Hearthstone Battlegrounds gets customizable emotes, a new hero, and quality of life features

Another new way to customize your Hearthstone Battlegrounds experience will become available with patch 24.0, in the form of emotes. Players will now be able to equip new, custom emotes to replace the default ones.

But this patch is also bringing a new hero, minor balance changes, and some pretty nice quality of life features that go beyond just Battlegrounds. Let’s take a look at all that’s in store for us.

The default emotes are now free for all players, and custom emotes are coming

Those default emotes that are already in the game will now become available to all Battlegrounds players — not just those who purchase Battlegrounds Perks. But just like with boards, hero skins, and strikes, players will now be able to replace that default set of emotes with new sets they obtain.

The first set of custom emotes, named Mystery Mayhem, is themed after Castle Nathria (and assorted murder mystery fun), and set to become available one week after the Murder at Castle Nathria expansion goes live, on August 2.

New hero: Heistbaron Toggwaggle

Heistbaron Toggwaggle’s hero power costs a whopping nine gold and reads:

• Steal all minions in Bob’s Tavern. Each turn, your next Hero Power costs (1) less.

Wow. This hero power is guaranteed to be very, very strong in the early to mid game. Depending on how many token minions or extra gold you’re able to accrue, you could be able to hit it for the first time as early as turn 3 (but more realistically on turn 4), for a massive tempo swing in your favor.

In the late game, even though buying any minion that is offered to you isn’t nearly as good a strategy anymore, you could still benefit from the sheer value — compositions like Pirate and Elemental might still be able to benefit from all the extra minions you get to buy and sell.

On a final note, the developers have also clarified:

Each time you use Togwaggle’s Hero Power, its cost resets to the original 9 Gold cost and starts the cycle over again.)

All in all, Toggwaggle definitely seems like he’ll be a strong hero, who’ll become available ahead of his official release on August 9 to players with Battlegrounds Perks — as is to be expected by now.

Small balance changes for Dragons and a few Heroes

This isn’t the balance update we’re waiting for — Grease Bot is still oppressive, and many players can’t wait for it to be nerfed. However, there are some changes happening — to Dragons, specifically. Red Whelp has been buffed, becoming a 2/2, which will make it a slightly better pick in the first few turns of the game.

But the more impactful change is the return of a reworked Evolving Chromawing to the game — the minion had been removed not too long ago due to its interaction with Kooky Chemist. Its stats have been nerfed to 1/1, and it has a totally new effect now:

• After you upgrate your Tavern Tier, gain +1/+1 for each friendly Dragon.

I’m not at all impressed — the new form of Evolving Chromawing seems very weak, in all honesty. Even though Dragons are a minion type that could use some help right now, it doesn’t look like this is what does it for them.

In addition to those minion changes, three heroes are getting a small update to their hero powers:

The Lich King, Sneed, and Edwin VanCleef can now all target minions in Bob’s Tavern as well as friendly minions. (Effects that are not “for one turn” effects will carry over to the next Recruit phase if you Freeze that minion in the Tavern).

The ability to target minions in Bob’s Tavern with those hero powers may have niche uses for the most part, but any improvement is welcome.

New quality of life features: Random Hero Skins in constructed, and opening packs made easier

Patch 24.0 brings other improvements with it. For Constructed players, the ability to pick from multiple favorite hero skins and let the game randomly choose between them is finally here:

Players can now favorite multiple heroes from the same class in the Hearthstone Collection Manager. If a deck has no specific hero assigned to it, a random hero will be used each game.

By default, the random hero is pulled from your pool of favorites, but you can also opt into total randomness by unchecking the “Favorites Only” toggle on a deck, expanding the pool to all eligible heroes you own, just like with card backs.

And then there’s this one, which is an absolute game changer:

You can now hold down the Spacebar to continuously open packs.

With a new expansion upon us, many players know how time consuming it can be to keep clicking (or pressing spacebar) to open all your packs. Thankfully, that process is about to get much easier — at least for desktop players.