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, Shattershard Turret, and Arkonite Defense Crystal die, your Starship will be an 8/10 minion with Taunt, Divine Shield, Rush, Windfury and Deathrattle: Gain 6 Armor. As you can see, those can quickly stack up to some impressive numbers.

Until you launch your Starship, it can’t be interacted with like for example Sargeras, the Destroyer‘s Portal – players can’t target 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. Those classes will get their own unique Starship Pieces as well as one card that comes with an extra effect if you’re building a Starship.

Additionally, Starships for those 6 classes will have unique names and artworks too (the other 5 classes will share the same, Neutral Starship). You can find a full list below (they all function the same in game):

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).

The main mechanic of Draenei is “The next Draenei you play does X”. There’s no special requirement like with many other minion types – they don’t have to be played on the following turn (like Elementals), you don’t need to have another Draenei in your hand (like Dragons) etc. It’s a simple mechanic, but most of the instances have some very clear synergies. Using some of the examples above – Ingenious Artificer can be used to summon Arkwing Pilot and refresh 4 of the 7 mana spent. Doing so means that you have much more mana to immediatley trigger Pilot’s Spellburst multiple times and flood the board with copies of it. Similarly, Expedition Sergeant has great synergy with Warrior’s Draenei package, most notably with Exarch Akama who makes the rest of your board be able to attack again.

There are also many Draenei with no specific synergies that are just generic cards in the expansion (but that’s pretty much expected because that’s how other minion types work too).

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.

The expansion doesn’t put a massive focus on Spellburst, but that might be expected given that it’s a returning keyword, not a brand-new one. Most of the classes have at least one Spellburst card, usually one that combos quite well with the rest of their kit, including a few Starship synergies.