To the delight of everyone, with the possible exception of Monk mains, Hearthstone’s next expansion will finally add Death Knight as a playable class. Blizzard has just announced that the new set, Mar
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(Image credit: Blizzard)
To the delight of everyone, with the possible exception of Monk mains, Hearthstone’s next expansion will finally add Death Knight as a playable class. Blizzard has just announced that the new set, March of the Lich King, launches on December 6, and contains a whopping 203 new cards. That number is so high (sets are usually ~135 cards) partly because it includes 32 free core cards for Death Knight. In fact, the initial Death Knight collection comprises 68 cards—a substantial bump over the 45 that Demon Hunter, the last new class, launched with.
The starting Death Knight hero will, of course, be Arthas Menethil. There must always be a Lich King, and for WoW fans there’s nobody more iconic Arthas. Death Knight also has a bigger collection of cards than Demon Hunter did at launch because it actually functions like several classes in one. And the reason for that is runes.
Leaning into how Death Knights use runes as resources in WoW, building a Death Knight deck means selecting cards according to their runic alignment. There are three types of runes which appear on Death Knight cards: Blood (red), Frost (blue), and Unholy (green). Death Knight cards either have no rune or between one and three of a given type. Take a look at the picture below and you’ll see that Patchwerk is a legendary minion with a single Blood rune, whereas Frostwyrm’s Fury is a spell that has three Frost runes, and Battlefield Necromancer is a double unholy Rune spell.
Note that, for this expansion at least, no cards have multiple different coloured runes. (Image credit: Blizzard)
The number of runes on a card matters because your Death Knight deck must be built according to a preset combination of three runes. You choose that combination by slotting three runes into the deck at the start, which then dictates the kind of cards you can include. So to include Frostwyrm’s Fury you would need to dedicate all three slots to Frost, but to include Patchwerk you just need to assign a single Blood rune. The upshot is that Death Knight decks function differently to all other Hearthstone classes because their class cards have an additional restriction.
Your opponent won’t know which flavour of Death Knight deck you’re playing until they’ve seen multiple cards and deduced the rune combination
The benefit, from a design point of view, is that cards with two and three runes tend to be powerful and very synergistic with their corresponding play style. You might go for a ‚triple Blood‘ deck (which will tend towards being very slow and controlling), or build a more tempo-orientated mix of spells and small minions by picking ‚double Frost, single Unholy‘, or some other combination of runes entirely. Your opponent won’t know which flavour of Death Knight deck you’re playing until they’ve seen multiple cards and deduced the rune combination, which is likely to make mulliganing against Death Knight a real challenge.
