The new Hearthstone expansion, Rise of Shadows is all about villainy. Villains across previous expansions have joined together to form the League of EVIL, starting with Arch-Villain Rafaam, returning from the Explorers League adventure. Each class will get a legendary Villain to help their side, Rafaam being the Warlock legendary.
With each new expansion comes new mechanics detailed around the theme. With the theme being Villainy, there are some cool new mechanics in this set. The first is Lackeys. No evil Villain is complete without a gang of bumbling lackeys to do their bidding. Lackeys are 1/1 minions who have special Battlecries, like summoning a random 2 cost minion. There are also cards that interact with Lackeys in different ways. Like, a card that will add more lackeys to your hand. It’s easy to imagine that this could quickly and easily fill your board and overwhelm the opponent. Lackeys will be a great addition to minion heavy decks.
Next there is the card mechanic of Schemes. Schemes are spell cards that grow in power the more turns they sit in your hand. We’ve seen this one cards before, but not as a whole mechanic. The card shown demonstrating this mechanic started off as a 5 cost, deal 1 damage to all minions, but waiting a turn brought it up to 2 damage to all minions.
The Last new mechanic is a new Keyword. Keywords are simple mechanics that come up across multiple cards identified by a single word. The Keyword that will be introduced in Rise of Shadows is Twinspell. When you cast a spell with the Twinspell keyword on it it will add a copy of that card (without the keyword) to your hand.
This expansion is coming at the start of a new rotation, where some previous expansions will no longer be available in standard play. This will give us a fresh start, to really see what this new expansion can do.
