Hearthstone’s designers on The Grand Tournament and the future danger of too many cards

Blizzard’s feeling just grand.

Earlier this week, the World of Warcraft maker launched the second expansion for its successful digital card game (which makes $20 million a month, according to Superdata). The Grand Tournament adds 132 new cards to Hearthstone, which gives players plenty of options to mess around with for new decks.

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We talked with Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcrft senior game designers Ben Brode and Mike Donais about the launch of the expansion, their favorite cards, and how Blizzard will combat the problem oversaturation in the future.

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GamesBeat: How are you feeling about the launch right now?

Ben Brode: I feel freakin’ great about it. It’s awesome. It’s so exciting to infuse so many new cards in the game. Seeing people try out new strategies has been awesome.

GamesBeat: What do you think the immediate reaction from the community has been?

Mike Donais: We’re seeing a lot of people trying to min-max. Everyone has their own idea of what the best and most interesting cards are to test. Everyone’s jumping on the ladder and trying new things. People are switching decks every couple games to new crazy things. They see their opponents playing crazy stuff and they’ll switch and play that, maybe try their own better version of it. That’s what I’m seeing all over Twitch and around the office.

GamesBeat: Do you have an idea how successful the $50 preorder campaign was?

Brode: I’ve focused more on the game design side of things. I don’t have a lot of insight into business-type things.

GamesBeat: What do you think will be the most likely approach from new players here? Are they going to try to make decks that are largely including these cards — a lot of Inspire decks or Joust decks — or will they try and fit these cards into existing archetypes?

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Donais: We’ve seen some of each. We have people who really want to try old decks. They get one new Murlock, and they put that in their old deck. But you see a lot more of new decks now with whole new strategies, like Lock and Load. I’ve seen Darkbane buff decks. I’ve seen a lot of Paladins. And, of course, you see a lot of Dragon decks, which is a mix of old and new.

Brode: You mentioned new players, which is interesting. We’re starting to get to a point where, after releasing new content, new players have a pretty different experience than they might have had when we first launched, when we just had classic cards.

We’ve been talking a lot about how to make that experience better for the very new player, how to reconcile adding new content and constantly changing the meta with players coming into the game and feeling like it’s more daunting than it used to be. That’s something we care a lot about and we’ve been discussing internally.

GamesBeat: If you could only craft one Legendary, what would you go to first?

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Brode: I probably would start with the Mistcaller. I have dreams of bouncing it back to my hand with Brewmasters and ending up with huge buffs on all the cards in my deck.

Donais: Mistcaller is a good one. Yesterday, after I opened a bunch of packs, the first two Legendaries I crafted were Lightbane and Darkbane.

GamesBeat: That’s not even fair. I have a bone to pick. I have to blame someone for this. I was playing against a Mage who used an Unstable Portal and got Varian Wrynn off it. [big laughs] That was fun. But that’s the interesting thing, to see how even old cards can work with these new cards, the madness that’s ensuing now.

Brode: It’s interesting. Adding a new card to Hearthstone doesn’t just add one card of interaction. Every card in the game can potentially interact with it in some way. The connections in each thread, it adds a lot of depth and complexity to the game.

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GamesBeat: Looking at the Legendaries, there’s not necessarily a Dr. Boom that you look at and say, this card is amazing by itself; it can fit into any deck. It seems like it’s much more consciously about making decks with a theme and cards that will work together. Is that intentional?

Donais: One thing we run into [is that] there’s always this temptation when we make new cards to increase the power level, so people see the cards and they’re excited to use them. The way we avoid that is what we call sideways design, where you design cards that are good only in specific situations. Dragon decks don’t stomp all over existing decks. They’re just a new option for players to explore. Same is true with the Lock and Load deck. It’s a whole new direction for Hunters to explore. I really like designing cards in that space.

GamesBeat: It seems that generally there is a theme here that maybe favors slower, more control-based decks, especially with the pre-Grand Tournament meta being so fast and aggressive. Am I just imagining that?

Donais: What we’ve seen is that there are lots of options for aggressive decks already. People gravitate toward those for various reasons. We wanted to give people more options if they’re frustrated with those decks. Now they have some extra healing options, some extra taunt options. The Joust mechanic very naturally falls into, I want to play a slower deck and get a bonus for doing so. Now if people are looking for something slow and control-ey that’s good against a fast deck, they have some extra options in that space.

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GamesBeat: Do you have some other favorite cards here that were fun to design?

Donais: I played a lot of Lock and Load during our design phase. Lock and Load is the 2 mana Hunter card that, whenever you play a spell, you add a card to your hand. I tried that with the obvious Arcane Shot, Tracking, Hunter’s Mark deck, but then I also tried it with a Hunter Mech deck. It works really well with Spare Parts. You can get up to eight Spare Parts in a Hunter Mech deck. That’s another version of that deck. There’s a whole bunch of different ways to do that, and they’re all different from existing hunter decks. I had a fun time exploring that. I had to play it a lot, because the card is pretty exciting in a scary way. When we have exciting cards like that, I want to push them forward, because I want there to be exciting scary cards, but I also want to make sure they aren’t too broken when I print them. They require a lot of testing.

Brode: I really enjoyed working on the whole theme of making your Hero Power really important. Inspire really brought that to the forefront. But also finding other ways to make the hero power important, cards like Frost Giant and [Maiden] of the Lake, Coldarra Drake, trying to figure out how to break the classes, how to bring their hero power into the foreground and make them feel core to the set.

GamesBeat: We’re at a point where we have so many cards, it seems like many more of them are going to do something more than just be a card with an attack value and a health value. Do you worry about that, or is it a thing that naturally happens, that some of the older, vanilla cards just fall to the wayside?

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Brode: I do think there is a world where Hearthstone has so many cards available to you that it becomes daunting to collect all the cards you need for a good deck, but also to understand the whole space. It’s a concern that we’re discussing how to best solve. I also think that when we launched Hearthstone, it felt like there were a lot of cards, but there was still a lot of space to explore. There were some cards that you played just because there weren’t many options for you to mess around with at that mana cost. When we launched, there weren’t a lot of quality cards that cost 5 mana, so when we launched Naxxramas, we included a lot of cards with a 5 mana cost that were pretty good. They got a lot of play, because before you were usually only playing Azure Drake. That was maybe your only option. Some of them aren’t getting as much play now, but that’s a factor of just not having as many options in the classic, basic set for a certain mana cost.

GamesBeat: Will there someday be a problem where there are so many cards that it becomes overwhelming? Is that something you think about now? Or is that a can you kick down the road?

Brode: It’s not a problem today with Grand Tournament, but I do think it’s a problem that is starting to form. It’s something we need to figure out a solution to in the shorter term. We’re actively discussing it. One of the biggest things we’re working on with the team is trying to solve problems like this. We have to solve it in the fairly short term.

GamesBeat: In my experience with the Pokémon card game as a kid, at first the expansions were exciting, but it eventually got to a point where, oh, this is just another expansion and I don’t know what’s happening anymore.

Brode: That’s the kind of problem we’re going to solve.

GamesBeat: It seems like you have a system here of going between expansions and Adventures. What are the different design challenges between those two productions?

Donais: For expansions, what we consider the normal way to release cards, you have to have a lot of different cards. You need to design cards that are for a lot of different types of players. We have different classes of players we identify. We try to make sure there’s stuff for players who like really big, exciting stuff, who like the combos. For new players we try to fit in simple stuff. With the Adventures, they’re a lot more complex to make. You still need to mix up the meta-game just as much as with a big expansion, which means with 30 cards you need to hit all the exciting points you previously hit with 120 or 130 cards. That’s a big challenge. Those 30 cards need to be fine-tuned right near the top of the curve, for most of them. In addition, you have to make all these exciting missions. In each one you have to think up the idea for why it’s cool or interesting, how it matches flavor-wise, how it’s going to scale to heroic, how it’s going to provide a big challenge at heroic but not too big a challenge. It’s a lot of extra tuning and design that goes into those dungeon adventures.

GamesBeat: Are you guys surprised at all by the rapid success of Hearthstone? Do you think it’s taken off faster than you anticipated?

Brode: Blizzard is notorious for taking experiences that are really fun, but maybe not accessible to the mass market, and bringing them to a huge new audience. When I was working on Hearthstone years ago, we knew we had something fun, and the goal was to make it accessible so that so many people could enjoy it. Once we got to that level of polish and felt like we had that, I felt like, yeah, this could be humongous. Throughout the company, though — before you play Hearthstone it’s hard to realize how it’s different, how it’s a really fun, accessible game, but still has all the depth that’s scared people off from the genre in the past. It wasn’t like the company knew for sure that this was going to be huge. But as soon as people got their hands on it and played it, they realized, oh, yeah, this is the super fun experience I wanted from card games. This could be a big thing. That’s probably why we went to so many new platforms. We wanted to try and give this game to as many people as possible, because we knew how fun it was.

GamesBeat: How did you come to the Grand Tournament theme? I liked it, because I played a lot of World of Warcraft in The Wrath of the Lich King era, and the Argent Tournament was one of my favorite patches. How did you come across this as a theme for the card game, though?

Brode: We knew at first that we wanted to do an expansion based around making your hero more powerful and interacting with your Hero Power in new and exciting ways. Given that lens, we talked about a lot of potential new directions for expansions. Somebody threw out the idea of the Argent Tournaments. Because that era of WoW focused so much on you as a champion and going up through the ranks and being a badass knight, that felt like it could map really well to the mechanical theme we wanted to pursue. Once we had those things lined up, we tried to figure out the right way to Hearthstone-ify the theme of the tournament. Really focusing on the knight tournament vibe, eschewing the horrible “Lich King is coming to destroy us all” last stand thing. We focused in on the fun parts of having a big festival and competing for glory without muddying the theme for what is basically just a set of cards. It sells a vibe, but doesn’t necessarily tell a story.

GamesBeat: We’ve recently seen the idea of introducing alternate hero portraits. Are we going to get more of those in the future?

Brode: Right now we’re discussing the feedback we’ve gotten from the community about the new heroes. I would be surprised if we didn’t do more of those. They’re fun and we have some cool ideas. But we don’t have any announcements right now about those.

GamesBeat: What’s feedback been like on those?

Brode: People have enjoyed them, but I think we’re discussing right now whether we can find ways to make them more enjoyable to more people. I’m not involved in those conversations, so I can’t say for sure.

GamesBeat: Is there anything else about the future of Hearthstone you can tease us on?

Brode: Ah … right now the future of Hearthstone is mostly seeing what comes out of the madness of the ladder and the new Grand Tournament cards. People are trying so many different decks, so many cool new cards, that it’s impossible to tell how it’s all going to shake out. We’re excited to see how it all plays out.