The Kobold & Catacombs

Lore & Background

Beneath the bustling streets of the city, the catacombs have long been a labyrinth of forgotten tombs, crumbling archways, and pockets of raw arcane energy seeping from the earth. For generations, the Kobolds—small, industrious, and perpetually hungry—have tunneled through these depths, mining for ore and hoarding whatever shiny objects they could drag back to their warrens. The Gnomes, ever the tinkerers, found the same subterranean veins irresistible, setting up workshops where steam-powered gadgets clanked and sputtered in the perpetual gloom.

What began as a uneasy coexistence—Kobolds digging, Gnomes building—slowly curdled into a joint enterprise. Together, they began constructing something in the deepest chamber: a device of interlocking gears, stolen spell components, and far too many Kobold 'improvements' that no single clan could have managed alone. Their ambitions grew beyond mining and tinkering; they spoke of reshaping the city above, of turning its foundations into a workshop and its streets into a mine. The catacombs, once a quiet graveyard, became a hive of clanking ambition.

The player's intervention is less a heroic quest and more an irritated intervention—shoving past a Kobold Librarian who insists on shuffling you into a new deck, dodging a Gnomish Engineer's half-finished steam cannon, and ultimately confronting the absurd, over-engineered contraption at the heart of the tunnels. The tone is one of exasperated comedy: these are not dark lords, merely small, stubborn creatures who have taken over the basement and refuse to leave.

In Their Own Story

The torch sputtered. Somewhere ahead, a gear the size of a carriage wheel ground against stone with a shriek that set your teeth on edge. You pressed your back against the cold wall of the catacomb and listened.

A Kobold's voice, high and chipper, echoed from the next chamber: "Right, so if we just swap the third piston for the—" "NO. You cannot swap the third piston for a rock, Glub." "It's a very round rock."

You crept forward. Through a gap in the stonework you saw them: a Gnome in oil-stained goggles hunched over a workbench cluttered with half-assembled mechanisms, while a Kobold no taller than your knee tried to wedge a boulder into a steam valve. The boulder was, in fact, very round.

You drew your weapon. The Gnome looked up, adjusted her goggles, and said, "Ah. A visitor. Do you want a tea? We're out of sugar, but the Kobolds brought a lot of dirt."

Behind her, the great machine hummed to life, and the ceiling groaned.

Reader's Guide

The Kobold & Catacombs arrived in 2015 as Hearthstone's second expansion, and it hit a sweet spot that the community still references. The story was short and silly—fight through the tunnels, stop the Kobold-Gnome alliance from finishing their ridiculous machine—and that lightness matched the card design perfectly. The set leaned into whimsy without sacrificing mechanical depth.

The Combo keyword was the big mechanical addition. Rather than rewarding a single powerful play, Combo asked you to build a turn around multiple cards, creating a satisfying chain reaction. Gnomish Inventor, Kobold Mechanician, and Kobold Apprentice all leaned into this, and the synergy felt genuinely fresh after the more straightforward design of Goblins & Gnomes.

Kobold Geomancer, of course, defined the set. A two-mana card that simply buffed your other minions, it was mechanically straightforward but became a cultural touchstone—a symbol of Hearthstone's identity as a game that could be both strategic and absurdly fun. The community embraced it, meme-ified it, and it lingered in the collective memory long after the set rotated.

On the Warcraft crossover front, Kobolds and Gnomes are both well-established races in the broader lore, and the expansion gave them a moment to shine outside of their usual supporting roles. The tone stayed true to their in-universe personalities: the Gnomes as brilliant but reckless inventors, the Kobolds as tireless, slightly dim diggers. It was a small, self-contained story that reminded players why the world felt alive even in a card game.

Did You Know?

• Kobold Geomancer, a simple two-mana minion that buffed your other minions, became one of the most recognized and meme-ified cards in Hearthstone's entire history, often used as a shorthand for the game's playful identity
• The Combo keyword introduced in this set required players to have played at least one other card that turn to trigger its effect, creating a new layer of turn sequencing strategy that had not existed in the base game.
• The expansion's story mode was a short, linear dungeon crawl through the catacombs, a format that became a recurring structural element in subsequent Hearthstone expansions.
• Kobolds and Gnomes are both long-standing races in the Warcraft universe, appearing in World of Warcraft and earlier titles, making this expansion a direct nod to the broader franchise's bestiary.