Blizzard talks crafting Hearthstone’s Karazhan, Purify anger, and Arena’s future

GamesBeat: It’s something you hear a lot, that people think sometimes that the meta is too fast and it’s been too fast for a while. Do your stats back up that perception?

Brode: It changes. There were times where Face Hunter was very good. Undertaker Hunter back in the day was very strong. Those kinds of decks were very fast. The game isn’t necessarily quite as fast as it has been. To me, the speed isn’t the most important metric. What’s important is how many archetypes people are playing. Is there a wide variety of styles of gameplay?

I was just watching the EU preliminaries this weekend. [Professional player] Dr. Hippie didn’t lose a match. He was playing a tempo Warlock deck, a zoo deck essentially. He was playing Renolock, I think? And Yogg token Druid. I think troll Warrior? It may have been a C’Tthun Warrior. I can’t remember. But he was playing a wide variety of styles of decks. Six-O is rated the number one player in the world right now on Gosu Gamers. He was playing Anything Can Happen Paladin, a very combo deck. Freeze Mage, I believe.

We’re seeing all kinds of decks, all kinds of styles. Even decks people think are kind of tempo-based or aggressive decks play very differently from one another. Warrior tempo decks play very differently from Mage tempo decks. That’s cool too. There’s a lot of variety right now. Over time things change. We aren’t seeing so much control from players who are doing incredibly well in tournaments. Maybe things are shifting in that direction.

Above: The last adventure, The League of Explorers.

Image Credit: Heather Newman

GamesBeat: With The Grand Tournament and League of Explorers, we saw a lot of new mechanics introduced: Joust, Discover, and Inspire. Was there a conscious decision to slow down on introducing new mechanics?

Brode: Depends on how you define mechanics. A mechanic, the way most people think about it, is a shared thing that a lot of cards are doing. Discover, lots of cards use the Discover keyword. But for most of the development of League of Explorers, those cards just said “Look at three random spells and choose one to add to your hand.” If we shipped it like that, it wouldn’t have felt so much like we added a mechanic in that sense. Even though functionally it would have been the same. But we have been doing cycles of cards, like forbidden, where there’s five cards that all have the same type of effect.

The Cthun mechanic is brand new. The portal mechanic is a new mechanic with Karazhan. With Karazhan, there are 45 new cards, and really 45 new mechanics. A lot of great new stuff. The menagerie stuff going on with the curator is a new thing. We’ve never done the type of deck-building hook for burgle-focused decks like we’ve done with Ethereal Peddler. We’re definitely supporting lots of new deck archetypes, trying out lots of new card designs. When it makes sense for us to add a new keyword or a very obvious cycle of cards beyond 55 or so cards in a set, we’ll do that. We’re not afraid to do that. But it hasn’t been what the set has needed, to have such a bold keyword in that way.

GamesBeat: The only difference is that those keyword cards can have their own synergies as a group. We had all the Battlecry decks and the Deathrattle decks. We haven’t yet seen “give +1/+1 to a discover card,” but you could do it.

Brode: You’re right. When you categorize things you can play off of them. But also, there’s other benefits to keywords. Once you read one card with discover on it — maybe the first time it doesn’t make sense, but once you’ve played it, you understand that discover is “look at three cards and choose one for your hand.” Now every future time you look at one of those cards, it parses very simply. You know exactly what it does with way less words.

Above: Lots of effects in one card..

Image Credit: Blizzard

It allows us to do more complicated stuff like Ivory Knight in Karazhan, which now has Discover plus a lot of other text that changes the way you think about discover. There are other benefits to that as well. But I don’t think every set needs for us to do a bold keyword.

GamesBeat: How is the Wild format doing? Has it been attracting the player base you’ve hoped for?

Brode: Yeah, I think — it shows promise. As things rotate out, it’ll have such a huge card pool for deck builders. There will be tons of crazy things you can do there. But even with two sets’ difference, we’re still seeing a lot of people playing wild. I’ve seen comments from people saying they keep matching the same person. That’s actually very uncommon. There’s lots of people playing wild, lots of unique decks. You could easily queue up in wild and play new opponents all day.

GamesBeat: Going back to Karazhan, do you have a favorite card from the expansion?

Thompson: For nothing more than as a player, I’m very art- and vibe-driven, big surprise, my favorite is probably Kara Kazam. I like the vibe of summoning up this enchanted, in this case, plate or cookware or broom or candles or teapots and whatnot. That room, that whole part of the wing, is one of my favorites. As far as individual cards that’s my favorite. If it were just vibe-based anything about Karazhan, I’d have to say it’s the opera house. That brought me right back to that raid we all knew and loved. I was excited from both a developer and a player perspective about all the different cards and interactions we were able to pull off in that wing. It made me feel very much at home, and surprised and excited again, as if for the very first time.

Brode: I’m super-excited about Barnes.

GamesBeat: Barnes is the correct answer!

Brode: It’s super-exciting. There are tons of crazy stuff that comes to mind. I love building crazy decks. There’s the dream of building a deck with just Y’Shaarj and Barnes and a bunch of spells. Turn four, you get a 1/1 Y’Shaarj and close out your Y’Shaarj and get just a horrible army showing up on turn four. But also including it in deathrattle decks and getting a 1/1 Cairn Bloodhoof or Sylvanas Windrunner seems nutso to me. I’m excited about all these different ways it can be used.

I also just love — that moment when you’re playing in Karazhan and Barnes is announcing the next play. Your whole raid is waiting for the curtains to lift. That, to me, is what crystallized WoW raiding for me, because I had so much built up anxiety and excitement. When the spotlight comes down in Hearthstone and he goes, “Behold! Tonight, a tale of true terror!” It just gives me all those emotions back again. I love it.