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In most circumstances, the Warcraft ambience is too bold and cheerful to allow for anything as creeping and underhand as fear. And yet Curse of Naxxramas, the new Hearthstone single-player adventure, is still a horror game to me, and the horror - the wonderful, energising horror - began when Eurogamer staff writer Tom Phillips showed me Duplicate. Duplicate's one of Naxxramas' new collectible cards, and beneath that suspiciously anodyne name stands a thing of real dread. Play Duplicate - it's a secret, which means it lurks hidden on the board until its trap is sprung by specific circumstances - and when a friendly minion dies, it will put two copies of it back into your hand. Imagine this for a second. Or rather, imagine it working against you, and imagine it working perfectly. Imagine facing an opponent who suddenly has had three Yseras, each spewing out a dream card at the end of its turn. Imagine those dream cards piling up. And that's just Ysera.
This is horror. Hearthstone's meta would rumble and shift and spasm in the presence of one or two new cards like this, of course. Naxxramas will bung in 30 - six of which are legendaries.
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