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Deathstalker Rexxar does not use new minions to build zombeasts and will not in the future.

In an earlier post here it was noticed that Deathstalker Rexxar does not use new beasts to make zombeasts. As explained by user Moshiyistu, Rexxar's pool will stay locked to allow for crazier cards to be introduced longterm. Even once cards have rotated out they will be able to be used in his Hero Power.

Personally this is the only thing that irks me about this expansion, with all the cool cheap beasts I was so excited to see the new combinations, but alas, no.

Edit: cards will rotate out of his pool as they rotate out of standard, so rexxar's pool will shrink and shrink in standard.

  • Mike Donais
    Posted 8 years ago (Source)

    /u/mdonais This is so stupid, Why can't it use all the beasts?

    The challenge was not a coding one. It was combining 2 text boxes into one across 15 languages. A lot of things that work ok in English don't work as well in other languages. When text is written for a card, it has very specific templates and line breaks and spacing to make it fit and look good and some languages actually have very different rules and would surprise you what they have to do.

    I will mention it again to the guy who works with the 15 localization teams regardless.

  • Realz
    Posted 8 years ago (Source)

    This is actually really stupid to me.

    Hey, you're not alone.

    Especially given the fact that Team 5 members have always claimed they do not care what kind of impact introducing new Spell or Minion cards has on other, random-generating Spells or Minion cards (think Primorial Glyph, Firelands Portal, Evolve, Devolve, all those cards).

    That said, having them remain so firm in the above statement, it makes absolutely no sense for Deathstalker Rexxar to not take advantage of the ever-growing Beast pool. Well, at least in this expansion it does not, because 3 expansions down the road, the pool might get polluted to the point you won't be able to reliably pick any combination you're looking for.

    But as far as this expansion goes, yeah, I too am vastly disappointed.

    We deserve an explanation. /u/puffinplays already confirmed the lack of inclusion of new beasts but, as Team 5 often does, he didn't really provide an actual explanation as to why - that's something I'm still interested in hearing.

    Hey azurevin!

    I don't post very often, but this is a topic near and dear to my heart, as DK Rexxar is one of my favorite cards, and one that I personally spent time working on.

    We deserve an explanation.

    It's a bit of a long response (story time!) so for those who are interested, try to bear with me.

    During KFT development, some designers thought it would be cool if DK Rexxar did something similar to Kazakus (create a custom spell) and could stitch together two beasts to make a custom one. We talked about how that could work, including considering making custom minions exclusive to DK Rexxar with simple abilities that could be interesting when combined (like Kazakus). As you know, we ultimately settled on the existing set of beasts to represent the tools DK Rexxar has at his disposal.

    One major concern was the text. If you imagine combining any two cards with longer text, 4 lines from each becomes 7-8 lines of tiny text, and needing a magnifying glass to read a Hearthstone card (including and especially on mobile) would be a bit silly. With this in mind, every combination needed attention, and since every localized language is different, different languages had to settle concerns with different combinations. Moving forward, the number of new combinations introduced would grow (and grow and grow) with each expansion. We also would either have to restrict ourselves and never make a complex Beast with a long text box, or exclude cards on an case-by-case basis.

    Given the above, we knew we couldn't make a version of DK Rexxar with future updating. We gave DK Rexxar a set pool of options like Kazakus, but this time the pieces would start off as existing recognizable cards before they're combined.

    So we had to decide: Should we still make this card? We thought (and still think) the answer is absolutely - Yes! We wouldn't have as many cool cards in the game if new ideas were tossed aside at the first sniff of imperfection. DK Rexxar is really fun, and we hope players agree that the version we have now is definitely worth having in the game.

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