The State of Hearthstone: How Mean Streets of Gadgetzan changed everything — and where it goes next

Mean Streets of Gadgetzan, the latest expansion for Blizzard digital card game leader Hearthstone, has now been out over a month, and it has brought big changes to what had been a rather stale late 2016.

Many of the 132 new cards have helped create new, powerful decks (hello Pirate Warrior) in the most popular mode, Standard  — the mode that bans cards from older expansions and adventures. But a few players are critical about of some of new cards, worried that they’re too powerful or have created a reliance on certain archetypes.

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GamesBeat interviewed senior game designer Peter Whalen about how Blizzard created some of Gadgetzan’s new cards and concepts, changes that may be coming to the Arena deck-drafting mode, and what Blizzard thinks about some the sets most popular (and maybe too powerful) cards.

GamesBeat: We’re reaching the end of this first Standard cycle with Year of the Kraken. Do you think the Standard year — which will be the same length of an actual year if the next expansions comes in April — is too long?

Whalen: I don’t think so. This is where we were expecting Standard to be. This is the most sets we’ve ever had in the Standard environment. It’s been interesting to see a lot of new decks come together. There have been pieces throughout the Standard season. We had the dragons in Blackrock Mountain, and now Dragon Priest is a pretty big force on the ladder. It’s been cool to see that deck evolve over time. The Reno decks that were introduced with League of Explorers have been very powerful. With Mean Streets they got a bunch of new cards. It’s been cool to see how, with so many cards in the metagame right now, those decks can really thrive.

GamesBeat: Are you surprised by how popular Patches has become? Did you think that pirate decks would become this big?

Whalen: He’s in charge now. [Laughs] It’s cool to see Patches and pirates do well. They’ve been one of the tribes, the minion types, that people have been excited to see do things in Hearthstone as time’s gone on. They haven’t been as well-represented. Murlocs had their time to shine. Dragons had their time to shine. Now it’s a chance for pirates.

It’s been cool to see people using that package in different decks to drive archetypes that had gone a bit dormant. Miracle Rogue was a bit weaker in the previous metagame, and now it’s had more of a chance to do well with the Patches package. That said, it’s true that the Patches package is going in a lot of different decks, more than we had anticipated. We’re watching it, definitely, and we’re trying to make sure that the metagame going forward has a lot of different viable archetypes. The Patches and Small Time Buccaneer is something we’re watching.

GamesBeat: Talking about Small Time Buccaneer, Hearthstone has seen 1 mana minions grow in power since the original set. Do you think Small Time Buccaneer is too powerful?

Whalen: It’s definitely powerful. It’s a build-around in the sense that you change what cards are in your deck to support it. You play more cheap weapons in Shaman and Warrior. Rogue gets a cheap weapon for free, so [Small Time Buccaneer] doesn’t need to do much work. You put things like Patches in your deck, other pirate synergies, especially in the Warrior archetype.

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But yeah, powerful 1-drops — we’re keeping a very close eye on. Our philosophy has been that having powerful 1 drops in the metagame allows us to drive decks and keep interesting things happening in the early game. It allows us to have powerful aggro archetypes, and it also to allow decks to combat powerful aggro archetypes. But it’s something that, going forward, we’ll pull back on a bit.

With the new Standard rotation, Tunnel Trogg, one of the most powerful 1 drops we’ve ever made, will move into Wild. In the near future we’re going to try and make fewer powerful 1 drops, especially ones that tend to snowball. If they sit on the board for a long time, they continue to become more powerful. In the classic set we had Mana Wyrm and Flame Imp, which are also very strong. But going forward we’ll try and look for more 1 drops like Zombie Chow or Swashburglar or Babbling Book that have powerful effects, but it’s OK if they sit on the board for three or four turns. They don’t immediately drive the game toward a conclusion.

GamesBeat: As more cards become available in Arena with every expansion, do you think there’s a point where there are too many in the draft pool?

Whalen: We’ve been talking about Arena a ton. We say that a lot … we want to find ways to make it better. One of the things we’re talking about is finding a way to limit the cards that can show up. Maybe one month it’s different from the next. Maybe we go for a Standard solution that matches the ranked play experience as well. Maybe the most recent set is 10 times as likely to show up as others. Maybe spells are more likely to show up. Maybe it’s something we change every month to keep Arena more fresh. All these things are on the table.

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We just got some new technology to allow design to have more fine-tuned control over the Arena experience. We’re going to take advantage of that and figure out what are the best things we can do to make Arena a good experience for both newer players and the very experienced players who’ve played thousands of Arena games.

GamesBeat: What’s this new technology you’re talking about?

Whalen: Before, in order to make Arena changes, we had to do a lot of engineering and code base manipulation. An engineer had to spend a lot of time on it. We’ve gotten a tool that, going forward, will let designers make changes to specific arena environments. An individual card can show up less or more. If we wanted to make Flamestrike show up 10 times as often, because we really want to buff Mage in Arena, we could do that. Or on the flip side, we could make minions show up less or more. We can curate a very specific arena experience if that’s something we’re interested in. We just got that tool, so now we’re trying to figure out the best ways to make use of it.

GamesBeat: So a card’s rarity wouldn’t matter as much.

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Whalen: Exactly. We can have mixed rarity picks. If we say, OK, Firelands Portal is a powerful card so we want it to show up as often as a rare or epic, that’s something we can do.

GamesBeat: So instead of rarity, there can be tiers of cards: really powerful, pretty powerful, weaker, and so on.

Whalen: Yeah, that’s definitely something we could do. Or if we wanted Murlocs to show up more often, we could do that. You get Murloc Warleader, and now your deck is more likely to come together. We have a lot of crazy ideas in that space. We don’t have anything to announce right now, but that’s an area we’re exploring. We’re excited about it.

GamesBeat: Is Blizzard surprised by that Arena is so popular?

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Whalen: Not really. Arena is super-important, at least to me personally. If you look at the main login screen for Hearthstone, you come in and there’s the box that says ranked, casual, Arena, tavern brawl, solo adventures. These are our game modes. These are the ways you play Hearthstone. They’re all super-important.

GamesBeat: Why is there always that two-day break in Tavern Brawl? Why not just make the one available a bit longer, right up until the new one’s out?

Whalen: That’s a possibility. It’s one thing we talked about at the beginning, when we were putting in Tavern Brawl. One of the main reasons we wanted to have a break is to separate the Tavern Brawls a bit, to let you have a bit of a cleanser in your mind between — all right, there was this Tavern Brawl, and now it’s going to be the next one. It gives you a bit of time to go do the other game modes if you’re interested, to go play ranked or Arena. Having that break gives you a pause that lets the Tavern Brawls breathe a bit more, which I think is kind of nice.

GamesBeat: You recently had that Diablo-themed Tavern Brawl. Is that something we might see more of, these Tavern Brawls that are themed with other Blizzard properties?

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Whalen: I think that’d be awesome. I love the other Blizzard games. We’ve gotten things like the Overwatch card back in Hearthstone and this Diablo-themed Tavern Brawl. That’s a lot of fun. Being able to draw inspiration from things that aren’t just Warcraft, being able to find a Hearthstone way to do them.

GamesBeat: So I can still hold out hope for something like a Lost Vikings Tavern Brawl someday?

Whalen: [Laughs] That’d be a pretty sweet Tavern Brawl.

GamesBeat:  The tri-class cards concept  is one of my favorite things introduced in Gadgetzan. I know they seem pretty heavily tied to the theme of Gadgetzan, with the gangs and all that, but do you think we could see more tri-class cards in future sets?

Whalen: I’m never going to rule anything out. I think tri-class cards have gone really well as a mechanic. It’s cool, and it feels a bit different in each of the decks. Jade Druid plays Aya as a sort of midrange value card. There’s Jade N’zoth Shaman floating around that takes advantage of the fact that Aya has a Deathrattle to bring her back with N’zoth. Kazakus has been really cool in the different Reno decks. It’s brought Reno Mage and Reno Warlock to tier one, and Reno Priest is doing pretty well. As a mechanic, having those things that are powerful in three different classes has gone over very well.

GamesBeat: Like you said, Kazakus has been doing well. The Reno decks for the spellcaster classes are popular. Jade decks are doing OK, if not quite top-tier.

But it seems like the hand-buffing mechanic for the Grimy Goons hasn’t taken off quite as much, especially with Paladins and Hunters struggling in Standard. Has that surprised you?

Whalen: We’ve seen some amount of the Taunt Warriors that are playing some of the hand-buffing cards. There’s been a couple of control decks the top pros have been playing that use a bit of the hand-buffing. There’s a really cool Anyfin hand-buff deck that made it very far on the Legends ladder last month. I think that in part, as the metagame shifts that mechanic will become more powerful. If we move toward more of a midrange space, being able to take time to buff the cards in your hand becomes a more viable option.

Right now the metagame is a bit polarized. There’s very fast decks and very controlling decks. The midrange, take a bit of time to make your future game plan better, that’s more difficult to do right now. The hand-buffing mechanic will have more of an opportunity to thrive in a different metagame. That’s a bit of what we were expecting. Maybe this mechanic isn’t top tier for this month, but people will experiment with it and find cool things, like Anyfin Paladin, but maybe in the future it’ll have more of a chance to do well and excel.

GamesBeat: The whole Jade Golem idea in general is a neat one. How did that come to be?

Whalen: That one was fun. We iterated an enormous amount on it. We had an idea early on that as you played jade cards, jade cards got better. The very first version we had was — you had a jade count on your hero, and you had a bunch of cards that cared about your jade. Jade Lightning was deal damage equal to your jade count. Maybe it was three damage plus one for each of your jade count. There was a card that summoned a 1/1 Jade Squirrel for each of your jade count. As you played each of your jade cards, your count went up, and you made a bunch of squirrels and did a bunch of damage. You had to figure out how you wanted to sequence that.

The problem was it was very complicated. All these cards did different things, and your jade count meant different things in different spaces. Then we said, what if you just made minions, and at five jade count this minion gets taunt? Or this minion gets divine shield. We tried a bunch of things in that space. It just made more sense to unify it. We could make cooler cards that did a thing, and the Jade Golem always got bigger. The Jade Golem was a unifying part between the cards, and the actual card mechanic was what made them cool. Gain a mana crystal and get a Jade Golem. Do some damage and get a Jade Golem. That was the evolution of it. We started out with lots of ways to use the jade mechanic, then we went to different ways of using minions that used the jade mechanic, and then we just made jade things with cool effects to go on top of them.

GamesBeat: It seems to be one of the more successful experiments in the set.

Whalen: Yeah, it’s been cool to see all the different versions come out, like the Jade N’Zoth Shaman control deck, the Jade Druid that uses Auctioneer. There was a list that went out yesterday, a Jade Druid that was a Malygos mix, with Malygos and jade. I played a couple of games with that last night. It was a lot of fun. It’s cool to see how people have been taking advantage of jade.

GamesBeat: Was it pretty easy to put these classes into their gangs? Or was there ever a point where they looked different? Like, maybe Hunter was in with the Jade Lotus originally?

Whalen: That’s literally how it was at one point. The casters were pretty easy. We had them in the Cabal doing this mystical magic stuff. The other ones were more tricky. Paladin and Warrior made sense in the Goons up front, but the Goons were more the city guys. It was Paladin, Warrior, and Rogue. That made sense as, these are the guys who are very urban, doing the thuggish, brutish thing. Then the more wild, natural, mystical classes – the Hunters, the Druids, the Shamans – were in the Jade Lotus.

But as the Jade Lotus and the Grimy Goons evolved, it made more sense to bring the stealthy, sneaky — get a more assassin vibe for the Jade Lotus. It made sense to bring Rogues into that group. Putting Hunters into the Goons, we made them more about smuggling and weapons and manipulating your hand-buff stuff. Flavor-wise, that smuggling vibe made a lot of sense for hunters, so they moved into the Goons.

GamesBeat: So at one point there was a Jade Hunter deck.

Whalen: There was. Jade meant something different at that point, but yeah.

GamesBeat: One of the weirder thematic cards I’ve seen in the game are these hog cards. The pig bikers. I have to wonder where those guys came from.

Whalen: That was a top-down design. By that I mean we had a concept that we wanted to put in card form. We said, what does a Hearthstone biker gang look like? How do we make that happen? The answer was, biker gangs all have charge. We’ll give all of these guys charge. How do they get charge? It’ll be conditional. Then we concepted that and talked to the artists. What does a Hearthstone biker gang mean to you guys? They said, oh, we want to do pigs, the hog riders on their hogs. It’s gonna be awesome. We outsource to various artists, and they got really excited about the hog riders. They have a bacon gun for one of the guys. They got very into it. That’s actually one of the successes, flavor-wise, for the set. They came out really well.

GamesBeat: It seems like the hogs’ effect is on the weaker side. They have these very intense requirements to play. I know you have been careful about charge cards in general, because we’ve seen charge cards get out of hand. Is that why they were designed with such big restrictions?

Whalen: We’re very careful with charge. It’s an inherently very powerful mechanic. When we make a charge card, it’s important for it to be either specific or narrow — we don’t want it to go in every single aggressive deck. We don’t want it to form OTK [one-turn kill] decks. We don’t want to make something that’s better than Leeroy Jenkins at just killing somebody out of your hand.

GamesBeat: My editor’s favorite card is Daring Reporter. I think he’d love it if you could talk about how that card came to be.

Whalen: Daring Reporter is cool. It’s a cool flavor. We had that name and that concept on a couple of different cards. It ended up in a good place. It’s an interesting effect. It’s not seeing tons and tons of competitive play, but it’s a cool flavor and it fits the feel of the set, that you have this reporter going out there and telling all about it for the Gadgetzan Gazette.

GamesBeat: Communication with the community is always an important and difficult. You guys make a big effort — recently with a live Q&A. But even so, there seem to be instances where there’s frustration from the community side on one thing or another. The Purify incident was the epitome if that. How has that challenge evolved for you guys?

Whalen: Paying attention to community feedback is something that’s really important for us. We read Reddit. We read Hearthpwn. We read a bunch of the forums. We’re on Twitter. We read lots and lots of things. Exactly how we get our message out is something we’ve been iterating on over time. I’m definitely not going to say we’re doing a perfect job right now. It’s often hard to find exactly the right way to interact with the community, to tell people that this is something that we’re thinking, to have nuanced conversations with them.

A lot of the things we talk about aren’t black and white. It’s not, well, this is obviously the way Hearthstone should be going forward. That kind of nuanced conversation is difficult to have. We’ve talked a lot about ways we can have that conversation, and that we can better interact with the community. Community involvement is something we’re iterating on and that is very important to us. Ben and Dean have been much more active on Reddit in the last week. That’s another way we’re trying to move forward. We’re active on our forums and on Twitter. We’re trying to figure out what the best way is for different members of the Hearthstone team and for those most vocal members of the Hearthstone team to interact with our community. We love all of the super-passionate players that come out in all of those different forms of media to give us feedback, because it helps us make Hearthstone better.

GamesBeat: Mean Streets has been out for a bit now. What’s been the team’s reaction to how people have responded?

Whalen: It’s been great. In a lot of ways the metagame is healthier than it’s ever been. We have five-plus top tier decks across five-plus classes. That’s great. The flavor has been great. We’ve gotten a lot of positive reception for that. I’ve personally played hundreds of games since Mean Streets came out. That’s what happens when you go on Christmas vacation, you play lots of Hearthstone. I’ve played a bunch of different decks. There’s a lot of cool stuff out there.

GamesBeat: What’s your favorite deck to play right now?

Whalen: Lately I’ve been playing the Jade N’zoth Shaman. It has a lot of game against basically everything. There’s no deck that you queue into and you say, I don’t have a chance this time. You play Hallazeal and a bunch of board clears and N’zoth for late game. I’ve been playing Devolve in it, one copy of Devolve, because it’s really good against Miracle Rogue. They conceal and stealth all their guys, and you Devolve them. Then you get some, wow, that was incredible. I’m sure they were really happy about it. [Laughs] I’ve enjoyed that deck a lot. There’s been some pro players streaming it. But I’ve played, I don’t know, probably every remotely competitive deck.