The Great Dark Beyond Guide - New Hearthstone Expansion - Card Reveals, Release Date, New Mechanics, and More!

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When the demonic Burning Legion invaded their planet, the Draenei fled to the stars. Now, these “Exiled Ones” are being chased across the cosmos while they search for a new home. Build your own Starship, command the new Draenei minion type, and battle a demonic threat as you explore The Great Dark Beyond!

General Information

Release Date – November 5, 2024
145 New Cards
New Mechanic – Starships
New Minion Type – Draenei
Returning Keyword – Spellburst
Two Free Neutral Legendary Cards – Nexus-Prince Shaffar and Avatar of Hearthstone
Prince Renathal temporarily returns to Standard (until the expansion’s release).
Special Pre-Release Tavern Brawl launching on October 29.

Announcement Video

The Great Dark Beyond Key Art

New Mechanic – Starships

The main new mechanic of this expansion is Starships. Many cards in the expansion will have a “Starship Piece” keyword. Once a Starship Piece dies, a “dormant” Starship will appear on your board. You can launch your Starship for a fixed 5 mana cost no matter how many pieces you’ve added to it. Here are some example Starship pieces:

Your Starship will be a combination of all the Starship Pieces that died – adding their base stats and effects together. For example, if you had Dimensional Core and Arkonite Defense Crystal die, your Starship will be a 6/6 minion with Taunt, Divine Shield and Deathrattle: Gain 6 Armor.

Until you launch your Starship, it can’t be interacted with like for example Sargeras, the Destroyer‘s Portal – players can’t target it it, remove it etc. The only way to deal with a “dormant” Starship is Reno, Lone Ranger. After you launch it, however, it becomes a normal minion and both players can interact with it.

You can build as many Starships as you want throughout the match, but you can only work on one at a time. Once you launch the first Starship, future Pieces that die will be added to a second one (that you will have to spend 5 mana again to launch). The mechanic is sort of “how greedy do you want to get”. You can prepare one massive Starship with lots of extra keywords and effects and launch it in the late game. It’s going to be insane value for just 5 mana… but it can easily get destroyed or even stolen by the likes of Reska, the Pit Boss. Or you can use a different tactic and launch a few smaller Starships, which is going to cost you much more mana in total, but it will be impossible to counter with a single card.

While every class can build a Starship with Neutral pieces, only 6 classes will get Starship synergies of their own: Death Knight, Demon Hunter, Druid, Hunter, Rogue, and Warlock. This is akin to the recent Excavate mechanic – while every class can Excavate, only a few of them had extra synergies. Starships for those 6 classes will have unique names and artworks too (the other 5 classes will share the same, Neutral Starship).

New Minion Type – Draenei

Hearthstone is getting another minion type – this time it’s Draenei! The last minion type we got was Undead back when Death Knight was introduced in March of the Lich King (December 2022).

While it’s a bit too early to tell what kind of synergies Draenei will have (as we’ve only seen a few of them), according to the blog post, their main mechanic is giving positive effects to the next Draenei you play. I’ll update this section once we get more information.

Returning Keyword – Spellburst

Spellburst keyword was first introduced in the Scholomance Academy expansion (August 2020). Just like most of the keywords, it was mostly limited to that set, with only a couple more Spellburst cards released later. The mechanic was generally well-received by the community and some players thought that it might become evergreen. While that didn’t happen, we finally see it returning to the game.

In case you don’t remember how it works, the Spellburst effect triggers after you play the first spell. It’s a one-time effect, so playing more spells doesn’t make it go off again.

We still don’t know how many cards will include this keyword, but we’ve already seen a couple of them, including the free Legendary card given to everyone in Patch 30.6 (Nexus-Prince Shaffar). It’s safe to assume that the expansion will put a bigger focus on spells than average.