Hearthstone’s next expansion pays homage to some of the game’s most popular and beloved cards.
We talked with Blizzard designers about how it all came together.
Hearthstone is celebrating its 10-year anniversary today, and the weeks-long birthday blowout is well underway.
GameSpot: When you were brainstorming for the 10-year anniversary, what did you want to accomplish?
How did you want to mark this big occasion?
Cora Georgiou:Well, we had no shortage of options, I will say.
“Well, that timing does line up pretty closely with Hearthstone’s 10th anniversary.
Would it be a wild idea to do a theme that really leans into that?”
We realized we have to go for it.
This is the one opportunity, our one shot–[we]cannot throw away that shot.
And from there it was just really figuring out, ‘Okay, we want to do the 10th anniversary?
How do we do that?
How do we make an expansion that encompasses 10 years of Hearthstone?’
We brought the League of Explorers back.
So how do we make this one feel really special?
A little bit of dark in there as well.
Death Knights can only be so whimsical before they start getting annoyed at us.
And so it seemed like he was just a great sort of hallmark character for the set.
It’s Whizbang versus Boom, but it’s also kind of goblins versus gnomes at its core.
But it’s also so whimsical and fun that there really isn’t much conflict there.
It’s all around just a really good time.
Once we got the ball rolling, different people came with different ideas.
The picture started to really come together.
And you said about a year ago you were starting to work on Whizbang’s Workshop.
That’s just who he is as a character.
So that characterization of a toy maker and inventor really just came naturally.
Georgiou:There are some layers to it for sure.
Sometimes it’s a little bit more difficult, sometimes it’s a little bit easier.
The gameplay came really naturally.
And of course, in the fantasy aspect, it kind of felt like a home run.
And there’s a lot of fun things that we can do with it, like Toy Captain Tarim.
So when you started the project of making it a nostalgia trip.
How did you go about picking out major trends and popular standouts?
And particularly, how hard was it to find one standout for each class?
So there were certain instances like Shudderwock where we’re like, yeah, it’s kind of obvious.
Shudderwock Shaman is the most iconic Shaman deck.
We haven’t used him since The Witchwood.
We should bring back Shudderwock.
But there were some that were a little bit more difficult.
That’s where characters like Pipsi Painthoof come in, or spells like the Wheel of Death in Warlock.
Georgiou:Yeah, absolutely.
That’s no good.
They don’t interact that way.
It doesn’t make your next Battlecry trigger nine times.
We made sure that that wasn’t the case.
So we liked that you had to space them out.
And there was some concern with specifically damaging effects.
We just had Brann Bronzebeard in Core for a whole year.
That was really fun, but there was a lot of power baked in there.
Maybe we didn’t want to retread that ground right away.
And when we were designing Shudderblock is his name, Alexstrasza Life-Binder was in Core.
It’s certainly powerful.
It certainly is giving a game finishing combination of cards, which is not always a bad thing.
You got to win games somehow.
It seems like you’ve got very careful phrasing that maybe you’ve learned the lessons from the past.
And that doesn’t mean that the original is not amazing.
Time Warp is an incredibly powerful Hearthstone card.
And so we had a good idea of what that would look like in standard.
Priest has so many copy effects, creation protocol, things like that.
And so it was just a matter of, hey, we want to make fun experiences here.
We want our players to be able to win the game with these cards.
Georgiou:There definitely were characters that were like, hey, these characters are really cool.
We just revealed Hemet, Foam Marksman, which is Hemet Nesingwary obviously.
The first two iterations [of Hemet] were very, very different cards.
Hemet, Jungle Hunter saw play in those Mecha’thun style decks where it’s destroying much of your deck.
And obviously he’s so tied to Beasts.
But giving him a little bit of a new life, I think that was fun.
They were adventure cards and the Wisdomball sometimes is great, maybe sometimes not so great.
What special considerations went into planning the Core set?
Georgiou:We actually do them a little bit in tandem.
A lot of fun, but maybe a little weak right now.
What if we tried a version of her at 4 mana, at 5 mana?'
But yeah, that’s something that we are working on consistently for about a year of time.
The range of this expansion seems especially broad since it’s revisiting so many different eras of Hearthstone.
What considerations went into making sure the Core set would enable such a broad range of possibilities?
Georgiou:Yeah, it’s definitely about making sure it’s as flexible as possible.
One, they had to be ideally pretty nostalgic this time around.
They always are to an extent.
But this time we definitely had a little bit more of an emphasis on it.
That’s where the Core set I think fits in really well.
So take Warlock for example.
The original deck played Doomguard and Voidlord, primarily with Voidcaller Skull of the Man’ari.
Everything we’re trying to do here.
We’re not really doing better than Doomguard, so why don’t we just do Doomguard?"
And eventually we were like, “Yeah, why don’t we?”
And so we just put Doomguard in Core.
And I think that’s really cool when we can get all of those circumstances to align.
Speaking of iconic, the Harth Stonebrew card itself was the free kickoff celebration bang out card.
You had to decide on iconic hands for him to summon.
What was that design process like?
Georgiou:Yeah, that was really fun.
It was really fun.
So Harth Stonebrew didn’t start as a card in the Whizbang’s Workshop.
Actually started as a concept for the character Zephrys.
But then there was an idea to do this cycle of gift spells.
It feels like you need something else on top of it.
Who’s throwing the party?
We’d never seen Harth in Hearthstone before officially.
And that’s where we came up with the 11 that we chose.
Technically 13, because Death Knight’s got three separate ones.
But it was a really fun process.
That was again, just an extension of that same process.
What are some of the most fundamental spells that players remember from these classes?
And so for Druid, yeah, it’s obviously Wild Growth.
For Warrior, yep, Shield Block.
Georgiou:Yeah, there’s a lot of factors to consider.
I wouldn’t say that it’s really any different from any other expansion that we’ve done.
In Titans we made the Titans.
They’re very, very powerful.
It was kind of a similar situation with the Colossals.
Having powerful cards to enable powerful decks and enable really fun gameplay is awesome.
That’s what we want.
Like, the best Warrior deck right now is an Odyn armor gain Warrior.
Anytime we make armor gain, it’s going to contribute to a deck like that.
So just a few things to consider there.
That isn’t fun either.
And sometimes those new cards are really fitting in old decks that are good.
When Hearthstone started, balance changes were relatively slow.
Now it feels a lot faster and more nimble.
Does that represent a philosophical change of approach into how the team sees balance updates?
Nathan Lyons-Smith:Part of that, definitely it’s been philosophy and willingness to react quickly.
And also looking at the market and what our players want.
They’re very hungry for this.
That’s also come alongside investment in our pipeline and process and capability to do that quickly.
We think about time to mitigation and then time to change.
There’s always more we could do there.
Georgiou:Yeah, absolutely.
Plus we have many sets that are an additional 38 cards.
It’s just a lot more than was originally planned with Hearthstone 10 years ago.
And so we want to feel comfortable with taking big swings.
We want to feel comfortable with making cards like Zilliax.
But there are so many variables that you might’t account for every single thing.
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