Hearthstone Breaks Out of Beta, Goes Live With Hearthsteed!

It’s official: Blizzard announced today that the long winding road to the end of the Hearthstone Beta is finally here. After announcing last week that there would be a limited amount of time left to grab the limited edition Gelbin Mekkatorque Golden Legendary card by spending real money in-game, the speculations quickly began to stack up as to when the Beta would actually end.

Speculations can end now, the game is out!

If you missed out on this little guy, you can always craft a non-Golden version of him…

With this patch, there have been changes to the two most infamous cards in tournament and ranked play of Hearthstone now: Tinkmaster Overspark and Nat Pagle. With both of these cards receiving decently sized nerfs, Blizzard hopes to once again reduce the issue of a Neutral card being so good that it went in every Class deck.

Kudos to Blizzard for this easy visual guide to the changes on the cards

With…

• more bug fixes (hopefully the damn cards swapping and stacking in your hand will go away)
• some new “Golden Hero” portraits (granted to a player at 500 Ranked Wins–sorry old school Hearthstone players, that 500 win count starts today and isn’t retroactive)
• new card backs for playing Ranked mode

…there is plenty of content in this patch for people who are already playing the game and have given Blizzard the feedback they needed to push to live.

But what if you aren’t playing Hearthstone and are finally interested now that’s live?

Well then, you’re in luck! There has been an extra incentive for new people to join in on the antics at “The Inn.” With the official live launch of Hearthstone comes the Hearthsteed, an in-game mount reward for World of Warcraft. By playing and winning 3 games of Hearthstone in either Normal or Arena mode, you earn the Hearthsteed for all characters on the Battle.net account that has both games on it!

With the Beta finally over, Blizzard can start to add more content to Hearthstone, a game with hundreds of hours of replayablilty. I’m a little fearful for my free time at that prospect, but at the same time, Hearthstone is a great, fast-paced game that’s low-level to enter but high-level to master. It’s perfect for people to play on their lunch break, waiting for a flight, or to just spice up any mundane part of your day. So pull up a chair by the hearth and join the card slinging phenomenon today!