Grab free Hearthstone packs and check out new Witchwood cards starting today

Are you ready to start celebrating Hearthstone’s Year of the Raven? Hopefully your answer is yes, because you don’t have much choice in the matter. (The celebrating is mandatory and we will be checking to ensure you maintain adequate cheer levels throughout the event.)

The fun (remember: fun is mandatory) kicks off on Monday (that’s today!) at 11 a.m. PDT with a livestream from the Hearthstone team, where we’re likely to see a big batch of new cards. After that, there’s an aggressive card release schedule that starts on Tuesday at 3 a.m. PDT. And no, that’s not a typo: some cards are being revealed on Asian websites at hours better suited to their time zones. We’ll just have to catch up in the morning. As usual, the cards will be revealed all over the internet and probably one or two at a time. We’ll be rounding them up in our Witchwood post so you can see them all in one place, but if you want to catch the reveals as they happen check out the full schedule on the Hearthstone page. You’ll note that each of the reveal dates includes a thumbnail of some card art, including characters that look similar to Godfrey, Crowley, and Emeriss. While I’m not sure what the Green Dragonflight has to do with all of this, I won’t be surprised if we see just about every Worgen we know join the card lineup — so expect more like Crowley.

And what’s a celebration without tons of card packs to open? From March 26 at 11:59 p.m. PDT until April 9 at 11:59 PDT you’ll receive a card pack every time you complete a daily quest — and that’s on top of the regular gold reward. Each pack will be a random Year of the Raven pack, so each quest will net you a Journey to Un’Goro, Knights of the Frozen Throne, Kobolds & Catacombs, or   pack. That’s up to 14 packs you can add to your collection, all of which you can play in this Year’s Standard rotation. Plus they’re free, so why not do a daily quest to grab them (and some gold)?

So get hyped for this (mandatory) celebration, everyone. The fun starts today at 11 a.m. PDT on the Hearthstone Twitch channel. We’ll see you there!