Hearthstone Dev Tracker

One of the earliest cards I pitched in Knights of the Frozen throne was Mass Teleport: “Fill both sides of the board with random minions.” It sounds really silly and fun on paper, but once you realized the opponent always had initiative over your minions, you just died. 100% of the time. I thought “Well maybe as a dreamy card it’s fun. Or what if the enemy has a full board?” But it just never happens. It SOUNDS SO COOL. It feels awful to play it every. single. time.

That’s the philosophy going forward, and we’re OK with letting the old-style cards just rotate out of Standard and stay in Wild.

But as you point out, Pilfer is a special case; it’s in Classic. Because of that, we are considering whether we should change it. But, we haven’t settled on a fix just yet.

These little hidden interaction voiceover lines are super fun to add. We try to do them where they’ll be most impactful, but not clutter things up with having too many. Rise of Shadows features a ton of lore-important characters, and so we picked the lines we liked best, and tried to spread them out between mul...

I heard a rumor from Dr. Boom that it’s actually “Explosive Varmints Importing Loot.”

This is something we’re considering. I don’t think we’ll get into a formula for “Mages always get a Legendary spell” and “Warriors get a Legendary weapon.” But I think now that we’ve done Legendary spells and weapons, we’re more likely to just do it when it feels right.

Indeed, better refining and defining class strengths and weaknesses is a big goal of ours this year. That does sound like a good topic for a designer insight or blog post!

Khadgar says they’re Extortionists. Vile. Immoral. Louts.

A couple of things going on here. For Basic cards, we’ve always nerfed in the past. If we Hall of Fame a Basic card, we need to replace it at the same time since it’s in everyone’s collection. That’s something we might do in the future, but haven’t yet.

For Classic cards, it’s a question of whether the effect is something we want around long term in standard. There are a few of pieces to that - how well does it fit the class’ fantasy, is it a healthy effect for the game to have around always, and is it something cool and exciting that we want to preserve in Wild. For Cold Blood, it’s a healthy effect, something w...

Don’t listen to these guys it clearly stands for “Evil eVil evIl eviL”.

Legendary is easiest to decide. Mechanically, if we only want something to happen once a game (ignoring shenanigans), we’ll make it Legendary. Or if it needs to be the only copy of something. A good example is the no-duplicate cards like Reno and Kazakas. Or if there’s something that doesn’t make sense to happen twice in a game, like this scrapped card: “Battlecry: Detonate all Bombs in your oppo...

Oh really? I heard from Rafaam himself that it was “Every Villain Imbibes Lemonade”.

We are working towards a world where class strengths and weaknesses are better communicated and more easily defined. One option players have when their class may have difficulty with wide removal options is to tech in cards from Neutral, like Dragonmaw Scorcher and Mossy Horror, if they’re running to a lot of decks like Token Druid. Neutral options are generally weaker than class removal options, but they’re something you can reach for if that’s something you’re running into a lot on the l...

Happy Birthday!

I wrote an article about a year ago about some philosophy on keywords when we changed Enrage (...

That’s a good question! I’m not sure… I’m not sure if even Rafaam is sure! Maybe “Elaborate Vision of Ideal Leaders”?

Tribes, or ‘minion types’, exist for a few reasons. Mechanically, they link a wide variety of disparate cards, so that they can be referred to and interacted with (“Whenever you summon a Beast…”, “If you played an Elemental last turn…”, etc.). They also help add flavor to a card. We have a variety of minion types right now, and are open to the idea of adding more in the future. However, each minion type we add does add a bit of complication, so we look at what the upside of each one is.

Take Treants for example: We’ve designed Treants to be consistently 2/2 tokens, with “Treant” in their nam...

We’ve heard from the community and understand this is an important thing to you. And it’s important to us too! The idea of a new game mode is very exciting, so figuring out what the right thing to do is important. We’re going to continue making card expansion and solo content, but other ways to play Hearthstone is something we’re very interested in.

• Don´t you think the epics should have the same rule as legendary cards? (Can´t open duplicates.)

We’re happy with the no duplicates rules for Legendary cards, but have no plans to extend it to epic cards.

• Are you pleeeeeeease going to do something about wild soon?

When we release a new expansion, we’re always excited to see players try out new cards and discover synergies and decks that will shape the meta. We’ve seen this with Rise of Shadows and have been monitoring the ebbs and flows as decks rise in prominence and get countered by other decks. With the Wild meta in particular, we tend to see crazier interactions and stronger decks and this is something we’re generally happy with. In certain cases when decks seem out of line with what we’re comfortable with, we have stepped in, like in the case for Naga Sea Witch and Aviana. We’ve discussed the possibility of nerfing cards, such a...

We’ve learned a lot about hero cards since we launched the Death Knights. In general, we like them to either have a fair amount of variance in their gameplay or to have their hero powers be at a power level more in line with Justicar Trueheart than, say, Bloodreaver Gul’dan. Zul’jin is a good example of this. There’s some wiggle room here, but the core idea is that we don’t want the hero power to drown out the rest of the cards that you’re playing.

With each expansion, we’re going to continue to make powerful cards – a card being powerful isn’t necessarily a reason for us to change something. The most important thing here is that the game doesn’t feel hopeless or inevitable. I think the variance in Dr. Boom’s and Hagatha’s hero powers helps a lot there. You could get lucky, your opponent might get unlucky, and there’s still a lot of gameplay back and forth between you after those are played. It’s meaningfully different from some of the very powerful and more repetitive...

Designs go through a lot of iterations, and this one happened to be a little later than others. We try to get the flavor, mechanics, and art to all line up but getting the right design is the most important part. We tried Boombots, shuffling in bombs, dealing damage, but this is the one we landed on. We wanted to give them some more defensive tools to help out that archetype more than the damage and bomb version.

We nerfed Saronite Chain Gang as a result of combinations with Shudderwock being an unfun experience to play against. It can be exhausting spending a huge amount of time on a single turn just watching everything play out without you interacting at all. There’s an unfortunate side-effect that Chain Gang loses handbuff synergies, but it felt like the right decision to make.

As for Yogg, it’s a pretty dangerous effect for us to have in Neutral sticking around forever. If we were to do this sort of thing again, we’d rather put it in a class where it’s a little more contained.