14 DAY TRIAL // 
The newest Hearthstone expansion may be one of the best released by Blizzard since the launch of the game. Journey to Un'goro is the ninth Hearthstone expansion and the most expensive available to date.
Players will have to pay €50 for 40 packs of Journey to Un'goro cards, whereas a few weeks ago you could buy 50 packs of cards for the same amount. But that's not the worst thing about the new expansion, so let's take a closer look at what the new Hearthstone expansion plays and what you can do to have a high win rate.
First off, Journey to Un'goro metagame hasn't been refined yet, but I can most certainly say that it will revolve around the new Quest cards, which are very powerful (except maybe for the Warlock quest).
Each class has a Quest that can be played at the beginning of each game, since you'll start with the legendary card in your hand. If successfully completed, these Quests summon legendary creatures with powerful effects.
For example, the priest class Quest requires you to play 7 deathrattle minions. The reward is another legendary card called Amara, Warden of Hope, which costs 5 mana and puts an 8/8 creature with taunt on the table, while setting your HP total to 40.
Rogue's Quest can be completed by playing four minions with the same name, which will award players with the Crystal Core, a spell that will make all your minions 5/5. The warlock class seems to have the less rewarding Quest card for the moment, but we won't know for sure until later on when the metagame sets in.
Obviously, you're not forced into playing Quest decks, but they seem to be more powerful than “standard” decks. On top of that, they are more fun to play than any other decks that you can currently build with the Journey to Un'goro cards.
What I really like about Hearthstone's newest expansion is that you can build extremely varied decks, which can be very powerful if you use the right synergies. The new cards offer so much versatility that playing Hearthstone has finally become a pleasure rather than a tedious chore that needs to be done to get your daily mission reward.
It's not just the Quests that make Journey to Un'goro much more worthy than any of the previous Hearthstone expansions; it's the fact that most of the newly added cards can be actually used in a competitive deck.
Along with the Quests, Blizzard also introduced a new “Adapt” effect, which does exactly that. If you've been playing Hearthstone before the launch of the expansion, then you already know what it does since Blizzard awarded players who log in a rare Journey to Un'goro card with the Adapt trait, Volcanosaur.
The Adapt ability allows players to “discover” an adaptation for a minion from a total of 10 choice cards. These adaptations enhance the creature with other abilities like Divine Shield, Windfury, Taunt, Stealth, +1/+1, +3 Health, Poisonous, and so on. Most of the time, the Adapt ability can be triggered when that creature attacks the enemy hero, but some cards have another requirement in order to trigger the effect.
It's only been a couple of days since the release of the new expansion and I can definitely say that there's going to be a lot of interesting and fun-to-play decks in the metagame. Right off the bat, the rogue Quest seems to be the most powerful because it can be completed very fast and the rewards are strong enough to secure you an early victory.
Surprisingly, priest has become a pretty solid class thanks to the quest that puts it out of range of aggressive decks like warrior pirate. However, mage is arguably the best class to play in Journey to Un'goro due to the Quest that allows you to play an extra turn. If you manage to survive the onslaught of the rogue and trigger your mage's Quest, you can basically kill your opponent in just one turn.
As I said earlier, warlock got a pretty weak Quest and not enough good cards to remain competitive, but I'd say we need more time to find the right combination to make the class playable in Journey to Un'goro.
Now let's talk about some of the things that I did not like and hope to see addressed in the coming weeks. The fact that Journey to Un'goro gameplay mechanics revolve around the new Quest cards is both good and bad.
It's good because they're very powerful and fun to play, but unfortunately, their drop rate is extremely small. On top of that, Journey to Un'goro has more legendary cards than any other expansion, so the drop rates for these Quest cards is even lower than usual.
Since Hearthstone has recently become one of the most expensive card games available on the market, I would have expected Blizzard to make it easier for players to get at least some of the most important cards in Journey to Un'goro.
Personally, I've opened around 60 packs and only got two legendary cards. Fortunately, one of these two was a Quest, but otherwise I would have had to craft one or two expensive cards just to be able to build a mildly competitive deck.
I know people who bought hundreds of packs and still did not get all the Quests, but had the same legendary drop 3 or 4 times. I'm not sure what algorithm Blizzard uses, but I've seen people opening 5-6 legendary cards in 60 packs, whereas others like me only got two.
The Good
- Incredibly fun to play
- Powerful Quest cards
- Lots of synergies and combos
- Fewer useless legendary cards
The Bad
- Too expensive
- Quests and other legendary cards have low drop rate
Conclusion
The flexibility that most of the cards in the new expansion offer when building a new deck surpasses everything that's been done in Hearthstone since the launch of the game. A word of advice before I go have some fun with my deathrattle priest deck: try not to craft too many legendary cards until the metagame is fine tuned.
