How To Unlock Death Knight in Hearthstone & Best Death Knight Decks To Try Out On Day 1

March of the Lich King expansion is releasing on December 6 (Tuesday), and it’s the first time in over 2.5 years we’ve seen a new class added to the game – Death Knight. It’s time for Arthas and his army of undead to take over the Tavern.

How To Unlock Death Knight & Class Cards

It’s impossible to unlock the class before March of the Lich King launches on Tuesday. After the expansion is out (probably around 10 AM PT / 19:00 CET), Death Knight Prologue will be unlocked. It’s a short PvE adventure showcasing the story of Arthas and explaining the new in-game Death Knight mechanics. Finishing the prologue will give you access to Death Knight class and its Core Set – 32 free cards. That should be enough to build some basic decks, but you will definitely miss a lot of key pieces.

26 more cards are unlocked from Path of Arthas “mini-set”. If you pre-purchased March of the Lich King Mega Bundle, then you’re set – Path of Arthas is included. But if you didn’t, you can buy it standalone at the price of other mini-sets – 2000 Gold or 1500 Runestones ($15). You can also buy full Golden version of the set for 7000 Runestones ($70). Alternatively, those cards will be craftable, so if you only need a couple of specific cards it might be a better idea to just craft them instead of buying the whole set (however, if you intend to play a variety of Death Knight builds, it will most likely be cheaper to just purchase it).

And finally, last 10 cards will come from March of the Lich King expansion itself. Those can be opened like any other regular card in MotLK card packs, or crafted with Arcane Dust.

You can find a full list of Death Knight cards here. 

Deck Knight Theorycrafting Decks

Of course, do keep in mind that those decks are just theorycrafting – since the set isn’t out yet, we can’t be. While some of them were tested during pre-release theorycrafting event, we can’t guarantee that they will be viable once the expansion’s meta settles. That’s why we don’t recommend spending a lot of resources to e.g. craft the necessary Epics/Legendaries to play them, because those might not end up being good. Still, they should serve as a solid starting point early after expansion’s release. We’ll be spending the first few days posting new decks, so if you’re reading it after expansion’s release, look for those instead.

Also a special note that two of the Unholy decks below (created by Old Guardian) are budget builds – one only using Core Cards (so 100% F2P) and another one adding some other cheap cards (but using no Epics/Legenadries that can’t be obtained for free). Both of them are good ways to try out the class if you don’t want to commit yet.

Blood Death Knight Decks

Frost Death Knight Decks

Unholy Death Knight Decks

Stonekeep

A Hearthstone player and writer from Poland, Stonekeep has been in a love-hate relationship with Hearthstone since Closed Beta. Over that time, he has achieved many high Legend climbs and infinite Arena runs. He's the current admin of Hearthstone Top Decks.

Check out Stonekeep on Twitter!

Leave a Reply

6 Comments

  1. Inhiszton
    December 5, 2022 at 10:01 am

    “26 more cards are unlocked from Path of Arthas >>mini-set<<."

    Does this mean there will be no "regular" mini-set in the middle time of the expansion?

    And, by the way, do we know if there will be a full dust refund period for the legendaries you can claim from the rewards track? Or this mechanic is replaced with the new re-roll system?

    • Stonekeep - Site Admin
      December 6, 2022 at 4:20 am

      It wasn’t confirmed yet, but I think that there will be a regular mini-set for March of the Lich King too. That’s why I used air quotes when calling Path of Arthas “mini-set” 🙂

      There will be no refunds for Legendaries from rewards track, they are replaced completely by the re-rolls.

      • Inhiszton
        December 6, 2022 at 5:33 am

        What a pain is this about the legendaries – I have benn planning to craft the Mage minion for its achievement 🙁

      • JoyDivision
        December 7, 2022 at 4:23 am

        So I found out that Signature Cards are bad in more than one way (they look awful – what is this with ‘no color’ 🙁 ).

        Point is, I actually got that Mage Diamond guy as a Signature Card … so no reroll after getting him in Diamond form via the track. 🙁

  2. JoyDivision
    December 5, 2022 at 4:55 am

    Did you forget to mention that Path of Arthas is included in the Mega Bundle?