To celebrate the launch of Hearthstone’s Perils in Paradise, we sat down with the developers at Blizzard HQ to learn everything there is to know about the new expansion. Perils in Paradise is Hearthstone’s 30th expansion, and it comes with 145 brand-new cards when it launches this Wednesday, July 24.
Pack your bags for a trip to the beautiful Spiral Isle as Perils of Paradise takes Hearthstone players to Azeroth’s most exciting new getaway, the Marin. After years of adventuring, fan favourite scoundrel Marin the Fox has found life’s true treasure: a little slice of Paradise. He’s opened up a new resort, and everyone’s invited. It has sightseeing Tourists, Locations you’ll want to visit, again and again, fancy Drinks, and a few scoundrels and scallywags.
“We all know what it’s like to have great vacations or sketchy vacations and in this case, there’s pirate’s everywhere, it’s a pretty sketchy vacation,”
– Tyler Bielman, Game Director
New Keyword: Tourist
While building your deck, including a Tourist adds the deckbuilding interface of a second class’s cards from Perils in Paradise, allowing you to mix any number of those cards into your deck as though you were playing that class as well. Each class has a Legendary Tourist, and each Tourist gets to visit a particular specified class. No vacation hopping—you can only put one Tourist in your deck at a time. We asked Game Director Tyler Bielman to share his excitement about the expansion’s unique new feature:
“The Tourist mechanic is pretty incredible,” enthused Tyler Bielman, “It is the first time you can build truly two-class decks. You have a card in each class that gives you access to the cards from another class from this set that you can then bring in. The dual-class experiments that we have done in the past have always been a little bit diluted because if we make a dual-class card, it has to feel a little bit like Class A and a little bit like Class B, and it comes off as somewhat compromised. This is truly a two-class deck you can build, and that feels pretty different I think it’s going to lead to a very exciting meta where you’re going to see archetypes that have never existed before and combinations of things that are unexpected. I think it has a chance to be a really fun opening stage of the meta. We’re really looking forward to that,”
Tasty Drinks
Perils in Paradise introduces six new refreshing Drink cards – each Drink is a spell that comes with two refills, allowing it to be cast multiple times for more flexibility with your Mana and card effects. You may recognise this mechanic from previous cards like Bunch of Bananas and Barrel of Monkeys.
Location, Location, Location
Special location cards can re-open immediately when you meet certain conditions – typically after playing a Location card, you have to wait two turns before you can use them again. Perils in Paradise, however, introduces new cards like Hiking Trail, which can be used immediately after gaining armour or Parrot Sanctuary, which can be used again after playing a Battlecry Minion.
During our time at Blizzard HQ in Irvine, California, we also met with the Diablo IV team to learn about the all-new Spiritborn class. You can read more about the new class and upcoming expansion, Vessel of Hatred, right here.
