Hearthstone’s Newest Expansion Is A Mystery With Murder At Castle Nathria

Hearthstone is taking a trip to the Shadowlands for a fancy dinner party hosted by the definitely-not-nefarious Sire Denathrius. “Hosted” is appropriate in the past tense because someone has murdered the now-former leader of Revendreath and the Venthyr. Now there’s a soiree full of suspects and locations to investigate to find out who did the dirty deed in Murder at Castle Nathria.

Murder at Castle Nathria has three key aspects to the set, including a couple of new mechanics to the digital card game. First are ten Legendary Suspects, new legendary minions with one representing each Hearthstone class. These legends include fishy detective Murloc Holmes which allows you to copy cards from your opponent’s deck by guessing three questions about cards in their hand or deck correctly and Decimator Olgra who can be buffed by counting the number of damaged minions and then attacks all enemies on the board. As a log-in bonus right now, you can get a copy of Prince Renathal for free, which, when included in your deck, increases your starting health to 30 and your deck size to 40.

Locations are a new card type that can be cast onto the battlefield. They don’t have health or attack stats and cannot be targeted by Minions or Spells unless that card specifically says so. Despite the lack of interaction, they’ll still have quite the effect on a game. Locations have abilities that can be activated by the player once per turn and, like Equipment, have a set amount of uses, with each activation consuming one durability and triggering a cooldown for one turn. Once a Location card is used up, it will leave the battlefield.

Finally, Infuse rounds out the new mechanics in Murder at Castle Nathria. Cards with the Infuse keyword will gain strength while sitting in your hand when friendly minions on the battlefield die, absorbing the Anima or life essence from that entity. Once the Infuse cost is satisfied, that spell or minion will grow in power or cause an effect that will change the card in some way, creating a stronger card to be cast.

Murder at Castle Narthria is coming to Hearthstone on August 2 and will include a total of 135 new cards. You can check out a handful of new cards in the gallery above and watch the announcement video at the top of the page.