Phil Xavier

Hearthstone has changed things up for the Year of the Scarab: gone are the mini-sets for each expansion, and to replace them we're getting twelve class sets, released four at a time.

This is Mistress Nagmara, a barmaid at the Grim Guzzler tavern in Shadowforge City, Blackrock Mountain (home of the Dark Iron Dwarves). In WoW, she used to start and end a quest that has since been removed from the game, making her a rare Succubus character that players could interact with. In Hearthstone, she’s just been added as both a Warlock skin and a bartender in Battlegrounds. She’s my current bartender of choice, in fact. I really like her voice lines. She’s very good at her job of encouraging you in a way that sounds much more “friendly barmaid” than “saucy succubus,” to be honest.

Also, “Nagmara” is an anagram of “anagram.”

This is The Queue, our daily Q&A column where sometimes we like to highlight random things because we just think they’re neat.

I had only played the first two seasons of Diablo 4 before I took a long break from the game, and I just returned to the brand-new world of Lord of Hatred expansion, with all of the changes and additions that the game has gotten since launch.

The recently-released patch 12.0.5 for World of Warcraft added a nice new feature for Dracthyr Evokers: Battle Visage lets them remain in Visage form during combat, only briefly shifting to their Dracthyr forms during certain specific abilities, and then immediately shifting back.

This is Bubbles. (The one standing next to her is some weird fish mage whose name doesn’t matter right now.)

Bubbles took a sabbatical for a couple years, but she’s back to fulfill her job of lobbing balls of water at fools with deadly force to help her master. Dutiful and unquestioning. Water Elementals are known for harmoniously agreeing with those who summoned them, rather than entering nebulous “contracts” or being employed against their wills (which usually leads to constantly plotting revenge, and that’s antithetical to good water flow).

We’re in The Queue, a daily Q&A column that delivers answers to questions day after day, with consistency and a dash of spunk.

This week, we have a brand-new Hearthstone Tavern Brawl, and it's a pretty fun one.

Seriously. What a week. And it’s actually Friday, so I get to say this without having some funny person tell me “Red, it’s Wednesday” or whatever.

This is The Queue, our daily Q&A column where sometimes things are just moving too fast and we’re exhausted, man.

A new season is about to start for Hearthstone Battlegrounds: Cataclysm Calls will be here April 14, and it promises to shake things up a little more than usual with two new keywords, Fodder for Demons, and Chromadrake for Dragons.

It’s almost Noblegarden, the annual holiday where the Great Goblin in the Noble Garden puts on his bunny costume, finds a nice spot to crouch down, [REDACTED], and we get a lot of chocolate eggs. Nature on Azeroth is beautiful.

This is The Queue, our daily Q&A column where all the lore is made up, and the points don’t matter. But the questions do matter, so let’s get to them!

We've got ourselves a brand-new Hearthstone Tavern Brawl this week!