It wouldn't be a proper Hearthstone season without some sort of a leak preceding any of the official announcements - although we are unsure whether we can even call it that here, seeing as the following information comes courtesy of the existing Twitch Drops campaign credited to Hearthstone/Blizzard. Eagle-eyed streamer Zeddy was the first to notice and call everyone's attention to this peculiar fact. 

If you've been eagerly awaiting the news about the final Hearthstone expansion of the year - already confirmed by the former game director Dean "Iksar" Ayala to be "bigger than normal" - it would seem that all the answers and more will be given to us during a special Twitch stream taking place on Tuesday, November 1. Conspicuously dubbed as 'Hearthstone Theorycrafting':

Quote From Blizzard
Join us on a very special stream for Hearthstone’s next expansion reveal and more!
 

If you wish to find out for yourself (as long as this doesn't get removed), you can simply navigate to your Twitch account and access Creator Dashboard from the dropdown menu. All open campaigns are being listed under the Viewer Rewards/Drops.

As you might've already noticed, there is one Castle Nathria pack that's going to be available for watching the stream for 15 minutes (a very short window of time, which had caused a lot of complaints the last time such a promotion happened).

Attempting to click on the 'About This Drop' link takes us to the following Hearthstone blog article - but you won't find anything there currently other than an Error 404 i.e. page not found. What's most interesting about this is the URL/web address itself, with a designated number 23852693. For reference, the latest published blog post (that of 24.4.3 balance patch notes) is currently listed as 23852692. And we're still expecting at least one other Blizzard article about the upcoming Masters Fall Championship to appear before the said esports event kicks off on October 28. Given this line of reasoning, some sort of expansion-related announcement might be imminent.  

Disclaimer: Now, while this being scheduled on Twitch could pretty much act as a full confirmation, with the set reveal time and date unlikely to be moved around - do NOT take it all for granted until we see an official Blizzard social media post, a blog article, or hear from one of the developers. Events like this are likely to be pre-recorded well in advance, and so it wouldn't be impossible for these plans to change. 

But in the event this is more than a simple placeholder, we might start seeing vague expansion teasers in the days leading up to the big reveal. Perhaps even something more detailed. There's been a lot of hopeful rumors circulating about the arrival of Death Knight as a new playable class. And one way or another, a supersized expansion is a novelty we aren't exactly used to in Hearthstone. That alone promises something special to come.


Death Knights, Spooky Creatures, & Mercenaries

We are also still awaiting the annual Hallow's End celebration to arrive in-game, and it wouldn't be particularly surprising if that was one of the main topics of the upcoming blog post. There is also this tease the Hearthstone team thought to share with the latest round of card nerfs

Quote From Blizzard
The one notable outlier that is not getting changed, but which we are keeping a close eye on, is Prince Renathal. He is powerful and popular, but we don’t want this patch to completely shake up the meta, because we have something fun coming in Patch 24.6 and we want to see how Renathal performs in the next expansion before making changes to him.
 

It's been almost four months since we've received Prince Renathal as the free Legendary paving the way for Murder at Castle Nathria, so the expectation here would be something similar. Typical cycle of .6 Patches is when Hearthstone usually shares the next set announcement along with all the other patch notes. The proposed excess coins solution for Mercenaries features on this extended list as well. Before we know it, there might be a ton of news dropping all at once. 


Excited to find out what's in store for Hearthstone's final expansion of the Year of the Hydra? Do you have any predictions or wishes that you would love to come true?