Hearthstone's next update will let you borrow a friend's deck and play it against them

With Hearthstone's Witchwood expansion just three days away, Blizzard held their customary pre-expansion livestream today to show off the rest of the set's new cards and to wisely take any excuse to put Day9 and Ben Brode in the same room. And while plenty of cards were exciting, for many people the best thing to come out of today's stream was a new feature called Borrowed Decks which—you guessed it—let's you borrow your friend's decks.

"If you're challenging another player and maybe you're new to the game and you don't have a lot of decks or you just want to help somebody playtest, you can hit 'Borrow Decks' and they'll get a little dialogue box," Brode explained on stream. "And they can say 'yeah, they can use my decks in this challenge.' So just for that 1v1 friendly play experience, now you can use each other's decks. You can swap decks and play each other's decks against each other."

Hearthstone players have been clamoring for a way to share their collections with their friends for years, and borrowing decks feels like a tidy solution to that need. It's also another way to play with friends, which ties into Team 5's hopes of improving Fireside Gatherings in the Year of the Raven.

You can learn more about the team's plans for Hearthstone's upcoming year, as well as Brode and lead designer Peter Whalen's thoughts on the defining cards from the Year of the Mammoth, here. For more Witchwood tidbits, have a look at our high-Legend expert's predictions for the expansion's legendaries.

Austin freelanced for PC Gamer, Eurogamer, IGN, Sports Illustrated, and more while finishing his journalism degree, and has been a full-time writer at PC Gamer's sister publication GamesRadar+ since 2019. They've yet to realize that his position as a staff writer is just a cover-up for his career-spanning Destiny column, and he's kept the ruse going with a focus on news, the occasional feature, and as much Genshin Impact as he can get away with.