Hearthstone Battlegrounds Season 7 Launches April 16 With Co-Op Duos Mode

Hearthstone Battlegrounds is preparing to launch its seventh season, and it will bring with it the new co-op mode promised at last year's BlizzCon. The new Battlegrounds Duos mode will let you team up with a partner to take on three other teams of two. The new mode will launch alongside the rest of Season 7 on April 16.

The four teams of two will make eight players in all, keeping the total Battlegrounds player-count the same. But rather than an eight-way competition, Duos will share a single life pool, and can pass cards back and forth to each other at a cost of 1 Gold. Four new Heroes, 16 minions, and three new Tavern Spells are designed specifically to be useful in Duos matches, and will only be found in that mode. You'll also be able to pair up with a friend for Duos matchmaking, or get paired with a random player. Duos will have its own ranking and leaderboard as well.

The two-headed ogre combo of Cho and Gall appear to be two of the new heroes made for Duos play. Their passive ability gives your partner a Triple Reward up to three times each whenever you earn one.

The single-player Battlegrounds mode will be getting updates as well. Those plans include 50 new minions, more than a dozen returning minions, and new Tavern Spells. Blizzard says it will be refreshing the Dragon and Mech types, doing a rework of the Beast type, and rebalancing lots of heroes and minions.

The theme of Season 7 will be Once Upon a Tavern, with various fairy tale cosmetic rewards. Quests will rotate out at the start of the new season, but Tavern Spells will remain a permanent part of Battlegrounds. A new Battlegrounds rewards track and season pass will begin at that point too. Blizzard will be announcing new heroes and minions leading up to launch, including a streamer preview event. You can find more details at the Hearthstone blog.

This is following just after the release of Whizbang's Workshop, the latest expansion to traditional Hearthstone, and a marker of the 10-year anniversary of the game. As a result, Whizbang is a very nostalgic-themed expansion, full of familiar mechanics and characters reimagined in new ways. For more on how Blizzard came up with its Whizbang ideas, check out our interview with the lead designers.