Hearthstone's Titans expansion features a brand new type of legendary card

The Warcraft universe's Titans are coming to Hearthstone next month, with 11 new legendary cards representing the mighty world-striding creator gods. Each Titan has three bespoke abilities and, if you hadn't already guessed, every class gets its own Titan card.

The new Titan legendary cards function very differently to anything we've seen in Hearthstone before. Once player, a Titan can deploy one of its three abilities per turn. Once all three have been depleted, they operate and attack like a normal minion.

Take the druid Titan Eonar the Lifebinder, for example. Her abilities are: 1) fill your hand with cards, 2) return your life to maximum, and 3) refresh your mana crystals. It's up to you in what order you play those effects, although obviously keeping the card on board is going to be a challenge given how much your opponent will want to remove it.

Each class will also get a legendary Keeper card that's more like a normal Hearthstone legendary—those are your Tyrs, Freyas, and so on. Lore-wise, the expansion is set in Warcraft's prehistory, after the Titans have defeated the Old Gods and are settling down to create life on Azeroth. As you'd expect the accompanying VFX for the Titans' entrances and abilities are pretty epic. 

Another new keyword is Forge, which alludes to what Titans are good at. Cards with Forge can be upgraded while still in your hand for two mana, which boosts their performance. An example given was Cyclopian Crusher, a three mana 3/3 with Rush that becomes a three mana 6/5 with Rush once forged. Not a bad investment of five mana across two turns. Every class will get its own Forge keyword card.

The Titans expansion will also see the return of the Magnetic keyword, due to the Titans' extensive use of Mech cards. Interestingly, Warcraft didn't have enough canonical Titans for each Hearthstone class to have its own. Counting the evil and bad guy titans like Argus, Telogrus, and Sargeras—and not-quite-a-Titan-yet Azeroth herself—there are only 10. In a group interview, Hearthstone lead designer Cora Georgiou said that it required them to make up a new one.

"This is something we ran into early in the ideation for this set. We knew we wanted Titans to be the exciting new thing for the expansion, and the problem of not having 11 canonical Titans was a tough one right at the beginning," Georgiou said. So they made a new one: The peacekeeper Amitus.

"She’s pretty cool. She’s a peacekeeping Titan, and she fits a bit of a niche that I thought the Titans didn’t have," said Georgiou.

To sweeten the pot, Blizzard is offering a legendary card from the new set as a log-in reward today. Prison of Yogg-Saron is the game's legendary Location card. It's a 7-Mana neutral that reads: "Choose a character. Cast 4 random spells (targeting it if possible)." It's live now so enjoy Pyroblasting your own guys I guess.

You can read more about Titans on the Hearthstone website and watch cards as they're revealed in the Titans card library. Titans will launch Worldwide on August 1st, 2023—remember that.