[2020] Hearthstone Team Reddit AMA – August 11

Yeah, we love that there's interest in this. As your update says, we just added a bunch of Scholomance Academy card art up on the press site, and we will try to post card art there whenever possible!

We love Arena. It has a passionate and dedicated following, and one of the things that we think is most important to Hearthstone is that there are many different ways to play. Our main focus right now has been on developing new game modes, while keeping Arena in a stable place. I can definitely understand wishing for 'something new' (beyond new expansions); are there little changes that you think would help Arena out?

To some of your specific points:

• Set rotations had some downsides as well (a more complex format, old sets out of place at times balance-wise, etc.). Since they were removed, we’ve seen a large amount of vocal support for them, and are considering bringing them back in some form for the next expansion.
• Buckets were a mixed bag; we could spend all day tweaking buckets, but we didn’t really see positive results from them. Even just a few poorly-bucketed cards would cause significantly negative community reaction/experience, until we could fix them. They made individual draft picks more interesting, but made decks more same-y over the long term. We think it’s OK to have some easy picks in your draft, and feel like the current drafting still offers interesting choices a lot.
• Offering rates, particularly on certain extremely powerful cards like Twin Tyrant and Dragonqueen Alexstrasza are mostly tweaked with class balance in mind, so the strongest classes do get less of these powerful cards. In the future, we’re open to removing cards that are too powerful for Arena. We’re considering doing some of this for the next expansion, but Descent of Dragons cards also likely won’t be in the rotation anyway if we do an Arena Set Rotation as mentioned above.

Let’s talk about why we do, and don’t turn some effects into keywords! It’s much more than just “do multiple cards use it”. The downsides of keywording are usually small. It’s not that it's “too confusing”; our players are smart. But it is something that players need to learn. That’s not a big downside, but it’s not zero.

The upsides vary dramatically between potential keywords.

• It saves card text space and reading space. Now, importantly, saving text space isn’t much of an upside on its own; to capitalize on that space, we need to have some designs that we want to do that make use of that space.
• It also lets us interact with it from other cards. We can make effects that draw cards with that keyword, or buff cards with that keyword, etc.
• There’s also a vague sort of “weight” that is implicitly given to a keyword, which can be good, if it’s fitting for the set.

Consider these upsides/downsides for Outcast. We’ll put it on a ton of cards. Lots of cards will have Outcast along with a bunch more text. We want to make cards that interact with it (“Draw an Outcast card.”). It also matches the expansion flavor (or class flavor in this case), and delivers on that in a meaty way. Small downside, huge upsides.

Compare that to something like Cleave. All of the fun designs involving Cleave that we’ve found are already doable in the card text space we have, and none interact with it from other cards. Same thing with Elusive. It’s only a small downside, but the upsides just aren’t there, at least not yet. We certainly might find those designs in the future, or feature them heavily in a fitting new expansion, and then it’ll be Cleave’s time (or Elusive’s). We’ll see!

Secrets in Paladin are an interesting topic. The concept of Secrets fits so well it something like Hunter (traps!), Mages (magic counters/tricks!), and even Rogue (surprising you is basically their main shtick). But in Paladin, the flavor is harder to find. Paladins are so open and non-secretive and fair and just. And additionally, 1 Mana is a touchy balance point; gotta bridge the gap between feeling like too minor of an effect to even be bothered by, and feeling unfair for only 1 Mana.

So yeah, as a designer, they definitely are the hardest Secret for me to design. But, despite all those challenges, we still keep finding cool new Paladin Secrets, and ways that we want to use them. I don’t want to be too much of a tease, but I will say that one of my favorite cards currently planned for the next expansion happens to be a Paladin Secret. ;)