For the last month or so we’ve been watching as Blizzard first announced the name and theme of Hearthstone’s next big expansion – Whispers of the Old Gods, based around ancient eldritch tentacled horrors – and then slowly released the new cards we can expect to see burst forth from the new card packs. Now it seems that we have a release date too, thanks to a message that appears when attempting to purchase items that are rotating out of the new Standard format on the Battle.net store.

The new Standard is of course launching at the same time as Whispers of the Old Gods is, and will remove Naxxramas as well as its related cards and the GvG set from use in Standard although Wild will still allow for their use. The patch that comes out to let the new cards be used will also rebalance a lot of the Classic and Basic cards that have been around since the days of the Closed Beta tests. It really is going to be a day of massive changes.

Since April 26th is only 3 weeks away, expect to see card releases to speed up now and a massive one to happen just before release. Also prepare yourself for the release day itself; if it’s anything like the last few big releases the servers will probably fall over a few times before everything settles down.

Hey, at least it’s consistent enough for us to expect it to probably happen by this point.