Hearthstone gives you the ability to build your own spaceship with the new Starship keyword in The Great Dark Beyond

Perhaps the most exciting new feature coming in Hearthstone’s next expansion, The Great Dark Beyond, is the new Starship keyword, which lets players slowly assemble their own spaceship to blast away at their enemies. Featured in this expansion are several cards with the “Starship Piece” words on them: when destroyed, each of those minions will add their stats, keywords, and effects to the spaceship you’re building. And when you decide to finally launch your Starship, it’ll be as big and powerful as the pieces you played up to that point.

So read on to learn all about building and launching Starships, how to get stronger while doing it — and even some tricks that let you do it all over again.

The Starship Location is added to your board and can be launched whenever you want, for five mana

As soon as your first Starship Piece is destroyed, a Starship Location will be added to your board. This is the launching pad for your Starship, and you can launch it at any moment by paying five mana. Once you do, your Spaceship finally arrives as a powerful minion (and the Location is destroyed).

You can do this multiple times per game: if you begin playing new Starship Pieces after you already launched one, a new Location will be added to your board, allowing you to eventually launch the second Starship, and so on. So it’s up to each player to decide if they want to be greedy and save up on a lot of pieces to launch a single, but extremely powerful Starship — risking that the enemy has an answer ready at their hand and destroys it immediately — or to launch several smaller Starships throughout the course of the match.

Starships are available to all classes, but six classes get exclusive Starship pieces: Death Knight, Demon Hunter, Druid, Hunter, Rogue, and Warlock. Those classes even get class-specific Starship names and art! The other classes can still build Starships with Neutral cards, and they all share the “default” Starship, The Exile’s Hope.

If you’re building a Starship…

There are also several cards that feature the words “if you’re building a Starship,” granting additional effects if you already have a Starship Location on your board. Examples include the powerful Demon Hunter cards Warp Drive and Bad Omen.

Warp Drive is a 3-mana Fel spell that makes a previous staple spell like Arcane Intellect seem laughable in comparison:

• Draw 2 cards. If you’re building a Starship, they cost (2) less.

Whereas Bad Omen is a 6-mana Fel spell that says:

• In 2 turns, summon two 6/6 Demons with Taunt. If you’re building a Starship, summon them now.

As you can see, just the act of building a Starship can already be a powerful factor in deciding how to build decks and win games — before even launching them!

…we hope it’s The Exodar

But the star of the show, logically, has to be the Draenei flagship, The Exodar. It shows up in Hearthstone as an 8-mana, 6/10 Neutral Legendary minion with the following text:

• Battlecry: If you’re building a Starship, launch it and choose a Protocol!

The three Protocols you can choose are all very powerful effects:

• Crew Transport: Get copies of all of the Starship’s Pieces. Set their Costs to (1).
• Emergency Repairs: Gain Armor equal to the Starship’s Health, twice.
• Offensive Formation: Deal damage equal to the Starship’s Attack randomly split between all enemies.

Wow. All three of those are game-ending effects on their own, giving you tons of value with the first option, tons of survivability with the second, or allowing you to deal enough damage to end a game with the third (which we think might become the most popular one). No matter which way you go, The Exodar is more than capable of navigating you to victory.

The Starship keyword surely looks like a ton of fun, and has the potential to shape the meta around it. And we’ll all be able to play with it when The Great Dark Beyond launches, on November 5. See you there, and bring your spacesuit!