Hearthstone: Goblins Vs. Gnomes Clanking Out Next Week

That's a nice-looking Hearthstone deck you've got there. What's that, a wolf, yeah? Cool, cool. And some dogs? A load of forest friends hanging out? Great, great, lovely. Here's a thought: why not replace them with bombs and robots? Those are cool. All the cool kids do robots now.

The free-to-play card game's technowizarding expansion Goblins vs. Gnomes will launch next week, Blizzard have announced. I hope you've been saving your dust to brew up new cards, chums.

Hearthstone's first expansion (they technically call Curse of Naxxramas an "adventure") will launch on December 8th in the Americas then on the 9th in Europe and Asia. Goblins vs. Gnomes adds over 120 new cards based on the rival schools of tinkering, as well as generally rounding out the pool. As gnome and goblin tech often is in the world of Warcraft, a fair few have unpredictable random effects. Blizzard have dumped images of the cards into this gallery if you fancy a look.

Hearthstoners will be able to win cards from the expansion as usual, craft them, or buy them.

Blizzard are also rebalancing a few cards after seeing what the last expansion did to the game, they said yesterday. A future patch will increase the casting costs of Soulfire, Flare, and Gadgetzan Auctioneer by one. Blizzard explain their reasoning on each in the forum post, but it boils down to "'cause they were too powerful."