So last month it was officially announced that the Grand Tournament would be the next expansion for Blizzard’s popular Hearthstone game. Since then new cards have been slowly revealed over the course of the past few weeks. However at Gamescom, Blizzard revealed not only some new cards and features, but yet another new mechanic called Joust.
Jousting
Joust is the second new mechanic to be revealed for the upcoming Hearthstone expansion. This is pretty much what it sounds like, a one-on-one battle. How it plays out is a bit different though. Essentially the initiating player must reveal a higher mana costing card than your opponent. There are only two possible outcomes here, either your card is the winner and the secondary effect relating to the Joust mechanic will activate, or your opponents wins an you have nothing activate.
Depending on what the outcome is, here is what will happen:
– If the minion is lower cost, or the two are of equal cost, the secondary effect will not activate.
– If the initiating player has no minion left to reveal, they will automatically lose the Joust. If neither player has minions left to reveal, the initiating player will lose the Joust. If the opponent has no minion left to reveal, but the initiating player does, the initiating player will win the Joust by default.
Jousting uses your card’s base mana cost. This means any modifier to the mana cost of a card will not take affect during a Joust. Jousting reveals a minion from each player’s unused deck. The minions are selected at random, not by order of placement in the deck.
Player Ranked Rewards
Blizzard will also be introducing new Ranked Play rewards for players to try and earn. The highest rank you earn during the current season will be displayed in your Quest log. Like usual, the minimum rank to reach to get any type of a reward is Rank 20. If you reach Rank 20, you’ll receive a chest with new rewards at the end of the season. The higher your rank, the better the prizes in the chest.
Chests will contain the monthly ranked card back like always as well as additional rewards like Arcane Dust and Golden Cards. However any ranks achieved in a season higher than Rank 5 will all see the same rewards, so chests don’t improve past that rank.
New Cards
So far 20 new cards have been revealed during Gamescom up until right now, two of which are Legendary cards. The cards below are the newest ones revealed in the last day or so. If you want to see every new card revealed up until now for the Grand Tournament, PCGamer has a great gallery of each one.
