Hearthstone's troll-packed Rastakhan's Rumble expansion is live
Rumble in the jungle. Oooh, ice cream!
Start working on your questionable faux-Jamaican accent, because Hearthstone is hamming it up like it's the nineties in its latest expansion today. Rastakhan's Rumble is themed around a once-in-a-lifetime arena brawl to decide the next great troll champion. This means new cards, a new keyword (Overkill!), wrestling jokes, sketchy invocations of voodoo, dinosaurs, ticket scalpers and ice cream. All the cartoon nonsense that defines Warcraft's world, even if some Blizzard insist it's about angst and elven war-crimes. As always, there's some free launch-day goodies to claim too.
As with other Hearthstone expansions, launch day brings the cards, and the single-player content comes later. On December 13th, they'll be rolling out the Rumble Run mode, a new troll-themed solo campaign, where you play as an arena hopeful looking for a team and bashing your way through the tournament. Logging in today nets you a generous six boosters from the new set, two Spirit cards and one of the Legendary Loa cards. Not bad, but I'll probably not be playing too much until the new solo stuff is live.
The new cards - 135, listed here - are an interestingly mixed bunch. It's not quite as wacky as the previous Boomsday Project expansion, which included some real Hail Mary cards that could throw an entire match into chaos. There's some fun ideas though, like the Dozing Marksman, a two-mana summon who comes in as a 0/4 card until damaged, and then gains four attack. Some of the cards are just outlandish, like Shirvallah, the Tiger, who is very beefy, but costs costs 25 mana. Thankfully that price goes down by one for each point of mana you've spent on spells that match.
The new keyword, Overkill, activates whenever you use a card with it to do more damage than is necessary to kill a minion. Some Overkills let you attack again, others summon minions - it's about pushing an advantage. Given that there's a ton of cards in this expansion that spam up the board with 1/1 minions, it's not hard to see how they've set up deliberate Overkill fodder to escalate the match. Fits the over-the-top (if culturally wonky) theme of this expansion, even if there's not as many 'roll the dice, eat half your deck' cards as the previous outing.
The Rastakhan's Rumble expansion is live now and giving away its usual launch-day goodies. Hearthstone remains free-to-play, and can be found on its official page here.