Hearthstone Dev Tracker

Hey guys, just a heads up:

We’ve got a Hearthside Chat coming out Thursday next week that’ll dive more into what exactly the new Solo Adventure is and when it’s coming out. If you have any questions once that’s out, I’d be happy to answer all I can!

We went back and forth on this during design. Should minions with “Can’t Attack” be allowed to attack? 0 Attack minions? Frozen minions? You could make arguments for each of these. Ultimately, it came down to Supercollider - we use the same wording for both and we wanted these two weird cards to act similarly. For Supercollider, the story is that you’re smacking two minions together, so Frozen, Can’t attack, and 0 Attack minions should all get smacked into an adjacent minion. So we made Mass Hysteria the same. As a bonus, it seemed simpler and there were less edge-case if we said it worked on all minions.

We are. Obviously these are conversations that take place across/between the entire team, but on the art side we’ve been having a lot of chats recently about our part in those and what’ll make for cool rewards.

That’s awesome, glad to hear it!

We’re working on ways to get Hero Skins out more often! There are two primary reasons there’ve been relatively few historically - the main one just being that we want them to continue to be something a little more rare and special (something rarer/higher-impact than card backs, for instance). We don’t want the game to get oversaturated with them, but we know they’re some...

I think he really wanted to make himself something cool that the League could rally around, but Togwaggle got super confused about how many fingers it was supposed to have so he gave up and just glued the staff to his arm.

(This is actually canon, we have so...

Yo happy birthday!

Glimmerroot, I love that lil’ guy.<3 I think he’s a great card, but also I’m super attached to his FX because they were really fun to make, so I’m biased.

Not on the RoS board, no.
The volcano was kind of a special case where we just couldn’t not do a gigantic eruption (and the Troll gates kinda wrote themselves as well :P), but we approach boards with the base goal of designing a clean, awesome board first and then fitting appropriate clickables to that (very generally speaking - we all sit right next to each other so there’s a lot of back and forth and “Hey what if we added…” between everyone as well).
Those secret interactions are really fun for us to make, and we always bat a ton of clickable ideas (of varying levels of practicality) around, but we want to make sure they make sense ...

Yeah, we’re talking about a bunch of different smaller goodies that we could use for more frequent, low-key rewards. We don’t have a super solid timeline for them yet, but there are a lot of different things we’re talking about and scoping out as possible rewards/cosmetics/etc.

We learned a lot about Hero cards after we introduced the Death Knights and applied that knowledge to the Hero Cards in the Year of the Raven. The t...

I’m actually further down the pipe than card art (usually by the time I see card art it’s usually getting pretty close to done so I can riff on it for the FX:)), so I’m honestly less involved in the 2D side than most of the Designers here (and our awesome 2D artists, of course :P). We do like making new art for tokens to fit the theme of the set, as it helps fulfill the fantasy...

Hearthstone doesn’t have a lot of ways to interact with other players. Emotes are one of the few ways to actually have some sort of communication. I’d say as far as toxic behaviors go, emotes are among the least harmful.

This is a super interesting topic, but hard to give concrete examples of, because we often iterate on problematic designs to find good designs, and I don’t want to spoil future cards.

In general terms though, I’ve personally been quite interested in finding a way to fulfill the Beast Mastery Hunter fantasy of “Just me and my one life-time partner pet”. We’ve worked on finding something fun (for both sides) like that a few times now. No idea when or even if we’ll find a fun way to deliver ...

Yes, that’s the plan

We’ve got replacements for the Hall of Famed basic and classic cards internally and we’re looking for the right patch to introduce them. Won’t be in the next one (that has the mission content), but we’re hoping to get them out before the next expansion.

We’re working on delivering it before the end of the year.

Greetings, fellow Explosive Villain In League(of EVIL)!

Sometimes we can write exactly what will happen on a card, sometimes it’s better to write the gist of it as most people will get it. Or at least think they get it enough to matter. This is similar to how we wrote Gral’s eat mechanic, it’s mostly for flavor, but there’s some benefit to save space on a card.

That said, we don’t have plans on teaching spells to more things yet, but I don’t see why not. ...

This is something we’ve been discussing on the art side as well - general things like what do those medium- and long-term rewards look like, more specific ones like what would be an awesome 1000 wins reward, etc.

We’d love to bring back the Tyrande alternate hero and things like missing Card backs. It’s one of the most asked for things from the community. It’s frustrating knowing you missed out on something while you were away or before you started playing Hearthstone. We’re working on the right way to get them in to your hands.

We’ve been working on figuring out what an awesome long term cosmetic reward would look like. Medium and long-term goals are one of the most consistent pieces of feedback we’ve gotten from long-time players so we’ve got some stuff we’re looking into to address it. Nothing to announce now, but it’s something we’d like to improve.