The famous WoW plague comes to Hearthstone
Blizzard has unveiled one of the new cards from the upcoming Rastakhan's Rumble expansion. It refers to the infamous Corrupted Blood plague that hit World of Warcraft in September 2005.
There are only 11 days left until the launch of Rastakhan's Rumble, the next expansion for the hit card game Hearthstone, announced during this year's BlizzCon. Blizzard is slowly revealing cards that will be part of the expansion. Among those recently presented are Hakkar, The Soulflayer - a legendary creature that costs 10 mana, with 9/6 stats and Deathrattle (an ability that’s activated after his death). It reads: Shuffle a Corrupted Blood into each player's deck.
Both Hakkar and the phrase "Corrupted Blood" should be known to all those who play or have been playing World of Warcraft. It was the cause of the plague that affected the world of this popular MMORPG thirteen years ago.
It all started in September 2005, when a new instance for high-level characters – Zul'Gurub – appeared in World of Warcraft. At its end, the players' task was to defeat a boss, Hakkar. At the very beginning of the fight, he cast a rather unpleasant spell called Corrupted Blood, which periodically dealt damage to the infected person. After some time, or when the player left the "raid" area, the weakness should disappear, but as a result of a programming error, it remained active on summoned helpers (so-called "pets") and players who teleported themselves from the instance, directly into cities. Unfortunately, Corrupted Blood was highly contagious, and led to a pandemic, which went down in history as the "Corrupted Blood Incident". Interestingly enough, it later became the basis for many scientific works, dealing with the behavior of people in the face of a pandemic, and even analyses of terroristic behaviors (some players deliberately went to Zul'Gurub and infected themselves, and then spread the disease further).
In Hearthstone, the Corrupted Blood card created by Hakkar, can be deadly to both players. When they draw it, they take 3 points of damage and automatically spawn two more copies of it in the deck. This will surely bring some extra excitement, but will it be useful? We'll have to wait for meta-analysis to verify this.
It’s worth remembering, that this isn’t the first time when Blizzard refers to a famous and not necessarily planned World of Warcraft event when designing cards for Hearthstone. Let’s just mention the hyperactive paladin Leeroy Jenkins, who is dead, but at least has a chicken. He has also been recreated in the popular free-to-play title.
