Blizzard Announces Grand Tournament Expansion For Hearthstone

Blizzard hyped a July 22 Hearthstone announcement for some time, and the reveal didn't disappoint. The Grand Tournament is the next Hearthstone Expansion, adding 130 new cards and introducing several new synergies and even a new keyword to the game.

The story of the expansion is that, after the Argent Tournament and the Lich King's defeat, the tournament organizers decided to make further use of the tournament ground, but things haven't gone quite as expected, with champions from all over Azeroth showing up and throwing things into chaos.

In his address from the Foundry in San Francisco, Game Director Eric Dodds said that one of the main thrusts of the expansion was to have more cards that interacted with hero powers, and that certainly was the case for several of the cards he showed off:

In addition, there's a new keyword, Inspire, that activates every time a player uses his or her hero power:

But wait, there's more!

In a game streamed during the cast, we also caught glimpses of a few other cards, such as a mage secret that resummons a dead minion with a minion of the same cost and a minion that improves the mage's hero power by one damage. As with Goblins and Gnomes, Blizzard will keep revealing cards on a regular basis on the expansion's website.

The Grand Tournament will be available next month. Starting next week, you can pre-order 50 packs at a reduced price, to be delivered when the expansion goes live. Otherwise, pricing and packaging is identical to previous sets.