Update: Festival of Legends expansion is now live! Enjoy!
Festival of Legends is the first expansion of Year of the Wolf (2023). E.T.C. is gathering the greatest musicians from all over Azeroth to put on the biggest music festival in history. From rock to hip-hop, and from metal to pop, every class is putting on a show. Start tuning your instruments and working on your harmonies, the next act is the Festival of Legends!
The expansion will add 145 new cards (with mini-set adding 38 more at a later date), as well as a variety of new mechanics and synergies. Learn everything you should know about it below!
Release Time
Let’s start with the most important – when does the new expansion launch? For years now, Hearthstone sets have had a simultaneous launch across the globe, so Festival of Legends should be out on every server at the same time. However, the time it launches for you depends on where you live – some countries from the Eastern Hemisphere will have it out on April 12 instead of the “official” April 11 release date because of time zone differences. Here are some examples:
- 10 AM Pacific Time on Tuesday (April 11)
- 1 PM Eastern Time on Tuesday (April 11)
- 7 PM Central European Time on Tuesday (April 11)
- 2 AM Korean Standard Time on Wednesday (April 12)
- 3 AM Australian Eastern Time on Wednesday (April 12)
Since the expansion was already pre-loaded a week ago, you won’t need to download a big patch when it launches. It also means that mobile release should happen exactly at the same time as PC. Just make sure to open the game early and download any patches if you haven’t been playing lately.
Freebies
When new expansion launches, players are usually greeted with some free stuff, like packs, free Legendaries etc. Here’s what we know so far about March of the Lich King:
- Most of the freebies this time were available before the expansion’s launch, through Twitch drops. Players could earn over 10 Festival of Legends packs by watching different expansion-related streams like Theorycraftings and Live(ish) Concert. We tried to cover all of them when possible.
- E.T.C., Band Manager was given out as a free Festival of Legends Legendary in Patch 25.6. If you haven’t picked him up yet, just log in and he’ll be waiting for you in-game.
- Pozzik, Audio Engineer is unlocked on Level 1 of the new Rewards Track, which means that you will get it as soon as the expansion releases.
- A new in-game event (Legends take the Stage) will launch a week after the expansion, offering two card packs and four Signature Cards (2x Cowbell Soloist, 2x Void Virtuoso) for free, as long as you finish the event Quests. The event should last for 2 weeks.
- Not exactly “free”, but if you plan to buy a Tavern Pass, you can get a Diamond version of Heartbreaker Hedanis on Level 2. While Tavern Pass is mostly about XP boosts and Cosmetics, the extra Legendary you get at the start is also a nice bonus.
- The first few levels of rewards track require almost no XP, so they are meant to be unlocked nearly instantly as you start playing. You will unlock three extra Festival of Legends packs over the first 9 levels, which you should easily be able to achieve on Day 1 (only 1550 XP is required to get there). You can get even further if you kept your Weekly and Daily Quests to get a jump start on the new rewards track.
Year of the Wolf Rotation
Year of the Hydra is coming to an end – when Festival of Legends launches, it will be replaced by Year of the Wolf. Standard rotation is always a massive event, its impact on the meta can’t be overstated.
This time we’re losing all of the 2021 expansions and their mini-sets, as well as 73 cards from the Core Set – a total of 583 cards will now be only playable in Wild. Among them, there are a lot of staples that we’ve seen in meta decks since their release. Those cards disappearing means that multiple archetypes will cease to exist, which should, in turn, create space for new decks to rise up.
You can read more about Year of the Wolf, including a roadmap for the new Standard Year here.
Alternatively, if you want to check out which key cards each class is losing with in-depth analysis (including predictions on whether each of their decks will stay playable after the rotation), we also have you covered with this series of articles:
- Part 1 – Neutral Cards
- Part 2 – Demon Hunter, Druid, Hunter, Mage, Paladin
- Part 3 – Priest, Shaman, Rogue, Warlock, Warrior
New Keyword/Mechanic – Finale
Finale is a new mechanic in Festival of Legends expansion. It’s actually quite simple – it triggers when you spend all of your remaining mana on a card. For example, let’s say that you want to play Ghost Writer and triggers its extra effect, but you’re at 7 mana. You first need to spend 2 mana or something and then play the 5 mana minion to trigger its Finale.
Finale is an interesting mechanic that seems to be mostly balanced by the fact that you can only really play one Finale card per turn (other than performing some mana restore shenanigans). Or rather, you can play multiple, but only one will trigger the extra effect. Finale cards don’t synergize with each other and you don’t want to run too many because playing them without the extra effect will generally be a really low value/tempo play.
New Class Keyword/Mechanic – Overheal
It’s not common for a class to get a unique keyword in an expansion, but it looks like we have one this time! Overheal is a mechanic exclusive to Priest and it really fits their general gameplay theme. While the effect is released in this expansion, it will be an evergreen keyword featured in the Core Set and future expansions.
Overheal triggers (as the name suggests) when you heal the minion above its max health. For example – Heartbreaker Hedanis has 8 health, but will start with 4 because of the Battlecry. If you now restore 5 or more health to it, you will trigger its effect. Then it should trigger for every time you heal it again at full health.
Other Themes/Mechanics
The expansion also features a variety of smaller, non-keyworded mechanics:
Music Genres
Each class will have a different music genre tied to them. The genre will be referenced in the general class theme for the expansion, such as the card names and artwork.
Legendary Musicians and Songs
Each class will get a unique musician (Legendary minion) and their most popular song (Legendary spell).
Instrument Weapons
Every class gets a special weapon with Deathrattle that improves when the weapon is equipped.
Harmonic/Dissonant Spells
Harmonic/Dissonant is a series of spells that swap their effect between two values each turn. The effects aren’t necessarily stronger or weaker, they simply might come in handy in different scenarios.
Signature Cards Redesign
Signature cards were first released in March of the Lich King expansion, but they weren’t received very well. Most of the players felt like they were a missed opportunity – while having a “full artwork” on display is a great idea, that expansion’s cards were bleak and pretty boring. Blizzard has committed to changing that sometime after their release, and it looks like they delivered this expansion.
New Signature Cards will feature bright-colored artwork and animations. They will also have thinner frames and no card text at all – it will be shown by a tooltip when you hover over the card. This way the new full artwork can be the center of new cards. Following Patch 26.0, Signature Cards opened in card packs will also become disenchantable at the rate of Golden cards (but still not craftable, because Blizzard wants them to be more unique).
You can find all of the reworked Festival of Legends Signature Cards here.
New Rewards Track
The rewards track, first introduced in Darkmoon Faire, is getting another refresh. When Festival of Legends launches, all players will get reset to Level 1 and will work their way up through the track again. If you were playing the game last expansion, then you pretty much know everything you need to know, since the rewards track looks exactly the same content-wise (of course, the exact packs, cards etc. you get are different, but they come in the same amounts and rarities). Tavern Pass is slightly different, but overall comparable. And in case you’re new to the game or returning after a long break, you can learn more about the track and find a full list of rewards in this post.
Your daily & weekly Quests will NOT reset when the new expansion launches. It’s not a bad idea to save them for after the launch to give you a nice boost through the early levels of the rewards track. The only situations in which I’d recommend finishing all your Quests under the old rewards track is if you have Tavern Pass right now, but you don’t plan to buy a new one after launch (this way you’ll get 20% extra XP), or you haven’t finished the previous rewards track and you’re close to leveling for some good rewards. In the second case, if you want to min-max, try to hit a new level on your current rewards track and stop there because any “excess” XP won’t carry over. Ultimately this is not a big deal and no matter what you do, you should come up with a similar amount of rewards in a long run.
Arena Rotation
New expansions also come with new Arena rotations. This time it will be a simple Standard format. Here’s a full list of sets that will be available in Arena once Festival of Legends launches:
- Core
- Voyage to the Sunken City
- Murder at Castle Nathria
- March of the Lich King
- Path of Arthas
- Festival of Legends
If you have no active Arena run, start one now! If you have an active run, DO NOT FINISH IT! Preferably play until two losses and stay there. When rotation happens, your run will get forcefully retired, but you will get a free Arena Ticket as compensation. Keep in mind, however, that Arena entries usually close a few hours (or even longer) before the expansion’s launch, so be sure to create one as soon as you can. If you’re already seeing the error, I’m afraid that it’s too late.
New & Returning Players Experience
If you are a new player, or haven’t been playing the game in a while (120+ days to be exact), you might be happy to hear that there are some extra goodies waiting for you once you log in. You get two things – an extra Quest Chain with some nice rewards and a free Standard deck of your choice. Those free decks are updated every expansion, but notably DO NOT include any cards from the latest set (so, for example, Festival of Legends decks include cards from up to the March of the Lich King). However, they are a nice start and can serve you early into the new set before you can open enough packs or craft something else.
An extra feature added recently is that you no longer have to pick your free deck right away. You get access to all 6 for a week, and only after that week passes you have to decide to keep one. It means that you have enough time to test all of them and see which one fits you the best.
Sadly we don’t have a list of Patch 26.0 new/returning players decks yet. There was a mistake and they got updated in Patch 25.6, but included Core Set cards that are about to rotate out. Then when patch 26.0 released, they got bugged completely and you couldn’t pick any. But once you log-in after, assuming you are eligible, you should see them. And since you don’t need to pick any right away, you can test all of them first easily.
New Festival of Legends Decks
Don’t know what decks to try out when the expansion launches? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Once the expansion launches, we’ll spend the first few days mostly adding new decks from streamers & pro players. We usually start adding new decks roughly an hour into the expansion and post a few dozen of them in the first 24 hours.
We’ll be gathering early meta decks for Festival of Legends in this post. We’ll also publish them on our social media, so if you follow us, you should have a pretty constant stream of new decks to play.
