Hearthstone’s D&D, Magic vet Mike Donais dishes designing Blizzard’s market-leading giant

GamesBeat: One thing I took away from League of Explorers was that you want people to have more minions on the board and trade those minions. I might be wrong there. But is that something you want, for people to have minions on the board and be able to trade and play with those instead of just using spells or rushing?

Donais: Minion interaction is just more fun. You’re making more decisions per turn when there’s minions on the board. At the same time there should be variety, in any card game. There should be some decks that don’t fall into that category. There’s a lot of Rogue combo decks that are pretty intricate. Having a bit of Freeze Mage and a little bit of control and a little bit of aggro is good, just to show the depth of the game. You don’t want too much of any one, but I think we have a good mix right now.

Above: The new Cthun Legendary card is yours free for playing.

Image Credit: Heather Newman

GamesBeat: How exciting is it to actually make a cult? So many games have cults, but Hearthstone never had one. You had Dark Cultist, but who does he represent? Now you have cults. What does this add?

Donais: It’s a flavor thing. When you play the C’thun you feel like, all these guys are working together. All these guys have one big goal in mind. That goal is very exciting. It’s communicated to you as you play it. It sort of creeps up on you. It’s like, oh, my C’thun’s a bit bigger. Now it’s bigger again. Every time it happens, you feel like, okay, I’m building up to something pretty awesome. It reminds you, because of the way he pops up on the side of the screen. So I think the gameplay for it is really cool. Designing for it was fun, because we wanted to do a bunch of different ways to encourage C’thun. That’s what those 16 different C’thun cards were. It was also fun because different classes have different takes on it. Those C’thun cards will help classes have different C’thun deck identities.

GamesBeat: Do you feel like this expansion is more lore-based, more deep lore-based than previous expansions?

Donais: Sort of? In many ways, yes. The League of Explorers, for example, was kind of like, here’s a theme, but it’s not really part of the lore. It’s just a type theme. But this is definitely, oh, yeah, that’s the history of the world. It feels a lot more like lore. It’s pretty interesting, because WoW never explored it very much. We don’t tell you the lore about it, but we show you the lore, sort of, through the card designs and card art and animations.

GamesBeat: Is it exciting to have an expansion built on this? League of Explorers belongs to Hearthstone’s. Now you have Old Gods, which is not an old raid or a place from WoW. It’s just deep in the lore. What does that mean for the evolution of Hearthstone outside of other Warcraft games?

Donais: We want to explore different ways to do sets. We did some sets that were specifically raids, some that were themes vaguely related to Warcraft, and some that were very clearly related to Warcraft. I think we’ll just keep exploring different directions. There’s not just one that we’re going to keep doing. We’ll try and surprise the players and ourselves with each set.

GamesBeat: It certainly opens up your design space, not being tied to a raid or a location or event.

Donais: Absolutely. We don’t want to set expectations that it’ll always be a raid. We want to show that we’ll do whatever we think is cool, whatever we think fans will think is cool.

GamesBeat: How difficult was it to create the expansion at the same time you were tuning the new formats?

Donais: It’s really tough. We did a lot of extra work to create these formats and make sure they were a good experience for everyone. My design team has done a lot of work balancing the formats and talking about what balance changes we should do, testing out different versions of that. At the same time, designing sets is a lot of work. We worked hard on it, and I think we ended up in a good spot. We did a lot of iteration on all these things. It’s starting to feel great.