HEX Update – Stay Frosty

Hi HEXers! This week, we have some more news to share about VIP tournaments, as well as a lore preview of the arena!

VIP Tournaments

We posted our VIP Tournament FAQ today, and the short of it is that we’ll be putting VIP tournament entry tickets into your account next week in preparation for the first VIP tournaments on September 26th. Read up on our VIP Tournament FAQ for all the details.

The AA VIP benefit rewards for the month of September will be inserted into accounts after the next patch. For those of you who participated and won at least twice (or better) in your tournament will be awarded the AA cards for September. For a prize breakdown, take a look at our last update.

Get your Constructed decks ready and we’ll see you in a few weeks for your first chance to win Xentoth’s Inquisitor AA and Menacing Gralk AA! If you’re looking for some deck ideas, we posted undefeated decklists a while back when we were originally testing 128-person tournaments. Gear up and good luck!

Speaking of gear, you’ll be able to find lots of cards and equipment in our arena, coming soon (TM patent pending etc etc) to your HEX client.

The Arena

The Order of the Frost Ring was a secretive sect of humans, elves, and orcs that existed several thousand years ago. The Order primarily consisted of artisans, magicians, and scholars who wished to pursue common interests beyond the scope of conventional academia.

The activities of the Order, as well as most of what they studied, has been lost to history. It is thought that the enigmatic consortium kept no written records or documents, as none have ever been found. The Order’s existence is only known today because of brief second-hand mentions in writings from their contemporaries who did not fully understand the Order’s intentions or reasons for existence.

The only remaining proof that the Order of the Frost Ring ever existed is the arena they were building in the northern reaches of the Hyperborean Mountains. Scholars can only guess what the Order’s intentions for the arena might have been. The structure was mostly complete when the meteor Hex hit the planet, not far from where the arena was being constructed.

The proximity of Hex’s collision with Entrath instantly killed the entire Order of the Frost Ring, flash-freezing them where they stood at the moment of impact. A large sapphire that landed on the floor of the nearly complete arena drew the spirits of the fallen Order to it, but the living world forgot about the existence of the Frost Ring.

Hogarth

Gerhardt Hogarth was born into a wealthy family, but rejected his birthright to study magic at the Great Academy of Cerulea. His intelligence and obsessive fixation on the undiscovered capabilities of Hexing Gems made him admired amongst the faculty. However, his increasingly erratic behavior unnerved his fellow students.

The Great Academy had no choice but to expel Hogarth in the aftermath of a magical catastrophe that seriously injured three students and cost Hogarth his left arm. (Hogarth’s family were forced to endow the Academy with an exceedingly generous financial donation to keep the details of the “incident” confidential.)

Banished, injured, and increasingly mad, Hogarth began his two decades of wandering.

During a perilous excursion to the Hyperborean Mountains, Hogarth found the arena of the Frost Ring. He was the first mortal to step onto the arena floor in more than two thousand years. He quickly became fascinated with this ancient, forgotten place. Hogarth decided to dedicate his life to discovering the arena’s secrets as well as the spirits that haunted its frozen walls.

Hogarth managed to rebuild his missing arm from magical ice. He also discovered three sentient frozen heads, former members of the Order, which he stuck on a single long pike who became his constant companions:

• Crispin, a human scholar and mage of the Order who claims to know everything about everything.

• Mulug, an orc cleric whose centuries of not having a body have left him embittered.

• Goneril, a female elf warlock who claims to have been the founder and leader of the Order, but Crispin and Mulug both deny the truth of this claim.

On a crisp autumn morning, a courier handed a wrinkled parchment to Archmage Wrenlocke, chancellor of the Academy of Cerulea. As the Archmage unrolled the soggy scroll, he saw a few scant words scrawled in the shaky hand of a madman:

“The Frost Ring has been prepared. The backside of this missive serves as a map to its location. Alert the reckless, the unwise, the imprudent, and tell them to come. Urge them to bring their swords and their spells. Gold and glory await the victorious.

-HOGARTH, KEEPER OF THE FROST RING”

For the rest, our teams continue to work on Set 2 final development, PVE tuning, creative meetings, and more. We’ve also completed the Shards of Fate Collector’s tier promos. Here’s the first of two, Master Theorycrafter AA by Zoltan Boros!

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