't know if that's true), they're just going to be happy with new cards and mechanics coming out for it. Where as people like me, who play WoW but don't actually play Heartstone but has considered it for reasons such as them aping raids to see how they turn those encounters etc into a card game.

You're already playing it. I'm not, but the more they do this sort of thing the more likely I am to maybe try it out to see the source material used in a different way.

@jesus_phish: Maybe they need to pick better raids. All I got out of Naxxramas was "Kel'Thuzad has a bunch of different areas with different minions, there is no storyline to any of this", and then Blackrock Mountain wasn't much beyond "first you're working for Nefarian to take down Ragnaros, then you eventually fight Nefarian." The League of Explorers expansion was a lot more creative and I liked the structure of it a lot more.

@bisonhero:The LoE wasn't modeled after a raid but after different areas/dungeons of Azeroth and after a quest chain itself. Being honest with you, most of the raids in WoW don't tell self contained stories but rather finish off stories that quests and dungeons outside of the raid introduce.

Most progression goes like this. Quests which lead to dungeons which lead to the finale in the raid. The raids are almost always just a bunch of dudes in wings or along a fixed path which lead up to the end boss. Defeating the final boss usually finishes the story of that region or patch or expansion.

Complaining about storyline in a CCG as well as the use of existing Warcraft set pieces is an odd stance to me.

If you dislike the Warcraft theme and look for more story in your gaming experience in general this is probably the wrong game/genre for you.