Hearthstone Dev Tracker

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.

We do a mix of this. Sometimes a mechanic like Rush and Lifesteal and Discover is kept for years. Sometimes we do it for one expansion. Freeze is a good example because it isn't very fun to have your minions frozen a lot so making that into a Tier 1 deck is pretty dangerous. We have seen this in mage already.

When we have a build-around like treants or elementals or dragons we can launch it and see how it goes, then slowly add cards to increase the power level over the next few years. Dragon Priest is a great example of this because it has been a reasonable deck for years and it changes each year as some of the strong cards leave, and new strong cards show up.

In the future we want to have more decks that rely on cards in two different years so that when rotation happens the deck changes, with some cards leaving and new cards entering the decks.

We all like the idea of more achievements and tracking of progress. We were able to add a bunch of this in the new Single Player adventure that is coming out after the first Expansion of the year. We will let you unlock hero powers and starting decks through play and we will track which hero powers and starting decks that you have won with. Hopefully in the future we can do more of this. Each time we do a new feature like this we learn more about it and expand on the technology as we go.

This seems like a great idea for a Tavern Brawl. We have so many ideas and suggestions both internally and externally for new game modes that we can't just add all of them to the game. Having them show up as Tavern Brawls guarantees that a lot of the community is focused on them and all talking about that mode and playing it at the same time.

When we do this as a Tavern Brawl would you rather it be a regular brawl or what we call Brawliseum (meaning it is 100 gold to enter and you get rewards based on success)?

When Hearthstone was built originally the technology for world wide collections didn't exist so we built our game around that. The vast majority of players play only in one region so this works great for them.

I do feel for the players like you that play in multiple regions though. It is a lot of work to change this so we haven't prioritized it yet over card sets or current features.