Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment
Platform: PC, iOS, Android
Tested on: PC
Hearthstone: TITANS – Review
We have covered a few recent expansions for Blizzard’s online free-to-play card game Hearthstone recently, and even after almost ten years of updates, it seems as if the game isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. Recently, the newest big expansion was released titled TITANS, introducing the titular beings to the card game’s battlefields. While normally we don’t give a score to these expansions, we found that TITANS deserved a bit more attention thanks to some of its more fun mechanics.
The TITANS expansion sadly does not come with a short story that you can play solo. We do find this a missed opportunity, as the TITANS cards themselves would be perfectly suitable for a short story to play through, allowing you to learn the ropes or learn the newly introduced mechanics here. In TITANS it all revolves around the Titan cards, which are no ordinary cards. Titans are high-cost cards that cannot attack for the first few turns they are put on the field. These ancient behemoths will first have to play three effects, of which you can play one per turn before they can start dishing out damage like your regular creatures. This mechanic does add a bit more strategic depth to the mix, as it’s not only a matter of choosing what effects you wish to play when they are on the field, but also keeping them alive until they can start dishing out high-damage attacks.
To further complement the mechanics in this set is the newest Keyword, Forge. Forge is actually a simple mechanic, but it does add quite a bit of oomph to a few cards in the set. Forge cards can be played as regular cards, but you can also drag them to your deck to ‘Forge’ its additional effect for an additional mana cost. When opting to pay that tiny bit extra, the cards become stronger, and in some cases, the effect may be different, or even the cost may go from something you have to pay to something you gain. If you’re not immediately in a pickle, it’s sometimes interesting holding on to a few of these cards until you can pay for the extra cost to make them more powerful.
Even though the 145 new cards will certainly take you a while to collect and use, an old Keyword also makes a return, namely Magnetic. This older Keyword is actually a lot of fun, and it’s also quite cool that it’s being introduced again in the Standard format. Magnetic allows the card with Magnetic to be merged with other Mech (or in some cases, Beast) cards on the board, to fuse into a stronger card. Keep in mind, this effect will only trigger if you place the Magnetic card on the left side of a Mech card you wish to fuse with, otherwise, it will just be placed on the field as a regular unit with the effects written on the card. You cannot use a Magnetic card on a board that’s already full, as the game will still need to be able to place the card first before triggering its Magnetic effect. So keep this in mind as well, especially when you are thinking of flooding your board to apply pressure on your opponent.
As always, the artwork is very nice, even though it feels a bit less unique than the previous music-related Festival of Legends set. Even so, you’ll be treated to very traditional Warcraft art that still looks very good. There are once again golden versions of the normal set to be found, but this is often a matter of investing more into the game for shinier cards. Hearthstone still remains a very expensive game when you wish to play on a competitive level, but at the same time, this is true for most physical card games as well. All in all, the game is still a lot of fun when only playing casually, and investing only what you think it’s worth. Of course, being matched against players with deeper pockets may be at your disadvantage.
Conclusion
Even though Festival of Legends was a lot of fun when it was released a few months ago, we feel as if the TITANS expansion does shake things up a bit more with the inclusion of the Titan cards, introducing the Forge Keyword, and throwing the older Magnetic Keyword in the mix again. We had a lot of fun exploring the content, and we came up with quite a few new (less-than-optimal) deck builds. Of course, we are only casual players when it comes to the very competitive world of Hearthstone, but we still very much enjoy discovering effective deck builds, and it’s simply a lot of fun being able to play a card game with this much content without having to stockpile loads of physical cards in our home.
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