Twist is coming back soon for a massive new season: Whizbang’s Heroes! Jump right into the fun with one of 19 new heroes, each with a pre-made deck and a unique hero power and passive effect. It all starts with the start of the next season on June 1st!
What does a hero do?
In Whizbang’s Heroes, just choose your hero and play! Each character has three main characteristics: a pre-built deck, a unique character power, and a corresponding passive effect. Characters can also have different life totals. Prebuilt Hero decks don’t have to follow the normal Hearthstone deck building rules: some decks are different sizes, most decks contain a mix of cards in different classes, and many decks don’t have duplicates for more varied play. Each hero’s hero power and passive effect are designed to match the flavor and mechanics of that hero’s deck. Our goal is to make every character feel like a new class.
Unlocking characters
The June Twist season will start with 19 characters available:
- Illidan Stormrage*
- Al’Akir the Lord of the Wind*
- Arch-Villain Raphaam*
- Leeroy Jenkins*
- Kael’Thas Sunstrider**
- K’Thun**
- Nozdormu
- The Lich King
- Xirella
- Pirate Patches
- Sir Finlay Murgleton
- King Krush
- Forest Warden Omu
- Doctor Boom
- Zul’jin
- N’Zoth, the Corrupter
- Bran Bronzebeard
- Guff Runetotem
- Arfus
Each character is unlocked as long as you have the corresponding legendary character in your collection. The specific card that unlocks each character is the card that matches that character’s name (except Illidan Stormrage, unlocked by Metamorphosis in Core).
If you already have the card in your collection when the season starts, the Hero will automatically be unlocked when the season starts. If you want to unlock a certain hero that you haven’t unlocked yet, you can go directly to that card in the collection from the Twist Hero selection screen to create it. Obtaining the corresponding cards through other means, such as packs, will also unlock these characters.
*These characters are unlocked from cards in the Core, so they will be automatically unlocked for all players at the start of the season.
**These two maps were free entry rewards for older expansions. If not already unlocked, C’Thun is automatically unlocked by having the Whispers of the Old Gods pack and going to the pack open screen, and Kael’thas is automatically unlocked by having the Ashes of Outland pack and going to the open screen of the package.
Checking the details
Since each character’s deck is pre-built, you can access all the fun right from the play screen! Switch to Twist Mode from the Hearthstone screen to bring up all the selected characters – whether they’re unlocked or not. From there, you can hover over a character to see their unlock criteria. You can also select the character to see their character power, passive effect, life total, and deck list.
Click here to see a list of what each hero’s health, hero power, passive effect, and decklist will look at to kick off the June Twist season.
Heroic style
The base quality of the cards in your character’s deck will match the quality of that unlock card in your collection (Normal, Gold, Diamond, or Signed). So if you have a gold version of an unlock card, your entire deck will be gold. If you have a higher quality (Diamond or Signature), all cards that match that quality will match it, and the rest will default to Golden. Individual cards in these decks can exceed the base quality of your deck if you have a higher quality version of those particular cards in your collection. For the purposes of this deck building rule, Signature is considered a higher quality than Diamond.
Plans for a turnaround by the end of the year
One of our main goals with Twist is to provide a space to try new things that we wouldn’t necessarily try in Ranked Standard. We try things, break things, learn lessons and then do it again.
One of the things we’re trying with this season of Twist is messing with the rhythm of the balance for the mode. Whizbang characters have variable health that we can quickly adjust, so we plan to make weekly adjustments to character health to respond to the evolution of the meta. Hopefully these weekly updates will help address the issue we’ve seen in the past where Twist seasons don’t line up well with our patch schedule. We’ll still be looking at fixing all the other stuff (like character powers, passive effects, and decklists) in our regular scheduled balance patches.
After the June season, we’re bringing back Whizbang’s Heroes for the July season — with nine additional new heroes to try out!
After the July season, Twist will be dark again for a while. Sometimes we see players asking why there are seasons when Twist is not available. By design, Twist is not an “always on” mode like most other modes in Hearthstone; it’s more like an extended event. We want Twist to feel fun and fresh, rather something that quickly fades into background noise. We will make iterations or updates when we feel they fit into this overall goal, but not by default.
For example, later in the year we’ll be revisiting Wonders and Caverns of Time for two seasons. Hopefully, the return of Wonders and Caverns of Time will give players another chance to try out the cards from this set or enjoy them for the first time if they missed last year’s fun.
Once those two seasons are over, Twist will go dark again for the rest of the year. We’ll bring you more updates on upcoming Twist seasons closer to when they start airing. For now, we hope you enjoy Whizbang’s Heroes. The fun starts on June 1st – see you there!
