WORLD OF WARCRAFT’S MOST INFAMOUS DISASTER IS BECOMING A HEARTHSTONE CARD

The upcoming Rastakhan’s Rumble will pay homage to Hakkar the Soulflayer and the Corrupted Blood incident.

Few moments are as memorable in all of World of Warcraft history as the Corrupted Blood Incident. On September 13, 2005, a player returned from the grueling new Zul’Gurub raid and summoned his pet in one of Azeroth’s capital cities only to find that, due to a bug, the pet had acquired a debuff that wasn’t supposed to exist outside of the raid.

Called Corrupted Blood, this negative effect would deal constant damage to its target until they died—but even worse was the fact that it was highly contagious. Anyone within a certain range of an infected player automatically contracted the disease and soon died. In a matter of hours, World of Warcraft’s capital cities had become ground zero of a deadly plague, and they stayed that way for over a week.

“It was all unintentional, it was just a bug,” Blizzard chief of staff Shane Dabiri told us in our feature where Blizzard devs reflected on the Corrupted Blood Incident and other disastrous moments in WoW’s history.

And now, 13 years later, Hearthstone is finally paying tribute to that cataclysmic moment in its own, cool way. Meek Hakkar, the Soulflayer, the boss from which corrupted blood originated, now transformed into a Hearthstone card.

The idea here is that, with enough unlucky draws, a player could fill their deck up Corrupted Blood and eventually—like WoW players of yore—fall victim to it. It’s not clear exactly where Hakkar will fit into the new meta, but high level players are debating the viability of the card in fatigue-based combo decks over on the Competitive Hearthstone subreddit.