This post marks the beginning of a long-requested update segment in which we detail progress made throughout the fortnight. Everyone, from designer to developer, is doing incredible work on the beta, and we want to share it with you.

Our game team has been previously running on 4-week development cycles, followed by 2+ weeks of QA. We are switching to 2 weeks development sprints + 2 weeks QA, meaning we will be shipping updates more frequently.

Today, we’re kicking things off with a bang. Closed Beta 0.9 has arrived. And we’ve got a whole host of AWESOME new features to discuss. So let’s get into it:

New Cards

There is now a total of 547 cards live. That’s 66% more cards to play with than our previous release!

New Keywords Ready — Soulless, Deadly, Confused, Hidden, Flank, Protected and Burn! With new Keywords comes great responsibility, the meta completely changes and we’re just getting warmed up!

New Features

Card Tooltips! Just Mouse over a card and its keywords will be explained

Card Double Targeting! Some cards can now choose multiple targets, give it a try with the Spell card “Forty Days”.

Updated Deck Builder! See your Mana Curve and more filtering options, making Deck Building easier than ever!

For all you serious collectors, we’ve added a new collections page! Track your progress and become a Demigod.

Quality of Life Improvements

Overall performance optimization. Including dramatic performance improvements for MacBooks!

Deck Builder improvements. Mousing over cards in your deck will now show a preview of the card.

We added a cancel option on the Matchmaking screen.

Spells can now be cast anywhere on the board.

We made the cursor bigger. No more squinting, particularly those of you on 4K monitors.

Cast spells now appear in the Void of the player who cast it.

The cards for God Powers are displayed when activated, now it’s easier to tell if your opponent used their God Power.

Tribe Labels: Tribes are now labeled on cards!

God Decals and God Icons on specific God type cards.

The Delve functionality got some love and has larger capacity!

The Settings menu can now be accessed while playing a match. Forgot to adjust your resolution or want to tweak the sound settings go right ahead! Just keep your eye on that turn timer…

New card Visual Effects added. Playing cards has never been more satisfying!

Art fixes and composition tweaks on many spells and weapon cards.

New Light God card textures.

A huge number of Core Set cards had their text clarified.

Audio

9 new SFX including sounds for playing gold, shadow, and diamond cards.

New music for the main menu and in-game from our talented composer.

Bug Fixes

We’ve fixed over 1,500 bugs since the first closed beta version release. Thanks to those who have been reporting bugs! Keep posting detailed bug reports with steps to reproduce these have been immensely helpful to our team! Note: no actual bugs were harmed in the making of this update.

Misc

You can now use the windows snipping tool whilst playing!

We can’t wait to hear what you all think of 0.9. As always, your feedback is priceless. We’ve got some super exciting stuff in the works and can’t wait to share that with you in the next update.

Until then,

Your Friendly Neighbourhood GU Team.

Lastly, in case you missed it:

ADWCTA, our lead game balance designer, recently finished 1st with TTEXXX_HS in the @TwitchEsports Rivals Hearthstone Team Draft Challenge! This follows him nabbing an impressive #13 on the leaderboard in HS Arena last month.