Hearthstone
Dawn Of The Dead - Card Design Competition Discussion Thread
Submitted 2 years, 4 months ago by
ShadowsOfSense
Competition Theme: Dawn Of The Dead
Demon Hunter was added to the game so smoothly with no issues at all - surely adding another class will be easy enough?
- You must create a Legendary for a hypothetical Death Knight Initiate Set
- Death Knight has been added to the game, and it's up to you to come up with a killer Legendary for them!
- Your Legendary cannot use a new Keyword
- We're focusing on Death Knight design in this competition - adding new Keywords would just muddy the waters!
This time linkblade91 wants us to imagine a world in which the Death Knight is added to the game. I wonder why...?
As always, I can be reached through Discord or here on the site via PM if you have any issues to report.
Competition Phases
Here are the phases of this card design competition
- Submission Phase: Starts on Mon, Aug 22 17:00 EDT (GMT -0400). Runs until Sat, Aug 27 17:00 EDT (GMT -0400)
- Voting Phase: Starts on Sat, Aug 27 17:00 EDT (GMT -0400). Runs until Sun, Aug 28 16:00 EDT (GMT -0400)
- Finalist Phase: Starts on Sun, Aug 28 17:00 EDT (GMT -0400). Runs until Mon, Aug 29 17:00 EDT (GMT -0400)
- Winner Selected: After finalist voting concludes and we validate votes.
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Competition Theme: Dawn Of The Dead
Demon Hunter was added to the game so smoothly with no issues at all - surely adding another class will be easy enough?
This time linkblade91 wants us to imagine a world in which the Death Knight is added to the game. I wonder why...?
As always, I can be reached through Discord or here on the site via PM if you have any issues to report.
Competition Phases
Here are the phases of this card design competition
Discussion Thread Rules
No thread rules were added to this season. Please populate and manually edit this thread with them.
Welcome to the site!
Nethrandamus and Altruis the Outcast were the Demon Hunter Initiate Legendaries, for reference. Both of them told us something about how the Demon Hunter wanted to function, without using a new Keyword: Neth was about tokens and death payoffs, while Altruis supported Outcast plays without actually saying it. For this comp, I want you to create a Death Knight Legendary that shows us what the class is - hypothetically - all about.
With that in mind, I have two ideas. I think the second one is more interesting, but I kept the Dragon in there just in case people prefer it:
Sapphiron is a Freeze-payoff card, but also implies there won't be any AoE Freezing going on ('cause that would be too good). It pushes the DK into a grinder-style Control deck where you run your opponent out of resources, Freezing and Taunting your way to an inevitable victory.
Lord Tamakeen is for the oft-forgotten Blood side of the Death Knight, a specialization built around tanking with Health regen and lifestealing. Lord Tamakeen would convert healing into Armor so you can overheal, or for keeping you at "low Health" for effects like Lokholar the Ice Lord.
It'll be really exciting to look back at these and see how we designed our "Initiate" Legendaries compared to the actual cards when Death Knight is actually added to the game.
I wanted one small and one large Legendary (to mirror Altruis and Nethrandamus). Freeze is one of the integral parts of DK, and that's where Lady Frostheart comes in. Gotta have some Freeze support somewhere. Frozen minions become brittle, weak, and ripe for the killing.
Alexandros Mograine is the father of Darion Mograine and draws on the power of death. What would a Death Knight be without utilizing, you know, death?
Teribus the Cursed is mostly there because I just wanted a dragon. Demon Hunter gets Nethrandamus, so Death Knight gets Teribus. Teribus draws on the power of your bigger minions dying as its effect scales upward based on what the highest-Cost friendly minion that died is. He could work in a Big Death Knight strategy, but he's also good for just Dragon decks in general since Dragons themselves have a lot of large hitters.
I do have a version of Frostheart that only doubles the damage instead of tripling it. Doubling may seem more grounded towards reality, but tripling just looked incredibly fun.
I misread the prompt to any kind of card, so I had the idea of Rune spells. I liked it too much, so I decided to recycle it for a Legendary.
Runes are collectible buff spells that can be applied to both minions and weapons. There would be three in the Initiate set, but later expansions would add more (I guess the first Razuvious should be worded differently because of this)
Great idea for a competition! I bet we'll get some interesting designs!
I have two initial design directions:
Gothik the Harvester - fairly basic, demonstrates the Deathknights core of gaining a benefit when enemy minions die. In this case, turning them into your minions!
Lady Deathwhisper - more complex, supports a controlling Frost Spell strategy and allows you to turn an Armor advantage into a Mana advantage!
Feedback:
linkblade91 - Sapphiron: Something odd about it summoning "dracoliches", maybe consider changing them into "frost whelps"? Also some good art for that out there + bonus for Raid Boss Onyxia synergy. Lord Tamakeen - Interesting and well designed, but "rest of game" effects might be too 'complex' for an initiate card, the equivalent in other classes is their core set legendaries which are more straight forward.
Demonxz95 - I think Lady Frostheart is the smoothest design, though I think it could be phrased as "Frozen minions take Triple damage", since your the one doing the freezing! Like the idea for the other two, by Frostheart seems like a cool tempo-DK deck idea.
Wailor - The runes strike me as too verbose by trying to be both weapon and minion, I'd suggest making them affect just your weapon like rogue poisons. Maybe then try a "Battlecry: Equip a X/X Runeblade and discover a Rune to cast".
Among the Death Knight cards, the one that was most memorable to me was Frostmourne (there's multiple apparently, I meant the one that resummons any minion killed by it), so I wanted to do something with resummon flavor.
I like the idea of DK having effects that Freeze a friendly minion or powerful minions that Freeze themselves when played.
I don't think the Stealth should be too problematic, since you can only hit face once before giving your opponent the opportunity to remove it, although they need to take care of your Frozen minions first of course. And otherwise Freezes only last one turn, so you'll need plenty of synergy to keep Yallesh 'sticky'.
My initial proposal for this week. Very interesting challenge, but I feel like it's hard to come up with a good design until we know which strengths, weaknesses and playstyles the new class will have. Would be fun to do this challenge again in December :)
I'm using Colossal because I've had a fun idea for a card, there's not that many other design reasons for this particular choice. I like the idea of having a card Frozen until a condition is met. The idea here being that the opponent has to kill the two Bone Spikes if he wants to attack either your hero or your other minions but, if he does, he will also have to clear Lord Marrowgar in the same turn unless he wants to get smacked for quite a lot of damage (as he will thaw out that turn, becoming able to attack during yours).
Loving everyone's ideas so far!
I made a fun custom expansion called Holidays at Un'Gol Island. You should check it out :)
The point was precisely make it different from Rogue, both to create an identity and because I'm assuming DK won't have a hero power that equips a weapon. If other people dislike this aspect, I'll probably try a completely new idea.
Feedback:
I'd say I like Sapphiron a bit more. I agree with Arkasaur, the tokens should have another name. Maybe Frost Drake, referenced just as Drakes in Sapphiron's text? Since 4/4 seems too big for a Whelp.
If people don't like the infinite effect of Lord Tamakeen, I'd suggest making it an aura effect and give it Rush to make up for it.
Lady Frostheart is also cool and her effect is very flavorful, but having to deal damage to Frozen minions kinda goes against the point of Freezing them in the first place. The tripling damage part is fine IMO.
Finally, Alexandros Mograine is alright, but a bit boring. I think hand-buffs aren't very exiting.
I'd say I like Lady Deathwhisper a bit more. I like how it uses mechanics from other classes and combine them to create something unique. I really buy DK being like a Mage-Warrior-Warlock hybrid, honestly.
Gothik the Harvester is also very interesting.
Only issue is it could be a Shaman card, as they use both Freeze and resummon. However, this is not too big a deal: I can buy a hypothetic DK class using these mechanics more intensively.
I'd probably make the spikes 1/3 minions, though. In the current state, they lock your board too much, and they're spikes, so it makes sense that they can deal damage.
Two major themes that stick out from the current Death Knight cards is self damage (Weapons like Frostmourne and spells like Obliterate) and deck destruction (cards like Army of the Dead and Doom Pact), so I tried making legendaries around those ideas. An initiate set legendary would also have to be pretty basic, so I tried to keep the ideas simple.
Painsmith Raznal offers very powerful stabilization potential against enemy boards, but requires they have minions and you have ways to self-damage. It's a powerful and potentially frustrating effect, so stats and cost might be adjusted.
My take on Lord Marrowgar attempts to capture his iconic Bone Storm ability while synergizing with a package that involves removing cards from your deck.
I came up with a new idea, one that's not a "for the rest of the game" effect. It's inherently simpler, while still associated with the Blood specialization:
Not only do your minions become more lethal, the healing from Lifesteal becomes stronger as well! I'll have some feedback in a minute, after I pull my pizza from the oven :)
Feedback:
BloodMefist - I saw the Painsmith and was like "that's just Blackguard, but cheaper and with Lifesteal." It is not; reading comprehension for the win lol. I'm concerned that people would just remove it like a soft-Taunt before the effect became very relevant, but maybe that's enough for stabilization. I don't like burning cards from my deck, so I am inherently biased against Marrowgar.
Moondreamer - It's supposed to be part of the challenge to come up with something based on little-to-no Hearthstone information: that way we can see who was right when/if the Death Knight comes to town :) Your Colossal is very neat, but it also has an overlap with Glugg the Gulper's identity as a minion that grows from its tokens that have Taunt. Not saying you can't have something similar, but it does detract somewhat.
AeroJulwin - I love self-Freeze as a positive: I've been doing it with the Shaman for years. That said, the Stealth irks me not from a balance perspective, but from a "Why does the Death Knight have a Stealth minion?" sense of flavor. They're not particularly sneaky, the necromantic tanky bruisers that they appear to be. Still a cool card, though.
Arkasaur - Gothik is a fine card; no notes on that one. Lady Deathwhisper is much more interesting to me, but I'm not in love with that statline. Obviously it's hard to say without seeing more cards, but are you suggesting she's the "closer" attacking minion looking to punch through after you spend your Frost spells Freezing the enemy? Or is the 8 Attack just compensation for her low Health, low Health being the balancing factor so your opponent doesn't get smothered by her ability? Like, I could see her being a 6/4/4, or a 6/4/8, but a 6/8/4 has me asking questions lol. I still like her, either-way.
Wailor - Unfortunately, while you could submit Razuvious as-is, you could not include the Rune spells if they are truly collectible. That would be like submitting a "package" of cards, such as Artificer Xy'mox and the various Relics, which we will frown on. You could tell us what Runes are in the description box, but you cannot post the images. That said, it is a very cool idea and I like the Battlecry version better: drawing a weapon gives me options on how to use the Rune I'm about to Discover. I would keep the ability to apply Runes to minions or weapons; that's a unique quality.
Demonxz95 - Just to elaborate on what I already told you:
Having looked at them again, I'd say Teribus might be the most interesting.
I like Alexandros Mograine the least. I like how interactive Lady Frostheart is. Tripling is a bit unusual, she could "shatter" Frozen enemy minions when they take any damage for all I care. Might even add to the flavor. Probably better as a 4-Cost, since she already has a Freeze included. I also like Teribus the Cursed.
Also, you've gotta fix the tilted "I" in the second card's name. Did it just fall over or something lol?
About the card itself, I think it works well as a Colossal minion, but it lacks synergy for an initiate Legendary. Link made a good point about the initial DH Legendaries: they both supported a specific mechanic (tokens dying and Outcast). You're clearly going for a Freezing friendly minions mechanic, but the card itself doesn't support any other cards that could be printed for that archetype. The Bone Spikes currently only buff one Frozen minion, which is already provided as Lord Marrowgar, so I think that could be improved.
Lord Marrowgar is underwhelming. It doesn't sound very exciting because you have to burn a lot of cards in a single turn to get a decent reward. Although the burn cards we've seen so far remove quite a lot of cards from your deck, they were rare to obtain. If DK would actually get this archetype, the average effect couldn't burn many cards or you wouldn't be able to afford using multiple. Otherwise you could only use them in an aggro deck, which I'm not sure fits the class identity.
I would advice going the Mordresh Fire Eye route with this one, counting the burns throughout the entire game for a bigger reward. If you do go down that route, it would probably need to be an 8-Cost with a new statline.
Two similar ideas:
The first one is designed to act in a similar way to a Snowball Fight! or Mass Hysteria. The difference from those cards is that they could hit an enemy multiple times and this will always switch sides for each attack, e.g. enemy, friendly, enemy, friendly etc.
'Temporarily' means it loses the effect after attacking and 'opposing minion' was an attempt at removing the ambiguity from saying enemy/friendly minion — is it Lady Deathwhisper's enemy/friendly minion or the opponents?
For the second one, I wanted a similar feeling effect but with less complexity. As it needs to kill an enemy, the attack needed to be higher.
Feedback coming up in a second post
I like Sapphiron as a payoff card, however Lord Tamakeen is definitely my favourite of the 2. Being able to gain Armor instead of Health feels different and unique from the other classes.
Your update of Izelair is definitely simpler but doesn't feel as elegant to me.
Agree with others about Frostheart only doubling damage, and that version would be my favourite of yours.
Alexandros is good, but might scale too quickly as your opponent can't remove stats effectively, giving it a soft taunt. Teribus probably comes down too late, when other classes cards are dealing similar damage earlier — I think the effect could also be a bit complex to understand without seeing it.
As others have said, you can't submit the Runes with this card. That said I'd choose the second version to draw a weapon and then Discover. Feels neater and the effect is immediate allowing you to get some quick value based on the weapon.
I like both of these — I'd probably make Lady Deathwhisper a 6/6, so that it has the potential to stick around a bit longer and get more use out of it's effect, since it's not inherently strong on it's own.
Stealth feels a bit strange to have here, I'd personally remove it, but the Deathrattle is great. Like the idea of freezing your own minions for a benefit.
I wonder if Death Knight would be given a Colossal since that was an expansion specific keyword. It also seems like a 7 mana do nothing kind of card which I'm not too keen on.
Painsmith seems great, perhaps it could be buffed to a 3/5?
Removing cards from your own deck feels like a major downside, so unless it received very strong support I think Lord Marrowgar would be a bad Legendary to play.
I have been busy today. I can finally give feedback.
Gothik the Harvester may be too powerful (or it may not since no one else seems to be batting an eye at it), but its place in DK's arsenal is quite solid and it fits the bill of being the "smaller, simpler Legendary" (in the same vein as Altruis for Demon Hunter) quite nicely.
Lady Deathwhisper is a really cool effect that hybrids other classes, but in a way that feels very unique to Death Knight. My only complaint is that 8/4 for 6 is a really weird statline.
While I appreciate the creativity here, I think you should avoid using Colossal at all costs here. There is about a 0% chance that it will appear in Death Knight's actual initiate set, so it doesn't make much sense to use it here. The card is also incredibly weak since it's Frozen first and the Bone Spike is not particularly threatening.
That said, self-Freeze of some type is a design space that you could build something cool with (like AeroJulwin has for Yallesh).
Painsmith Raznal is a balanced effect and it's good with weapons. I'm not a WoW guy, so I don't know if self-damage is a think in Death Knight like it is in Warlock.
Lard Marrowgar can be quite cool. I think deck destruction can be a cool part of Death Knight looking at the cards that they have in KotFT and it seems that Blizzard would've intended to make it a part of the class. I can't speak much for balance, but the direction here is solid.
Alright, alright. No Colossal minions. :(
New design uses the idea of self-freezing as a way to preserve both minions and heroes in the ice, allowing them to be more resistant to enemy threats. Four mana 2/6 statline because I feel like people prefer slightly underpowered designs but I feel like it could be pushed to 2/7.
Don't feel super at ease with this week's competition so I'll forgo feedback on other designs. I enjoy most of them, though. Interested to see if anyone gets anywhere close to the real designs we'll see soon enough!
I made a fun custom expansion called Holidays at Un'Gol Island. You should check it out :)
The Stealth on my card was kind of an oversight. I already had the Deathrattle figured out, but decided it wasn't reliable enough and found Stealth to be just what it needed to give the player some control, so I added it without a second thought.
I've tried coming up with an alternative for the Stealth, but couldn't find anything. I don't think it's too big of a deal and outright removing it could ruin the card, so I'll just submit it as-is.
Although I'd prefer an initiate Legendary to support an archetype/synergy, I think the first effect van be quite fun. I do think you might be able to phrase this effect with less words. Here's my attempt, although it does remove the Rush and makes it a single-use effect:
"Battlecry: Attack a random enemy minion. If it survives, it repeats this effect."
The second effect feels more Legendary to me and does have some synergy potential with copying enemy minions, but it still has the text issue and I agree with Demon that most of the time it will die before the effect can be activated.
I'm very late, but I finally came up with a refined version of Razuvious.
I took Shaman's basic Totems as inspiration for these basic Runes: they are token spells with very basic effects that can be generated by several DK cards.
Since you'll be able to generate many of these during a single game, I made them weaker than a collectible card. This, in turn, turn allowed me to combine the effects of both previous versions without it being broken.
Finally, there would be other collectible Runes with more complex effects.
Late feedback:
Lord Marrowgar seems to have a very weak payoff for a very harsh tribute, so I'd probably swap Taunt for Lifesteal. Even then, I don't enjoy burn effects, so I'd still go with Raznal.
"Rush. After this attacks and kills a minion, summon a copy of it that inherits these powers."
or even simpler:
"Rush. After this attacks and kills a minion, summon a copy of it with Rush."
I like this a lot more, and fitting within the rules always helps, too :D I have but one niggle: the Poisonous/Unholy Rune costs 2 when the others cost 1. This feels weird; I'd honestly have it cost 1.
I thought it was a bit too strong, considering you are potentially able to get basic Runes multiple times. I might make it cost 1, though.
Definitely going with Deathwhisper. My thinking for the statline was to try and get the "dangerous but fragile" nature of the Lich across - and we dont have enough wierd statline minions right now! Additionally, I had some concern that it could lock you out from playing frost spells once you ran out of armor. Lower health means it would be more easily traded off to free your cards up.
I've mocked up a 5/5/5 version that I think meets a nice middle ground.
More feedback:
Wailor - I very much like this new version - the runes are much smoother, though I'd make the wording consistent across the three of them give/choose. Also i agree with Linkblade, make unholy cost 1.
Moondreamer - super interesting idea but I'm not sure it would be worth it (might depend heavily on what self-freeze cards DK would have)- maybe if it also gave Frozen minions taunt?
FooBars - Quite a complicated effect. I wonder if you can keep the spirit but make it a one-off effect. eg. Battlecry: All other minions attack each other until one of them dies. - rush then to clean up the last remaining minion.
linkblade91 - This is cool. +2 attack might be a bit too much, but I could see +1/+1 fitting well - similar in power then to Rokara. Gets really scary when you already have more than one lifesteal minions on board that can trigger.
AeroJulwin - This should say "if you control a Frozen minion…" theres no different between a/any in hearthstone since its a Boolean state. Otherwise I think Rush would be a simple replacement for stealth since the Deathrattle is hard enough to ensure in the first place.
'Any' made sense in my head. It should be legal looking at Zerek, Master Cloner. But 'a' would indeed have been the more logical option. Already submitted though.
And I did consider Rush, but then you'd be able to resurrect and attack with Yallesh multiple times in the same turn, using the same Frozen minion. You'd save him to easily remove a bunch of medium-large minions and then you wouldn't really care what happens to him after. That changes the card's use and value too drastically for my liking. It's flawed either way, but I'm happy with how the card turned out.
About your card's new version, I didn't mind the previous statline, but I agree about this being a nice middle ground and it will likely do better.
Less than 20 hours left to submit! Lots of cool designs so far :)
Good luck to the finalists :)
Congratulations to Foobars!
Seven people gave me 5-stars in the first round, but not one in the finalist vote? That's quite a bummer :(
Congrats FooBar! Glad you refined your idea and managed to win with it :)
Thanks for your help with the idea Wailor! Very surprised with the win tbh