The Lost City of Un’Goro Expansion Launch Guide

New expansion releases very soon, so it’s time for another launch guide! If you have any questions about the new set, I hope that you will find your answers below.

The Lost City of Un’Goro is the second expansion of Year of the Raptor (2025). It turns out Un’Goro Crater is more than just a big bowl of deadly dinosaurs. Legend tells of a Lost City hidden in its depths, and it’s up to the great Tortollan explorer Loh to assemble a team of experts and find it! Between ancient Maps, perilous Quests, and Kindred spirits, Loh is going to have one shell of a story to tell!

The expansion will add 145 new cards (with a mini-set adding 38 more at a later date), as well as a variety of new mechanics and synergies. Learn everything you should know about it below!

Check out our The Lost City of Un’Goro expansion guide, which contains tons of information including a full list of cards.

Cinematic Trailer

Release Time

Let’s start with the most important – when does the new expansion launch? Hearthstone sets have a simultaneous launch across the globe, so Un’Goro should be out on every server at the same time. However, due to timezone differences (not to mention daylight saving time and such), that “same time” is a different hour around the globe. Here are some example launch times for different time zones:

• 10 AM Pacific Time on Tuesday (July 8)
• 1 PM Eastern Time on Tuesday (July 8)
• 7 PM Central European Time on Tuesday (July 8)
• 2 AM Korean & Japan Standard Time on Wednesday (July 9)
• 3 AM Australian Eastern Time on Wednesday (July 9)

Since the expansion was already pre-loaded in Patch 33.0 last week, you won’t need to download a big update when it launches. This also means that mobile release should happen exactly at the same time as PC. Just make sure to open the game early and download any patches if you haven’t been playing lately.

Freebies

When new expansion launches, players are usually greeted with some free stuff, like packs, free Legendaries etc. Here’s what you can expect from The Lost City of Un’Goro:

• A big part of the rewards were already given out before the expansion, including a lot of card packs from Twitch drops. But even if you missed them, don’t worry, you won’t be that far behind.
• Pre-Release Brawl is still going on and it will be available until the expansion’s launch. Each player received one free entry, and even the worst-case scenario of 0-3 finish gives you two free card packs. Additionally, if you have some Tavern Tickets hoarded, you might give it a few more tries. We compiled lots of successful Pre-Release Brawl decks here.
• Endbringer Umbra was given out as a free Un’Goro Legendary in Patch 32.6. If you haven’t picked it up yet, just log in and it’ll be waiting for you in-game.
• A random Legendary Quest card is unlocked at Level 1 of rewards track, which means that you will get it as soon as the expansion releases. Additionally, City Chief Esho is a Level 20 reward.
• The first few levels of the rewards track require almost no XP, so they are meant to be unlocked nearly instantly as you start playing. You will unlock six extra card packs and a few other rewards over the first 11 levels, which you should easily be able to achieve on Day 1 with a couple of Dailies (only 2200 XP in total is required to get there). You can get even further into the rewards track if you keep your Weekly Quests to get a jump start on the new rewards track.
• A new in-game event will launch together with the expansion. Players can get a lot of rewards – 15 card packs in total (including 6 Un’Goro packs) as well as one of the three Hero skins, depending on the event “path” they choose. The skins are Brann – Hunter, Finley – Paladin, or Reno – Mage.
• If you’re a new or returning player (haven’t logged in for over 90 days), you will be offered one of the updated free decks. To be more specific – you get to borrow all 6 decks for a week and play them as much as you want, but after a week is over you have to pick one of them and only that will be added to your collection. Do keep in mind, however, that the decks don’t contain any cards from the latest expansion, you will still need to get those to keep them up to date.

New Keywords/Mechanics

As usual, new expansions usually come with new mechanics. Sometimes we also see an older one making a big return. Here’s what you can expect from The Lost City of Un’Goro:

New Mechanic – Kindred

Elemental minion type was first introduced in the original Journey to Un’Goro back in 2017. Their unique mechanic is getting an extra effect if you played an Elemental last turn. It means that chaining together Elemental minions was very important, otherwise you might have missed on some powerful bonus effects.

The new “Kindred” keyword works exactly the same, but for all minion types. For example, if you play a Beast with Kindred (such as Ravasaur Matriarch), it will follow the same formula but for Beasts (“If you played Beast last turn, do X”).

And that’s not all – Kindred also works for spell schools. For example, the new Kindred spell Gravedawn Voidbulb will cast twice if you played a Shadow spell on previous turn. We had a few decks focused on a specific Spell School in the past, but they were quite rare overall; this new keyword might change that.

Returning Mechanic – Quests

Quests are making a return! Also dating back to the original Un’Goro, the last time we saw them was in Saviors of Uldum expansion in 2019. Quests are 1-Cost spells that always start in your hand. Each Quests asks you to do some task; after you finish it, you get a powerful reward.

Unlike Questlines from United in Stormwind, Quests are “one and done” – there are no multiple steps. But remember that you need to play the Quest from your hand first for the progress to count.

Each class is getting one new Quest in The Lost City of Un’Goro. Most of them follow a similar formula of giving you a 5 mana minion with a powerful effect as a reward, but some (like Mage or Paladin) have a bit more unique rewards.

New Signature Cards

Another batch of Signatures has been released for The Lost City of Un’Goro. They have seen no general updates in this expansion (such as the card’s border or rarity gems). However, as usual, many of them look phenomenal. Sadly, we haven’t seen all of them yet – we know that some of them exist from datamining, but they haven’t been revealed yet (maybe they weren’t ready for launch and they will drop at a later date).

We’ve gathered all of The Lost City of Un’Goro Signatures in a separate post, but you can find a few examples below:

New Rewards Track

As always, the rewards track is getting refreshed. When The Lost City of Un’Goro launches, all players will get reset to Level 1 and will work their way up through the track again. The rewards track goes through some minor changes this expansion, like the position of Legendaries on the track or some minor value changes for Tavern Pass. You can find more information here.

Your daily & weekly Quests will NOT reset when the new expansion launches. It’s not a bad idea to save them for after the launch to give you a nice boost through the early levels of the rewards track. The only situations in which I’d recommend finishing all your Quests under the old rewards track is if you have Tavern Pass right now, but you don’t plan to buy a new one after launch (this way you’ll get 20% extra XP), or you haven’t finished the previous rewards track and you’re close to leveling for some good rewards. In the second case, if you want to min-max, try to hit a new level on your current rewards track and stop there because any “excess” XP won’t carry over. Ultimately this is not a big deal and no matter what you do, you should come up with a similar amount of rewards in the long run. But a free pack here and there can’t hurt, right?

New & Returning Players Experience

I’ve already mentioned it in the freebies section, but let me expand on it. If you are a new player or haven’t been playing the game in a while (90+ days to be exact), you might be happy to hear that some extra goodies are waiting for you once you log in. You get two things – an extra Quest Chain with some nice rewards and a free Standard deck of your choice. Those free decks are updated every expansion but notably DO NOT include any cards from the latest set. However, they are a nice start and can serve you early into the new set before you can open enough packs or craft something else.

An extra feature added a while ago is that you no longer have to pick your free deck right away. You get access to all of them for a week, and only after that week passes you have to decide to keep one. It means that you have enough time to test all of them and see which one fits you the best.

You can find an updated list of free decks here with our reccomendations.

The Lost City of Un’Goro Decks

Once the expansion launches, I will be compiling decks from pro players & streamers in this post. I’ll try to add decks for all 11 classes, but as always, it’s hard to say whether every single class will be viable around launch. The post will be updated every few hours over the early expansion period (roughly the first week). We also generally do compilations of best-performing decks in separate posts – one after ~24 hours and the second about one a week after launch. So if you want something to base your early crafting decisions on, that would be your best choice (it’s still not a guarantee that those decks will remain viable, but it’s better than nothing).

Until we get some actual decks, you can check out Old Guardian’s theorycrafting impressions. He talks about each class and how it might fare in the upcoming expansion, plus he showcases some decks from the event. Those never translate into the expansion meta once it launches and everyone gets to play it, but some decks that are strong during theorycrafting also end up being good once the set launches. So you can get some ideas this way. Here’s the article!

Vicious Syndicate also always prepares an article with lots of decks to try on Day 1. And they are quite good at predicting some upcoming meta builds. Of course, the final decks still usually require some refinements, but many of them are great early meta picks. You can find their theorycrafting post here.