Hearthstone Dev Tracker

https://imgur.com/a/iBd8HtW

Me and my daughter hanging out for Father's day weekend #sweet

I am starting a stream right now teaching my daughter Melody Hearthstone through the Dalaran Heist adventure.

Come by and say hi to us and ask if you want advice on Dalaran Heist stuff or just want to hang out.

https://www.twitch.tv/melodyserafina

We talked about it like this because some candidates will be people who regularly hit top Legend like Chakki was, while other candidates have hit legend a few times but have a ton of card game experience and other skills.

We do have a fridge full of Snapple within 20 feet of the design team :)

I wanted to give some bonus context for our open design position, although the job description tells a lot.

One of the reasons people use Hearthstone Reddit is to keep up with the meta and understand how it is changing, and why it is changing in that way.

This understanding of the meta and prediction of the future meta is something our final design team does every day. Not only with expansions that are live, but with expansions that are 1-3 expansions in the future.

If you want this job you should be able to predict what new decks will be competitive because of a new card. And how those decks might change the meta, perhaps pushing out other decks, or bringing in counter decks.

You will work with Hearthstone ex pros like Chakki, Realz, Puffin and of course Iksar.

In addition to understanding and predicting how cards will change the meta, you should also be genuinely nice and easy to work with while still being able to express yourself and ma...

Reconnect is getting a big buff in the buff patch next week too.

I think you are right.

This was a real roller coaster, well worth watching.

Congratulations, a milestone on a grand journey. Happy to see where it takes us!

These awesome card names are from the future!

We will give you more info on them in a few months. Great sleuthing though.

This is a great example of top down design. Based on a song that we all had stuck in our head.

Our goal was to add a feature that made it easier for players to build competitive decks using the cards they already own. This will be a great help to people who don’t own all the cards for a specific deck they’d like to play. It’s also great if someone knows 5 or 10 cards that they want to put into a deck, but they aren’t sure what the rest of the deck should look like and want help with that.

The way it works is we gather information from all the decks that are being played and we see how successful each card is in these decks. We look closely at what cards you own, and what cards you have already placed into the deck, and find the best archetype that fits those 2 criteria. We then finish out the deck with the strongest cards that you own for that deck archetype.

Sometimes a deck doesn't fit into one of the many archetypes and in those cases we resort to a backup plan and give you the most powerful cards that you own in a good mana curve.

Legendary weapons, Legendary spells, hero cards and quests all had a positive reaction so we can certainly bring them back at the right time.

When we do bring cards back we want to make sure it is the right time and the story support it like it did for Dr. Boom's Hero card and Hagatha's Hero card.

What is your favorite keyword or cycle of cards or card type that you would want us to bring back first?

I meant Sludge Slurper. I never forget a murloc!

One important lesson was that new expansions should have a big impact on the meta. We want to see the game continue to evolve over the year because that’s what makes it fun. We helped this by changing some Classic cards so that our new expansions will have a bigger impact, but we will continue pushing new cards that have a bigger impact.

Another lesson we took away from Year of the Raven is that having something to do between expansion releases is important. We are hoping to address this in a variety of ways this year and in the future. One way that we already mentioned is Arena changing every 2 months. Another way is releasing the single-player Adventure a month after the expansion. We’re not done with just that though.

I will miss Arfus. He was a good dog. :(

I just wanted to double down on the fact that we can't give any new keywords away.

I love murlocs and I am hoping to add a splash of murlocs in the next few expansions. Sludge Slurper has an amazing coming into play sound, check it out!

Some of this has been discussed in other answers, but I want to mention Squelch because it is something that different game designers around the world feel differently about.

From a game design perspective, emotes help players feel that they are playing a game against other human players, and squelch would hurt that. Emotes create emotional moments, whether it’s a begrudging acknowledgement of a good play from your opponent, or even a taunt here and there.

That said, there are pros and cons, and it’s an interesting topic of discussion.

This time we will gave away the card a week before the expansion comes out so you can use it over the prerelease weekend.