When Hearthstone Battlegrounds' Duos mode was announced in November last year, Blizzard said to expect the launch in early 2024. As of today, we now know that April 16 is the day players will be able to begin buddying up to take on lobbies. The full blog post is here. 

I'm a long-time enjoyer of the auto-battler spinoff, so I'm looking forward to jumping in over Discord with my colleague Austin on GamesRadar, whose head for strategy, APM, and MMR are all substantially higher than mine.

In Duos you share a life pool with your teammate and face off against three other teams. You initiate a game by inviting anyone from your friends list to partner up, or you can opt to take your chances with solo queue, although I can only imagine the kind of frustration trying to strategise with a rando using in-game emotes will lead to. 

As you'd hope, Duos features some substantial tweaks from the normal Battlegrounds formula. Players can pass cards to and fro between each other at a cost of 1 Gold per time, which you're going to want to do because many of the new cards and heroes being added have been designed specifically to synergise with the mode. Think cards designed just to buff the other player, or that reward you for working together. 

In total, Duos is getting 4 unique heroes, 16 minions and 3 tavern spells. I've dropped the minions revealed today in the gallery at the bottom of this article.

Duos arrives as part of a full refresh for Battlegrounds, with the launch of Season 7 happening on the same day and themed around fairy tales. Quests are leaving as part of the update, but tavern spells are sticking around. The main game will see a substantial shake up of the minion pool, with 50 brand new additions, 12+ returnees, and a couple of new tavern spells. Blizzard also says it's tuned up the Beast, Mech and Dragon tribes in order to be better balanced. 

I'll leave you to guess whether a swathe of new cosmetics are also coming. Clue: Yes.