Peter Whalen: So, ‘dinosaur Hearthstone set’ has been around for a long time. People have been suggesting that, basically every time we go into a room and say ‘what set should we do next?’ So that idea has been around for ages, and then, shortly after Whispers of the Old Gods launched, we were at the launch party and we were kind of solidifying what the next set was going to be, and that’s when we said – let’s do dinosaurs, let’s do Un’Goro crater for the next expansion. Well, for the next expansion that we’d work on, which was actually a year out!
IGN: I like the idea that you guys are celebrating the launch of Whispers of the Old Gods and working.
Peter Whalen: (Laughs) Well, our job, it doesn’t feel like work sometimes. You’re talking about – what would you like to see in Hearthstone?! We want to see dinosaurs! That’s not really working hard. That’s just fun.
IGN: How early was the Adapt idea linked to the dinosaur theme?
Peter Whalen: Adapt’s pretty early. We were actually looking into some of this when we were writing the articles during the launch period leading up to Un’Goro. Adapt was actually one of the first mechanics we had for it, though it started much more complex. There used to be about 20 adaptations, and some of them were minion buffs and some of them were mini-spells that you would cast, like, heal your hero for five or deal one damage to all enemy minions, that kind of thing. We decided that it was simpler just to do the minion buffs and it was a better vibe fit – it made more sense if ‘adaptation’ meant your minion got better. IGN: This set ushered in a new Standard rotation – what does a new set that’s leading the charge for the next rotation have to do differently to another set? Do you think about it in a different way?
Peter Whalen: Yeah, for sure. I think in some ways it’s easier. It’s more of a challenge because there’s a lot of weight on this set. You have to have cool themes for the different classes, you have to have all of these new ideas that are coming out, because there’s a lot of focus on this new set, because it’s a bigger part of the meta game, but on the other hand, you’re not constrained as much, because you don’t have some of the powerful cards from a couple of years ago, at least in the Standard environment, that you have to design around. There’s fewer constraints, which makes it a lot of fun to explore what kind of new things we can do. So you definitely need to do these new themes and one of the ways that we did that was with the Quests. It gives us new opportunities for – here are particular decks you can try out – but also just in each of the classes, we had several different themes that you could explore.
IGN: How has the fact that you’re doing three expansions a year now – and bundling adventure-style content in with that – how has that changed your thought processes about what a set needs to be? Peter Whalen: Not that much, I think on the collectible side it stays pretty much the same. One of the opportunities that having the adventures bundled in with the expansions gives us is it lets us tell more of a story, and it lets us have some more opportunities to express the vibe and the fantasy for each of our expansions. It would have been fun with Un’Goro to do some stories about Elise and her troop in the crater and meeting Hemet or exploring these dinosaurs for the first time, and we see some of that with the cinematic, but by having adventures bundled in with expansions, we’re going to have more opportunities in the future to tell some of those stories.
IGN: For sure. I would have loved to see some Mean Streets adventure content along those lines… it’s going to be great moving forwards to have more story content linked to each set.
Peter Whalen: Oh yeah, absolutely. Mean Streets was fantastic. It would have been great if each of the wings was a different boss and you get to see how they interact with their crime family. It would have been really cool.
IGN: Definitely. The set has been out for a little while now, and to me the class balance feels really good. It feels like almost every class has at least a couple of viable archetypes. Some classes have several archetypes that – even if they’re not all viable – offer some really fun stuff to experiment with. How do you feel about the way things are shaking out so far?
Peter Whalen: I’m really happy about it. I wish Mike [Donais] were here, because this is really a huge success story for his team. He leads the final design group and they did a phenomenal job on this expansion, I think. There’s a bunch of different things in each of the classes, the power level on them is pretty good, and there’s a bunch of places – one of the stories that I don’t think has been told much is that there’s so many opportunities for some of the weaker cards to be good in the future. There’s a number of the Quests that aren’t tier one right now, but as time goes on, over the next five expansions or so, while they’re still in Standard, there’s opportunities to print more cards that make those Quests better, and that give interesting archetypes in the future that we can build on. And I think that that’s one of the most exciting parts about Un’Goro to me. Yes, the meta game right now is fantastic, the top 16 at Dreamhack [Austin] had, what, 16, 20 different decks? I think that’s fantastic, but also, going forward we’re going to have these opportunities to see some of the lesser played cards played more. IGN: I completely agree. In terms of the Quests – how much were you guys trying to play it safe, or perhaps, lay a groundwork for the Quests with this set, as opposed to aiming explicitly for tier one?
Peter Whalen: A bit of both. So, the Quests are legendaries, and it’s definitely not one of our goals to have all of the main build-arounds in an expansion be legendary - all of the powerful cards. So it was really important to us that the Quests were only a piece of the set, so I think we hit that pretty well. I think there’s two or three tier one, tier two Quests, and there are a couple of others that people are exploring that are a little bit lower tier, but as time goes on, there’s opportunities for some of these Quests to come to the forefront, as we release more cards. Like, if there’s a powerful discard enabler the Warlock deck can become more powerful. If there’s a way to make a bunch of five attack guys, the Druid Quest can become more powerful. I think that’s one of the opportunities that we have here.
“It was definitely not our goal to have all nine Quests be tier one or tier two. I think that would make the expansion feel too one note…” – Peter Whalen.
So yeah, it was definitely not our goal to have all nine Quests be tier one or tier two. I think that would make the expansion feel too one note, and also, to make it feel too [much] like you have to have the legendaries. And instead, I think where we are right now is the Warrior Quest and the Rogue Quest are definitely very very strong, the Murloc Shaman Quest is a little bit weaker, the Priest Quest a little bit weaker, and then there are some other Quests that are even weaker than those, though I actually really like that the player rate on the Mage Quest is still pretty high. People really enjoy that despite its power level right now. So it’s been cool to see people explore all the different archetypes.“
IGN: It must be kind of tricky for you guys to balance though, the fact that these are legendary cards. If a Quest deck is tier one or tier two people feel that they need the Quest cards, but then, there are Quests that people might just want to have some fun with, and give it a try, but it’s quite a high cost of entry.
Peter Whalen: Yeah, that’s definitely true. I think there’s a balance here between [what] you want when you open a legendary in a pack - that it’s exciting. You don’t want to have too many legendaries where you get it and you’re like ‘oh, I’m just sad’. So we want our legendaries to be things that you look at and you’re like ‘I’m excited about exploring that’, but yeah, there’s the flipside to that that we definitely don’t want all of the competitive decks to be super legendary heavy and super expensive. And I think that’s true right now. There’s decks like Murloc Warlock that are very powerful. There are decks like Mid-range Hunter that play no legendaries, that are very strong, and y’know, tier one, tier two decks, that you can definitely explore and have fun with and win with, while at the same time lots of these legendaries, lots of these Quests are exciting to open, exciting to explore, but didn’t end up at tier one.
IGN: Speaking of opening legendaries and feeling sad, I’ve opened The Marsh Queen three times now.
Peter Whalen: (Laughs.) Well, before the expansion released a lot of people were really excited about that one, so I actually think that’s done a lot of good things for us.
IGN: It’s just on you guys to help me realise my Marsh Queen dream in the next set.
Peter Whalen: Yeah, I think that’s one of the Quests that – it has another five expansions in Standard, so if there are easier ways to get one-drops into play, if there’s better one-drops to play, and some ways to get more staying power, it could become a much better deck in the future.
IGN: I’ve got to figure that there are some decks that – even if you’re not focused on them – are going to improve regardless, because it’s not like you’re not going to print one-drops, right?
Peter Whalen: Right, exactly. That’s absolutely true. IGN: Let’s take a step back and talk about where the Quest idea came from, and how early that was linked to this broad theme.
Peter Whalen: Sure, so before TGT even came out one of our designers had sent around some ideas for littler quests, that, maybe they would go on minions, and you know how there’s a flag for Inspire, or a lightning bolt for triggered abilities and a skull for Deathrattle, there would be an exclamation point under some minions, so when you met their quest condition, like, I don’t know – attack twice with this minion – it would flare and that would mean you’d get +2/+2 or you’d draw two cards. There would be a reward.
So when we moved to Un’Goro one of the things we wanted to do was to have exciting build-arounds that you were interested in, and we came back to this quest idea. What if we said ‘meet a very difficult challenge and as a result you’ll get an insane reward’? So instead of being small quest, small reward, we said – okay, build your deck around it and you’re going to get something nuts, like, take an extra turn, or permanently get 3/2s forever, or your minions are free. All of these crazy things, and we can do it because we said you have to build the deck around it. And so that’s where Quests came from, and that was what we were exploring with the quest idea.
IGN: How early did you decide that legendary spells would be a thing? Was it just that it fit well for this? Or was that something you’d been planning on for a while? And maybe prototyping ideas of what that would look like.
Peter Whalen: It’s more that we wanted to do Quests and we wanted to do them at legendary, because they’re a very crazy idea, we only want one of them in each deck, because they only sort of make sense that way, and because we wanted the rewards to also be crazy ridiculous things. And so that fit what we want from legendaries perfectly... It didn’t make any sense that the Quests were epic, because having two of them wasn’t reasonable, so they made a lot of sense at legendary, and then, because they were spells, that gave us our first legendary spell. So it was more that the designs for the Quests made sense at legendary, rather than we said – we want legendary spells and here they are. I think if we just wanted legendary spells we would have done something totally different.
"I don’t feel like we’ve really captured the spirit of legendary spells yet, but it’s certainly something we can do in the future. Quests don’t feel like they’re just the legendary version of spells, they feel like their own thing." - Peter Whalen.
IGN: Are you planning on making more legendary spells?“
Peter Whalen: I think it’s certainly on the table. Legendary minions are great, we’ve had lots of them, the Quests went really well, but I don’t feel like we’ve really captured the spirit of legendary spells yet, but it’s certainly something we can do in the future. Quests don’t feel like they’re just the legendary version of spells, they feel like their own thing.
IGN: True. Let’s chat about some of the Quests specifically. I imagine there were some quests that were designed for the class and some that were just good ideas that you matched to a class. Is that the case?
Peter Whalen: Uh, yeah. All of the Quests, we want them to feel like they fit within the class. It was a lot less of – well, we just have this idea, let’s see where we can pigeonhole it – but definitely some of the Quests came because we were trying out different things mechanically, and then we tried to figure out where the flavour sense was. And now Mike [Donais] just walked in the room! Hello Mike!
IGN: Hey Mike. We’ve just been chatting about Quests. Peter has been telling me about where the initial idea came from and some of the broader goals, but I want to dig into some of the specific Quest designs and how they evolved over time. Was there any particular Quest that you guys would like to highlight that was really tricky to get the balance right on? I imagine it probably applies for all of them, given you need to basically pick a number for each.
Mike Donais: Yeah, we spent an enormous amount of time balancing the different Quests and also coming up with build-arounds for each of them that was different and fun to play, and yeah, all the specific numbers. And the trick was, we didn’t even know exactly how Quests were going to work when we started final design. We didn’t know if they would start in your hand, if they would cost zero mana or one mana, if they would start in play. Those were all things we talked about. If they would start shuffled into your deck. So we had to figure that out, and then we also have to figure out what they do and how to balance them. IGN: Wow. Let’s talk about perhaps the most successful quest to date – The Caverns Below. Leading into the release, many people didn’t think it would be very easy to pull that condition off, but it turns out you can do it by turn four a lot of the time. Was that a surprise to you guys or were you anticipating that?
Peter Whalen: No, not at all. We played a lot of games with that Quest.
Mike Donais: Yeah, we played a lot. We knew the Rogue Quest was – we were hoping it was around a 50/50 deck, which it turned out to be. The other ones, we knew the Warrior Quest deck was going to be pretty good. The one we weren’t sure about a bit more was the Mage one, because we knew – wow, it’s going to feel terrible if this card is very popular because you just lose from an empty board, so we wanted to be a bit more careful with that one, but it was, like, a bit of a wild card to us. We thought it might be dangerous.
Peter Whalen: One of the other things with the balance for these is that even once you fix the build-around piece and the reward, all the other cards in the set are still changing and they’re a really important component for how good the Quest is. Like, Primal Glyph – the “Discover a Mage spell” – is a super important part of that Quest and how strong that card is makes a big difference. Primalfin Champion, the Murloc guy that gets buffs in Paladin is an important part of that Quest, so how strong he is relates to it. So all of these pieces are an important piece in figuring out the balance for the Quests.
Mike Donais: There used to be a card in Rogue that was very good with the quest, but we had to change it because the Quest was just a little bit too easy to complete… the additional card that was in the set was ‘add a copy of a minion in play to your hand’. IGN: Yeah, I can see how that could be problematic! The Caverns Rogue list is feeling really refined – how do you feel about its power level in the meta right now? It’s definitely a deck that can be beaten, but if it’s a bad match-up for you it can be quite frustrating to play against.
Mike Donais: Yeah, I like watching how it’s changed over time. It started off as a 46% [win rate] deck, and then about a week or two in it went to a 48% deck, now I think it’s, like, a 50% deck, which means, okay, people aren’t embarrassed to play it, but what surprised me more is – it’s been the most played deck, regardless of its win rate. People just want to play it, and that’s been surprising.
IGN: There’s something pretty fun for the player on that deck to be bouncing minions and have this game plan that’s hidden from your opponent. And then the reward is just so strong - the way the deck is built you just get so much out of being able to play the reward card.
Peter Whalen: Yeah, for sure. I think that deck’s actually a lot of fun to play. It’s one of the more interesting decks I think, where you have to pick which minion you go in on, which turn do you even play the quest on is pretty interesting. It’s not always right to play it on the first turn. I think that deck is actually quite a bit of fun, but as you mentioned it’s sometimes not that fun to lose to, there’s a lot of Charge damage. Sometimes you can lose from an empty board, so that’s definitely something that we’re watching.
Mike Donais: Yeah, I think I would like the deck a bit more without the Charge.
IGN: There’s some pretty cute stuff you can do even after you’ve completed the Quest, like bouncing damaged minions back to your hand to play them again.
Peter Whalen: Yeah, for sure.
Mike Donais: You can bounce your Charge guys.
Peter Whalen: Vanish is pretty interesting in that deck. It’s kind of good for you and bad for your opponent. You have so many cheap minions, so you can play them afterwards. It’s pretty interesting.
IGN: True. So, I have a bit of a side observation. I feel like Dirty Rat has proven to be one of the most defining – or important - cards you guys have created in the last year. It seems to be relevant in every meta in really interesting ways. Mike Donais: I really like how it’s turned out. It’s obviously good against the Rogue Quest. It’s good against the Warrior Quest and it’s just interesting when you play it. Obviously you have to think about what’s in your opponent’s hand, what’s in your hand to deal with what’s in their hand. There’s a lot of risk/reward, odds, so I think it’s really cool, how it’s turned out.
IGN: I agree. There are so many cute plays – Dirty Rat + Brawl, or Dirty Rat + Equality + Consecrate. You can get punished, but realistically there’s often a right time to play it and a wrong time to play it. There’s a lot of skill in determining that. And sometimes you get punished for it, but that applies to a lot of cards.
Mike Donais: I think there’s more design space that’s similar to that. I think about what other cards we could do in that space. If our audience has more ideas in that space I’d love to hear them.
IGN: Tweet those questions to Mike! Let’s talk a little bit about the Warrior Quest now. The taunt side of Warrior is something that you guys have been toying with for a while now, and this is the set where you really made it work. Were there any other Quests that you considered for Warrior or was that always the direction it was likely to go in?
Peter Whalen: The reward is actually exactly the same as from day one, except that it went from costing five to costing three, because we wanted to make it so that for five mana you could play the thing and then hero power, because all the Quest rewards cost five.Outside of that though, what you did to get Sulfuras changed a lot as time went on. The very first version was ‘end the turn with exactly eight armour’. And obviously the direction the Quest went changed a lot as time went on, but it was just like this weird math problem, where you had to exactly get yourself to eight armour to finish it, and then we had gaining armour, equipping weapons, equipping different weapons, attacking with weapons and eventually we ended up on taunt as being something that was more interesting and we could put some cards in the set to make it feel pretty good to play.
IGN: It’s a bit weird that Ragnaros has been taken out of Standard with this rotation, but that ability has found a home with Warrior.
Mike Donais: Yeah, we took out Ragnaros because he was just making the game more stagnant. Everyone was just playing him as their eight drop and ignoring other expensive minions, like Medivh, so I think it’s been a success – Ragnaros has gone to Wild and now people are playing other expensive minions in their decks, whether it’s Medivh or the new dragon or whatever.
IGN: It’s definitely Medivh’s time to shine. Is attaching Rag’s ability to Warrior part of a thrust to ensure that games aren’t getting long and drawn out and going to fatigue? A way to speed up the end-game?
Peter Whalen: In part, I mean, a lot of the Quest rewards are designed to push the game to a conclusion. Once you finish your Quest the game’s going to finish pretty quickly. This was one of the directions to do that. Also, we were looking at iconic weapons from World of Warcraft – what were some of the things that would feel cool as Quest rewards? And Sulfuras being inside the volcano here really stuck out to us as something that would be awesome to find. And once you have Sulfuras what does it do? Well, giving you Rag hero power made a lot of sense. And when we played it it’s actually a lot of fun. There’s counterplay to it – you put a whole bunch of minions out. There’s some interesting decision making on your part for – how do I want to clear so that I can hit the hero power? How do I play around whatever the hero power hit? And it does – it drives the game to a conclusion. It doesn’t make it so that games end in fatigue. Games actually end once you finish your Quest. IGN: Once you’d settled on the taunt theme for the Warrior Quest, did you have enough taunt cards to make that work, or did you have to design some more? This set as a whole is relatively heavy on taunt. Peter Whalen: A little bit of both. Stonehill Defender came out of trying to make the Warrior Quest more fun to play. It was a little bit boring beforehand, so Stonehill Defender helped out with that a lot. It had some extra benefits in Paladin and other places as well, but that was the main thrust for putting it in the set.
IGN: It has massive upside in Paladin – you can wind up with several Tirions, particularly with the right Secrets from Hydrologist. Let’s talk about the Shaman quest. Was that quest always built around Murlocs or did you consider overload or any other mechanics?
Peter Whalen: There was one Quest super early, before the paradigm of the Quests was worked out. It was ‘control a minion’ then each of these different minion types, so, like, you needed a Totem and a Beast and a Murloc and an Elemental and a something else. And if you controlled them all at the same time you got some crazy reward.But we moved away from that paradigm where Quests involved, like, just having a certain board state and so they were iterative things that you built up over the course of the game, and then, once we changed to that it was Murlocs the whole time. And actually, it was Megafin the whole time, basically. We tweaked Megafin at one point and then went back and we tried a couple of different things in that space, but it was basically this, except the number used to be way higher, and then final design played it and they moved it to the right number.
IGN: How much did the number change?
Peter Whalen: It was 15 at some point, then we changed it to be ‘play’ instead of ‘summoned’ and then it moved down to, like six or seven, then it moved back to being ‘summoned’ because we had Call in the Finishers in Mean Streets and we also wanted to make the 2/1 Murloc that makes a 1/1 Murloc [Murloc Tidecaller] – there’s a bunch of Murlocs that make more Murlocs – we wanted them all to work, rather than not work, so it moved back up to ten.
Mike Donais: And the Murloc totem [Primalfin Totem].
Peter Whalen: And the Murloc totem. Yeah, it was pretty sad when it didn’t work with the one Murloc Shaman card in the set.
IGN: Coming into the set were you expecting people to be playing Elemental Shaman or were you expecting Quest Shaman? And have things panned out differently to your expectations?
Mike Donais: I thought people would experiment with Elemental and Murloc Shaman both, obviously Murloc Shaman because of the Quest and Elemental Shaman because their other legendary was Elemental. One of the goals was to have multiple different build-arounds in most of the classes and then have people experiment with those build-arounds and see what they do. There was also Volcano in the set, which we thought was a pretty strong card, but didn’t really go with minion swarms because it cleared your own board as well, so we thought there might be people experimenting with some kind of more control-ish [build]. There’s a decent number of healing cards in Shaman now too, with the 2/4 taunt [Hot Spring Guardian] and a couple of others.
IGN: Are there any Quests that you expected to be stronger than they are?
Mike Donais: The Mage one is probably the one we would have expected to be better. It’s getting very low win rates right now.
Peter Whalen: But surprisingly high play rates, despite that!
Mike Donais: Yes, and pretty high play rates. I don’t know what that means, but maybe one day it’ll get better. Maybe it’s just missing one or two cards to become great. Maybe it’s just a trap. Peter Whalen: I think the Priest Quest will become better as time goes on, I think the Warlock Quest has the potential to become better as time goes on.
Mike Donais: We’re at the beginning of a year, so for the next couple of sets cards are just going to be added before rotation happens, so these build-around cards seem like they’re just going to get better. But obviously Quests are always a bit dangerous because your first turn is often spent doing nothing or using one of your cards in your opening hand. But we’ve seen with Rogue and Warrior that that isn’t necessarily enough to stop Quests from being powerful.
IGN: True. In terms of the Mage Quest, I imagine that one of the reasons people are playing it so much is just that the reward is so evocative! It’s just cool – people want to make that happen. I think in terms of the flavour it definitely succeeds.
Peter Whalen: That deck is also super fun to play. I’ve played a lot with that deck despite not winning that much with it, and it’s pretty fun.
IGN: Speaking of that Quest and the idea of having random cards in your hand, it can feel like it’s very difficult to play around what Mage and Rogue and Priest can do, as you can’t know what they could be holding. Lately in the community there’s been discussion about the idea of giving the player a little bit more information about the cards that some of these classes are getting into their hands – say they get a random card from your class, a little bit like Ivory Knight, you might find out the mana cost, if not be shown the card altogether. How do you feel about that as an idea versus where things are at right now, where you often can’t play around cards because there’s no way to have any idea what they are? Peter Whalen: There’s pros and cons of course. One of the things I like about the Mage ones is that in general they give you Mage cards, and so if your opponent is playing around Mage cards that’s perfect, that’s what you have. The Priest and Rogue ones are a little bit more generic, but it’s still just one class that you tend to be playing around. The Priest ones in particular – you know what cards are in your deck, so that gives you a little bit of opportunity to play around it. As far as knowing exactly what cards are generated, there’s pros and cons. There’s a downside to knowing what’s in your opponent’s hand in that it puts a lot of burden on you to play around it exactly. If it answers all the stuff that you have then you feel bad for running your things out there. If you know your opponent has a Shadow Word: Death it feels bad to play your 5/5 into it. It’s skill-testing and interesting in some ways, but there’s also potential there to create these un-fun play experiences, that I think are more un-fun than walking into a trap then having your opponent spring it on you.
IGN: What about the idea of showing you the mana cost? If it was a three cost card, then you don’t know it’s Shadow Word: Death - it could also be a number of other things.
Peter Whalen: I think there’s potential there. There’s some UI complexity that we’d have to figure out, but it’s not completely off the table. That said, I don’t think it’s something we’re exploring right now.
IGN: Okay cool. Let’s move on to Adapt. Once you’d settled on the final set of choices, how difficult was it to work out what the ‘cost’ of Adapt would be?
Mike Donais: There was just playing a lot of games to get the idea, but we sort of have the idea that +1/+1 on a minion costs one, and that was one of the Adapts, we had +3 attack and +3 health and those were around the same cost. Three health might cost one and a half. And we wanted it to be generally upside. Divine Shield we also know costs one. Most of the Adapts cost around one mana, so you pay one for the whole thing and it gives you some choices, but there’s also no guarantee, so it felt pretty close to one the whole time.
IGN: Is it relatively linear with multiple adapts or does that change the equation significantly? Mike Donais: Those cards sort of stand on their own, the multi-adapts. Often having a choice on a multi-adapt, it matters a lot if you get +3 attack, versus almost everything else, because if you have a whole bunch of minions in play and you give them all +3 attack that’s huge. If you get anything else it’s like ‘well it doesn’t kill my opponent, what does it do?’
Peter Whalen: Sometimes Windfury is pretty good.
Mike Donais: Windfury can sometimes be similar to +3 attack. And then it’s basically Bloodlust, so we wanted to cost it somewhere around Savage Roar or Bloodlust, in that space. Those were the cards we thought about when we costed it. For the Murloc one [Gentle Megasaur] it’s a bit different because it’s build-around – you have to run a bunch of Murlocs, and have a bunch of Murlocs in play for it to be good, so you can cost it lower, but obviously that guy turned out to be one of the best cards in the set.
IGN: Gentle Megasaur is definitely strong. From my experience so far, Crackling Razormaw is also a bit of a star. That card is such a big part of Mid-range Hunter’s success now. That deck got a lot of different tools, but I feel like that card is integral to making it work and putting pressure on in the early game.
Peter Whalen: Jeweled Macaw helps it a lot too. Those two cards made a big difference I think.
IGN: Yeah. And then you’ve got a card like Vicious Fledgling, which can really help you snowball if you can actually take a swing with it.
Peter Whalen: Yep. Nesting Roc’s also a potential for that deck. There’s a handful of things that help it out, but I definitely agree – Jeweled Macaw, Crackling Razormaw did a lot of work for it. IGN: What were some of the biggest challenges you faced with Adapt?
Mike Donais: I think the biggest thing was when we realised that Adapt should be a modifier to the creature. For the first part of the design cycle we had it as doing other things that weren’t related to directly modifying the creature… and once we figured that out, it was mostly like – make a list of all the key words and playtest those. Charge was one of the ones that we had in there for a while, and then after playtesting for a while, it was like – [this] is just too swingy. Sometimes getting Charge would be a huge deal and sometimes it’d just be totally irrelevant that it had Charge.
Peter Whalen: So we replaced that one with the Faerie Dragon ability - can’t be targeted by spells or Hero Powers.
Mike Donais: Right. And then we thought, like, how many total do we want? We decided around ten is good, and it felt pretty good in playtesting. It made it so that you couldn’t guarantee things – 30% [chance] of getting what you want is pretty nice. Usually there’s two things that do what you want, like, if you want to not get killed by a spell you can choose ‘can’t be targeted’ or ‘Stealth’. If you want to kill your opponent - ‘Windfury’ or ‘+3 Attack’. If you want to kill a minion – ‘Poisonous’ or ‘+3 Attack’. So for a lot of situations there’s two options that are similar.
IGN: Moving on to Elementals. How happy are you with the way that mechanic has turned out for the expansion so far?
Mike Donais: I’ve really enjoyed it. I’ve liked how people experimented with Elementals in a lot of different classes – we saw Elemental Paladin, Elemental Shaman, Elemental Mage, Elemental Priest. It’s just really good to have… a bunch of cards you can put in and the experience is different in each class because of the class spells, and sometimes because of the class Elementals. A lot of the Priest decks run some Elementals anyway, so, like, what is the cost to add a few more, and play the Elemental Priest version? I also think Elementals are cool because we can just introduce some Elementals in future sets and that will change the Elemental deck. Like, if Priest gets another Elemental, or Paladin gets another Elemental, people go back, because of that one card, and try those Elemental decks again and they’re better.
IGN: True. One card can make a huge difference. Think about Hydrologist - that card just makes Paladin Secrets amazing. Paladin Secrets are not necessarily cards that you want to run in your deck, but you’ve got a pretty good shot at getting something that’s going to be useful for you, and then time when you’re going to use it. And if you want something specific there’s not that many Paladin Secrets in Standard.
Mike Donais: Yeah, he’s certainly shown a comeback of Eye for an Eye. It was not a very played card.
IGN: Yeah, I know! Eye for an Eye is in the meta! But that’s amazing, right, because you’d never put that card in your deck, but if you’re facing a Freeze Mage or any kind of Mage that’s going to have Ice Block up and try and burn you out, it’s such a good choice. That’s what’s great about Discover. It’s like - choose your tech card as the game progresses. I think I speak on behalf of the whole community when I say that Discover is definitely one of the best things Hearthstone has introduced in terms of mechanics.
Mike Donais: Yeah I like that guy. He’s very powerful. He’s one of the best cards in the set. IGN: I agree. Really versatile too. It’s kind of crazy actually how many viable builds Paladin has at the moment. Did you expect Paladin to remain the home of Murlocs?
Mike Donais: Well, we did give them a new Murloc so that was certainly intentional. We didn’t know for sure if Paladin Murloc or Shaman Murloc or Warlock Murloc would end up getting played – or end up getting played the most, but we figured [if] we put a bunch of stuff out there, put them all at a reasonable level and people will decide for themselves which one’s good, or how exactly to build a deck. For Paladin Murlocs it’s been very interesting to see, because there’s a very heavy Murloc version and then a very light Murloc version with only eight Murlocs, and then a bunch in-between. And I think having a lot of cards at similar power levels lets people make those decisions and still have success.
IGN: It feels to me like the neutral card pool in this set is really powerful. There’s a lot of tribal synergy. I think you really nailed the neutral cards.
Mike Donais: Yeah, neutral cards, if we can put a fairly simple card that makes people think about their class cards differently, like, the Murloc that gives +1/+1 to another Murloc [Rockpool Hunter] he pushes all the different Murloc decks, and he doesn’t really work at all if you’re not playing a Murloc deck, so to me he’s a great neutral design.
IGN: Is there anything else you’d like to highlight before we sign off?
Peter Whalen: I think one of the things that’s most exciting to me in this set is the effects. We really wanted to get the primordial vibe across, and if you look at things like Meteor or Volcano, or even the Un’Goro pack, there are these really cool effects that have come out of it that are some of the biggest ones we’ve ever done, and that also capture that feeling of huge primordial creatures. Queen Carnassa from the Hunter quest, when the stream of raptors goes into your deck, is totally insane. I just really love a lot of these different huge dinosaur effects, or huge primordial spells things. Kalimos, I think, is one of the best fusions of art and sound that we have in the game, where you look at him - his golden, the four goldens for the cards that you get to pick, and that come into play where all the elements are swirling together, I think they’re fantastic. So I think a lot of the effects and the art that went into the set are just unbelievably good.
IGN: Thanks guys! Cam Shea is senior editor in IGN's Sydney office and spends too much time obsessing over CCGs. He recently wrote about how Shadowverse came to be a player in the CCG genre. Tweet at him here.