What Does Year 2025 Look Like for Hearthstone Based on the Warcraft Direct?

Warcraft Direct may not have quite captured the magic of Blizzcon, but when it comes to announcements, we got the full Blizzcon treatment for the Warcraft franchise. Player housing coming to World of Warcraft, Warcraft 3 Reforged finally delivering most of its original promises (no reworked cinematics though), and Hearthstone… Yeah, what was announced for Hearthstone, and what does it all mean?

Before I study the context of the Hearthstone announcements in full, one practical tip: you can actually redeem the Twitch drops multiple times! The drops are still active for four weeks, and if you watch 20 minutes of a World of Warcraft stream, a Hearthstone stream, and a Warcraft Rumble stream, you will get the drops three times. That’s six packs instead of just two.

Hearthstone: Heroes of StarCraft

It is going to be a cross-franchise time in January 2025! The next Hearthstone mini-set will be completely focused on a different universe, that of StarCraft. It will be a bigger – and more expensive – mini-set with 49 cards that will bring StarCraft into Hearthstone. The three StarCraft races are each aligned with multiple Hearthstone classes and will feature multi-class cards, including a Hero card:

• Zerg – Sarah Kerrigan Hero: Death Knight, Demon Hunter, Hunter, and Warlock
• Protoss – High Templar Artanis Hero: Druid, Mage, Priest, and Rogue
• Terran – Jim Raynor Hero: Paladin, Shaman, and Warrior

This is not the first time Hearthstone visits one of the other Blizzard franchises, but it is by far the biggest such incursion. Battlegrounds had a Diablo event, and Mercenaries features Diablo and Tyrael as playable heroes permanently. But this time, another universe is coming to the main game mode itself.

There is little doubt in my mind that this move, like Hearthstone itself, has drawn inspiration from Magic: The Gathering. If you have not kept up with Magic in the past few years, you are in for a surprise, because Magic is now a wild mix of different worlds and franchises.

Magic – Universes Beyond

The development of cross-franchise Magic products may be interesting as a possible future for Hearthstone.

It all started in 2017 with some rather innocent promo cards for a Hasbro event. Hasbro is the owner of Wizards of the Coast, who make Magic: The Gathering. Just three special Magic cards that featured Transformers, NERF, and Dungeons & Dragons, three other Hasbro brands. As promo cards, these were not legal to play in tournaments, they were just a collector’s item for the event. A similar set of three promo cards was repeated in 2019 with three My Little Pony themed cards. Still nothing that you could use in an official game of Magic.

The first cross-franchise Magic set that was legal for tournament play was The Walking Dead in 2020. This is another Hasbro franchise, and it is only legal in Eternal formats (the equivalent of Wild in Hearthstone). For a long time, Wizards of the Coast maintained that any cross-franchise sets would not be legal in Standard.

Despite their limited eligibility, more and more cross-franchise sets of various sizes were added to Magic. There were three other franchises featured in 2021, four in 2022, eight in 2023, and another eight in 2024. By now, most of these franchises are not Hasbro’s own, such as The Lord of the Rings, Fallout, and Monty Python.

Peak Universes Beyond will be reached next year, as new sets will have the full Magic set status, including being legal to play in Standard tournaments. The first such set will be Final Fantasy, and the second one will be SpongeBob SquarePants. I’m not kidding.

It would have been hard for Blizzard not to notice these changes to Magic. The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle Earth from 2023 is the best-selling Magic set of all time with over $200 million in sales, and Magic is printing more and more money at over $1 billion in sales annually. Hasbro expected Magic revenues to decline this year, but they have been growing all year instead. It is still possible that they cannot match The Lord of the Rings’ holiday season performance from last year, but money just keeps pouring in. Hasbro also expects further revenue growth next year. Do you know why? Because they plan to expand their Universes Beyond lineup.

More and more people are being introduced to Magic through these other franchises and the player base is growing. At the same time, there are concerns that Magic is losing its identity, but so far, the number of people quitting has been smaller than the number of new people coming in. If we draw some comparisons to Activision, they killed some of their franchises through over-saturation, such as Guitar Hero and Skylanders. On the other hand, Call of Duty is doing fine despite pushing out one release after another. Which way are things going to turn out for Magic? Impossible to say yet.

Hearthstone’s Cross-Franchise Future?

So far, the only concern Hasbro has displayed about Universes Beyond is that their licensing costs are increasing, which reduces their profits. They have to pay to use all these other franchises in Magic. Hearthstone is starting out with StarCraft, which is a Blizzard IP, so it costs them nothing to do so. However, they could potentially expand to many, many other worlds without paying a cent. Blizzard is part of Activision Blizzard King, who hold a huge gaming IP portfolio. They are also part of Microsoft and Xbox, which gives them access to even more franchises. I would not expect an Office-themed Hearthstone set with Clippy in it, but you never know.

Expanding to other franchises is not inevitable, either. The StarCraft mini-set is bigger than usual and will also cost more. If this works out, Blizzard may be able to teach us that mini-sets are now bigger and cost more, and go back to doing Warcraft franchise mini-sets, complete with the new size and price tag. This is not necessarily a bad thing either because mini-sets have generally been less impactful for the meta than one could hope. More cards gives more ways to affect the meta, and this could end up being a positive experience, if the team can deliver on a fresh meta and the price tag is not too high.

As a matter of fact, we received the themes and names of all the Hearthstone sets for 2025 in the Warcraft Direct. We have never received such detailed information about upcoming sets this early. The previous roadmaps have included some vague teaser graphics of the upcoming sets at best, but this time we got the whole scoop.

First, we will head Into the Emerald Dream for a showdown between Druids and the forces of Old Gods, then back to Un’Goro crater in search of the lost Tortollan The Shrouded City, and finally we will travel with Chromie to alternative realities to recruit new versions of iconic Warcraft heroes, culminating in a battle against Murozond at The End of Time.

This set of expansions seems more closely connected to Warcraft lore than some of the journeys Hearthstone has taken over the past couple of years. The Great Dark Beyond was already thematically closer to World of Warcraft, especially its Legion expansion, and this trend seems to continue. Emerald Dream has appeared multiple times in World of Warcraft, we have traveled with Chromie multiple times as well, and the fight against Murozond in End Time was part of the Cataclysm expansion. More Warcraft-focused first set, followed by a Hearthstone-nostalgic second set, and another more Warcraft-themed third set looks like a fun overall plan for 2025. It seems unlikely that the alternative versions of Warcraft heroes would bring us Grand Admiral Thrall or Jainadriel, so we should be reasonably safe from other IPs. For now. Magic slowly leaned into them, and money has been pouring in. Blizzard is now gently testing the waters with StarCraft and taking a short break after to measure the results.

Underground Arena – More Deck-Building for Arena

Coming in the first half of 2025, Arena will get its first major revamp. I have always been hoping for more deck-building for Arena, or a new limited format with more deck-building in it, similar to the limited formats in other card games where you draft more cards than you can fit into your deck and have the opportunity to take more risks during drafting while still ending up with a playable deck. Some of that is coming, although not quite the full traditional limited format experience.

Arena will be split into two modes: Normal and Underground.

Both modes will have player ratings added, so matchmaking is going to change. As of now, the matchmaking is based on your current Arena run record, so at 2-0 you’re meeting others who are at 2-0. In the future, Normal Arena will have skill-based matchmaking whereas Underground Arena will keep the current matchmaking system. This means that Normal Arena will be more difficult for strong players and more forgiving for new players – an experience where most games should feel closer than they do now.

Normal Arena will have shorter runs than the current Arena, whereas Underground Arena will have longer runs. It is a little unclear whether longer refers to longer than the current Arena or simply longer than the new Normal Arena. In an environment where each game is against an equally strong player, shorter runs make a lot of sense. Big win streaks should be unlikely, anyway.

Underground Arena will also have a new Re-Draft on loss feature: after you lose, you can re-draft five cards and swap any of those into your deck while removing cards you no longer want there. This way, Underground Arena will add more deck-building to the mode, but it happens mid-run instead of right at the start.

In a traditional card game draft, you sit around a table with a bunch of people, each of you opens a pack, picks a card from it, and passes it along to the next person. The packs travel around the table until they are empty. This can then be repeated a couple of times, so everyone gets to be the first one to pick a card from some packs, and the last one to get whatever is left from others. In this kind of draft, you end up with roughly twice as many cards as you need to build a deck. This means that you have room to explore various paths during drafting before committing to what your deck will ultimately look like. Of course, when drafting from packs with other people, you also want to pay attention to what others are picking from the packs and what options are more easily available to you. Hearthstone Arena has traditionally had neither the exploratory nature nor the social nature of a traditional card game draft.

You’ll still be picking cards from choices presented by the computer in Underground Arena, so the drafting part is still not social. There are no signals to read or give. There may be some more room for exploration though. You are still stuck with every card that you pick for your first game, but should you lose a game, you can go back, re-draft some cards, and make changes. I think the format will still be focused on picking the strongest generic cards, as the probability to find synergistic pieces from your re-draft remains low. It will still be an interesting twist to bring some more choices for players. Personally, I will be left hoping that they use the technology built for Underground Arena to bring even more flexible limited formats to the game later.

Is 2025 Going to Be a Good Year for Hearthstone?

The Hearthstone segment of Warcraft Direct managed to simultaneously reveal a lot and provide only a little. Yes, Hearthstone will get new expansions and new mini-sets. I knew that without Warcraft Direct. Well, I guess there was always a chance that they cut the mini-sets to add a fourth full expansion, and now we know that it will not happen in 2025. The expansion themes sound fun, but does it really matter to me what the theme of an expansion that comes in 8 months will be? Ultimately, it is the cards themselves that matter, and they will matter when I get to play with them, not a year in advance.

So we’re mostly left with two things: the first cross-franchise mini-set and the Underground Arena.

Cross-franchise cards are a major opportunity for the game to reach new players, Magic has shown how successful they can be. For existing players, they offer but little. Again, it is more about how fun the cards are to play with than their names.

The Arena revamp splits Arena into a more new-player-friendly Normal Arena and a more hardcore Underground Arena. Even with these changes, Underground Arena still does not scratch my itch for traditional limited-format gameplay. For people who enjoy the current Arena more, it can be an interesting improvement and a new challenge. It is the biggest thing coming to Hearthstone in 2025.

After the failures of Mercenaries and Twist, and the shutting down of Duels (it was the most successful of the three, albeit not successful enough), Blizzard’s appetite to try something completely new with Hearthstone is gone, at least for the time being. We can see this from their strategy blog post earlier this year. 2025 will be a year of fun-looking expansions, but nothing completely surprising and new that could blow your mind. Then again, games like Magic and Pokémon existed decades before Hearthstone and are still going strong, and they don’t have a wonderful new invention every year. For a card game, continued success ultimately depends on the card design. Blizzard’s ability to deliver on card design and balance will determine what the year 2025 will be like for Hearthstone.