:D :D Thank you! Those were really really fun!

I definitely want to chase more of a clear/unique identity for the different classes/schools of magic as time allows. There’s nothing super solid there right now (aside from an absurdly big Excel sheet and the discovery that our task-tracking software only lets you import 250 tasks at a time like a coward), and the fact that as a team we’ve honed in on the general look of each class/magic type enough so we don’t create a whole lot of blatant offenders in new FX going forward. But I’m really excited for the point where we can start looking backwards with all these clearer visual identities too, it’s been my white whale for a while and any time I get to chip away at it makes me so happy.

There are also just like, so many fun questions there. The style for new FX has evolved a lot, which parts of that do we backport for wee reuse FX and what do we leave for the Big Stuff? What cool visual elements make the best motifs for the different classes if we were to do any of it again? There are tons of cool ways to give Priest and Paladin’s holy magic feel different, when and where do we distinguish those and when is it right for them to be the same? We’re always playing FX on top of a light board but classes like Mage and Priest have very bright/additive visual identities, what’s the best way to improve those without making them feel murky or shadowy? How many ways can I try and get Dr. Facilier’s “Friends on the Other Side” shadows into the game? Etc.

Demon Hunter definitely benefited from all that pregaming I’d been doing for other classes’s hypothetical kits, too, because it meant I could go into a new class with the all these frameworks I wished the others had had when they were made (that’s not a slight at the original team, a lot of my favorite FX are still a lot of those clean little original ones like Arcane Missiles and Lesser Heal, just saying with the library of content and knowledge we’ve built up since). Doing the VFX for Demon Hunter also had me putting a lot of scrutiny on some classes in particular (Rogue’s weapons and bright-green-on-smoke FX, Warlock’s literally everything), so that’s been another sort of nudge towards this want to better about distinguishing the different classes.

Always want more uumph!:3c

We don't have any firm plans here. It's definitely something that comes up regularly both in the community and on the team - we freakin love the cardbacks too, so if we felt like we had a really good solution in-hand we definitely would've pushed it by now.

The flat decks is a good example of one that I always want to work but is a whole can of worms - it's a perfect solve in terms of keeping the game feeling physical while showing off the backs, but then you've got to be weighing the benefits of seeing those vs. being able to easily tell roughly how many cards you have left, gotta reshape the board to accommodate the bigger footprint of the decks, figure out how to fit those changes on mobile, Oh god, do we have to rejigger every animation that cares about board shape now?, so on.

That Pandora's box of UI/UX and/or tech concerns has always been a tricky one with many of the ideas we've discussed over the years, but I'm sure it's something we'll keep batting ideas around for as we come up with them, and hopefully someday we'll get everyone a whole eyeful of those sweet sweet cardbacks ingame.:)

(/u/iamdew802, tagging you since we're talking we're talking flat decks, hope that's okay!)

Wheeeee!

<3

Thank you!<3 We're glad you love it, we love it too. Have a good one and I hope you're doing well.:)

I'll add on to this... Part of the way we're doing this is through having more cards in each Year of the Phoenix expansion for Demon Hunter, but some of those cards are core Demon Hunter fantasy, not tied to the expansion. Since they're brand new, we want to help instill the baseline of what Demon Hunter is, especially for those who are experiencing them for the first time here in Hearthstone.

Examples from Ashes of Outland: Spectral Sight, Immolation Aura, Warglaives of Azzinoth, Metamorphosis.

We intend to continue that strategy in the other two expansions this year.

Our current plan for card sets for Demon Hunters involves creating a Classic set for them in the future. That set may pull from some existing Initiate/Phoenix cards, possibly with changes, and some brand new cards. Exact plans are still very much up in the air; we have a lot of time before we have to decided what their evergreen cards are, and so want to take that time to get more experience with how Demon Hunters play out. Rest assured, we'll let you know what's going to happen when it's finalized.

It only damages the Treant you targeted, but not any other Treants (because Treants don't have minion type).

The bug where Rogue Galakrond’s golden somehow got Valeera the Hollow’s ponytail. It was even better because there’s that piece in the adventure where a teeny-tiny Rafaam is standing on Galakrond’s head, and a while after we fixed the Rogue one, I got what I thought was a troll bug about how Valeera’s ponytail was on another Galakrond in the adventure. Went to ask QA about it and it was a serious bug, they’d been so haunted by the first time it happened they were just seeing Galakrond ponytails everywhere now.

​

There were definitely a lot of moments during Battlegrounds development when the BGs producer would turn around and tell off Conor because I was jokingly curled up in the fetal position by his desk based on some conversation we had.

My favorite stupid BGs moment was probably when we were going through a ton of iterations for the end-of-round damage stars, and Conor pitched “something kinda like Spirit Bomb.” I, a fool, assumed he meant the Spirit Bomb from Boomsday, which I’d commented during Boomsday would surely never be confusing with as many DBZ nerds as we have on the team. I think we went through two or three rounds of “that’s not quite right, what about more like this?” before I caught on and asked him directly if he meant Boomsday Spirit Bomb or DBZ Spirit Bomb. He meant DBZ, iteration went way faster, and I get to make fun of both of us for the miscommunication now.:)

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When we were making Rastakhan’s Rumble Peter Whalen really wanted each Pirate to fire their own cannonball for Cannon Barrage, but the game had absolutely no support for playing FX from multiple sources in a single spell. Engineering’s estimate for a proper version of it was out of scope, so I decided to try and hack it on my side. The resulting card script was several hundred lines of weird If statements sending different ints depending on board location and treating sources like targets because multiple targets were supported, and an FX script that hard-coded 27 possible positions in world-space to throw the cannon ball based on that card script info (I named it CannonBarrage_TotalBullshit_FX, and am never not disappointed that it hasn’t been datamined). It shipped, but an engineer found it during script review and was so horrified he spent like 1-2 months later on writing an incredibly robust system for controlling FX through card script so I would never do it again.

So the moral of the story is it takes a week for engineering to do something right, and 6 hours for an artist to do something unwrong enough to ship.:)

​

Pretty much all my best friends are people I've met on this team - it’s easy to have funny moments and fond stories when you’re in that. We laugh our asses off during set previews and FX brainstorms. We troll each other with idiot gifts, stupid meeting invites, dumb filenames, and trying to collectively break software. We scream at each other during games and playtests. It’s not like that all the time, of course, because some of that isn’t exactly, er, productive, but a lot of that happens while we’re also doing work and going about our meetings, and you can’t ask for much more than that in a crew.

Haha i'm trying to imagine what that elegant shuffle looks like too. We'll find out soon I guess!:D

I think one of the perennial favorites on the team is King Krush - for my personal favorite legendaries, I think my favorite of Nick’s is Deathwing Mad Aspect, Dominic’s is Zephrys, and Sasha’s is Murgur Murgurgle. It’s hard for me to pick one of my own because I always see the bad in them, but I love Glass Knight because /u/Moolamu did a beautiful piece of art based off of her story that I actually have a big print of hanging in the office. (Also I’M SO GLAD YOU LIKE KALIMOS he is one of my favorite sons.<3)

Set design starts like 8+ months before we start doing legendary VFX. There are definitely cases where Design has a very clear vision for what they want for a card (they’re never bossy about it, because they’re darlings, it just means who’s pitching the idea is flipped), but by and large we have a lot of freedom to come up with our own ideas based on the card’s mechanics, art, VO, and lore. Historically we’ve been pretty loosey-goosey about when we come up with our ideas for them (everyone usually has a few cards they go into the set with really clear visions for, but mostly we’d kinda solidify ideas as we started working on each one). We’re trying to get more organized about it and plan out all the legendaries before we start though, so we can have better conversations earlier with Design and Audio to make sure they’re getting everything they want/need out of the FX, spot visual overlaps early so everything can feel a little more unique, etc. Everything’s better when we’re all getting to jam on each other’s ideas more.:)

I replied to this kinda-sorta on another question, quoting here.:)

"I know it's something that you would do whenever there is free time, but would you say that at some point we could see the whole classic set with animations or is that more or less uncertain at the moment? "

It’s uncertain, unfortunately, for exactly the reasons you’ve mentioned. It’s still the first place most of our minds go when the possibility of some free VFX time comes up (as I think Dominic’s kick-ass dragon updates indicate:)), but it also still hinges on free time. That’s gotten tougher to find over time since our first focus is always on maintaining the current quality bar for new sets and content and there’s more and more of that, but on the flip side, the VFX team is now five people rather than just, er, me like it was when I did Deathwing and Thalnos. So I guess that's a long-winded way of saying there isn’t a specific plan for how/when to hit all of them, but also that (I think:3) I hired some really good artists who also care about this, and a big part of the goal of hiring more VFX artists was to give everyone's schedule more breathing room for these sorts of passion projects.:)

Tacos, but we're in SoCal - my answer would probably different if we were in Chicago or NY or something, haha. There was a place up in SF that did godly stuffed deep-dish.

Which one do you prefer? (They're both good answers.)

I appreciate that, thank you! High fives!( 'u')/\('v' )

Shit, your dreams are way cooler than mine.

Since the Saviours of Uldum expansion release, the entry animation of Sir Annoy-O freezes on smartphones. This problem was not fixed for half a year. Please pay attention to this problem.

Sorry I can only answer one of them, but we've got a new bug logged for this now - I was unaware it had such a terrible frame drop, sorry about that.

As QA eloquently put it, "Oof."

I'm really glad you enjoyed the read, thank you! And I really appreciate the kind words, as does the whole art team. I always take quotes like this back to them and they get shy and blushy, it's the best.

Which part of dev do you work in?

Yeah!! I'd talked about your art to a bunch of people, and my best friend got it printed it for me as a surprise for my birthday. It's been hanging by my desk in the office ever since and people regularly ask about it and compliment it.:) I love you piece, it's my favorite thing I've got in the office by a lot.<3

One of the upcoming sets is a) a theme I've been rooting for for like, three years, and b) contains a design I was really excited about that was cut from Kobolds, and a design that always terrified me and has been cut from multiple sets since at least Un'Goro.:)

Nick said it's the only card in the whole set whose FX he really cares about, so I sure HOPE it's staying this time.

Siblings are always such a pain...🙄

Your timing is impeccable, I've been spending the evening in an e-mail about accessibility.:)

You're the first I've seen reply to it here. The honor is yours, friend.

The work itself has been pretty smooth - way moreso than I would have ever expected or dared hope. Those of us who wanted to were just able to bring our PCs home; I have no idea how IT was able to move basically an entire damned company home over the course of like two days, but they did, and they made it look easy (which there's no way it actually was). My drawing tablet doesn't fit well on my desk, but that's like, the only hardware/software issue. Focusing can be tricky, especially if you're just having an off day, but again, hasn't been nearly as much of an issue as I was worried it would be. There's also just the weird fringe benefit that those of us who have problems with bursts of anxiety or stuff like that can just space out at our desks for a bit or take a nap without having to disrupt our whole workday by going home, lol.

As a manager I've definitely been worried about my artists working more since I'm not there to shoo them away from their desks. It's hard enough to put down something you're excited about and go home for the day when you're in the office; it only gets harder at home. It's also easier to justify it by being like "Well I was a little less productive today, I'll just make that up with an extra hour or two of work." Work-life balance is harder now and more important now. There's nothing I can really do there except remind them of those things, but we also have twice as many 1:1 meetings now so we have more contact to try and offset not sitting next to each other.

I miss my friends. Like, a lot. I think we maybe have it a little easier because we're all so used to hanging out via games and Discord and stuff anyways, but I can't make them try the really good beer I got, or have that random happy chat in the hallway, or hug them.:(

But we also curbstomped the Directors in our Overwatch match last week, so all things told things're alright.:D

Sorry for being late replying to this!

I think darker/more serious is still absolutely a possibility, and I think to many of us the ability to go a bit darker (like Knights of the Frozen Throne) or sneak in some off-color jokes (hi Cravitz) as well as doing the lighthearted charming stuff is one of the things that makes Hearthstone wonderful. So, we’ll be continuing to avoid too much overt gore or front-and-center sexualization, but it definitely doesn’t mean that dark, beautiful, or sexy is wholesale off the table (three of my favorite pieces are Priestess of Fury, Fel Inquisitor, and The Mute).

Sorry for being late on my reply to this!

I think the Hearthstone art style has evolved and become more distinct and cohesive since launch, and as part of that we generally avoid explicit or mature content, like overt gore or front-and-center sexualization. I don't think it's an outright ban on dark themes, sexy characters, or stuff like that (three of my favorite pieces are still Priestess of Fury, Felsoul Inquisitor, and The Mute), but yeah, we definitely reined it in and our guidelines are stricter than they were in some of the older pieces. Personally, and I’ll grant that this me speaking as someone who genuinely enjoys the challenges art limitations bring (but also someone who really loves a good pin-up), I think we also just get better/more interesting art as a result - when you can’t rely on Tiddy Good to make a piece appealing, I think it pushes you to find more varied ways to make it compelling.

It’s like anything creative; people have a wide range of preferences when it comes to mature themes and we try our best to find a happy medium that feels friendly to everyone. Some artists have been frustrated by the lessened sexuality in particular, but that was also the case with the art direction at launch—some people just don’t want to draw a woman who doesn’t double as a sex object, and that's well within their rights as an artist but probably not a piece we want to ship in Hearthstone specifically. But since those limitations mostly deal with card art and no one’s full-time job is painting card art (our in-house artists typically do one card a set, and the other 170-odd pieces are done on contract by external illustrators), it means they can pick up other work that’s much more adult-oriented if it’s important to them to get paid to do that. I’ve also never met a professional artist who didn’t do personal art on the side (I'm sure as a creator you're well-familiar with the experience of getting home and thinking "I would like to do a slight variant on exactly how I just spent my day" haha), so y’know, there’s always that as well.

Mine's Vilefin Inquisitor, I love Silverhand Murlocs with my whole heart and I adored that iteration of the Murloc Paladin deck.

I really really like the Librams too (glad you're enjoying them!:)), partially because I just think they're fun to play and the flavor is great, but I also got to do the FX for them and I fucking love animating books.

Fun fact about Ragnaros Lightlord's animation: our tech artist wrote a new shader specifically for his gold sparkles. We've never used it since, because there are a bunch of other ways to create sparkle particles, but he's probably the only card in the whole game that has a shader all to himself.

Partial reply of mine from another thread:

One of the upcoming sets is a) a theme I've been rooting for for like, three years, and b) contains a design I was really excited about that was cut from Kobolds, and a design that always terrified me and has been cut from multiple sets since at least Un'Goro.:)

Celestalon talked about another cut Un'Goro card in the same thread:

"Titan's Script" actually refers to "Titan's Grip", a Warrior ability from World of Warcraft that lets you equip a two-handed weapon in each hand. Not at all related to Zephrys.

The Hearthstone design for Titan's Grip that they were talking about was a spell that read "Equip a minion." You'd pick a minion up and put it in your weapon slot, using its Attack as Attack, and Health as Durability. Fun idea, but there were a TON of technical issues with it. There were also a ton of gameplay issues with it as well, like, do you just use it as a way to protect an important minion from being killed? What do all these combat keywords like Taunt mean when they're on your weapon? Does 'Can't Attack' on a weapon mean that the Hero can't use it to attack? Do all of their triggered effects still happen? Imagine putting Armorsmith in your weapon slot and just never using it up!

We may find a way to do something like it, someday. We're brainstorming and prototyping similar ideas, and you may see something very lightly inspired by it in a card coming a couple expansions from now; but we'll see if it makes it live!

There's definitely a lot of stuff we just hold onto for later - often we need more time to get the tech right, but it might also not be right for the set or the mechanic cycle or things like that, too. There are definitely cases of delayed cards that have made it into the game already - I'd say every other set or so we go to look at the card list and I laugh and say "Oh we're finally bringing that back, eh?" They kind of blur together so I'm not sure of any off the top of my head, which I apologize for, but I'll reply again if I think any.:)

Either The Lurker Below or Librams.

Bamboozle has the best name though.:3

I think we're a while out from picking the next Druid alt hero, but last time we made a list of hero skin ideas I made sure everyone there knew what a fan favorite Hamuul is.:)

Bit over 100 people total (which always makes me feel super old, I was #39 I think?). I don't know specific counts on any of the teams except art, which is gosh, 16 now? Plus all our external illustrators who do card art, there are... a lot of them. There are five us on VFX now, which is nuts to me. Audio is freshly up to five and they're all absolute beasts.:)

All the designers chip in on everything in one way or another, but they also have their specialties that they focus more on, the larger of which are Initial Design, Final Design, Missions/Live Content, and UI (our UI peeps are formally part of design rather than art, which is pretty unusual for games but I think speaks well of how important UI is to Hearthstone:)). There're a few smaller/one-off focuses too - Conor's really focused on Battlegrounds, we have one guy who focuses on Systems design, etc.

The rest is various engineering departments, and production, but for better or worse I always count producers as part of their teams (we have 15 titled artists and 1 god-tier art producer, etc.).

Priest was the one where we felt the Basic/Classic set was the most in need of revision, by a considerable margin.

We're hoping to see how that goes (please, let us know what you think of it, whether you'd like to see more of that, etc.), and then evaluate the potential of making Basic/Classic design changes to other classes. I wouldn't expect the same level of change to other classes, but we're definitely talking about it.

Lord Jaraxxus is super sweet, and we love him. Any card's viability is always going to fluctuate with the meta, and this is no different. We may currently be at a low point in his meta-viability, but that's okay and natural for card games.

I'd also take issue with the idea that even now, he's unplayable. Yes, Zephrys is currently in standard, making Jaraxxus risky. But it's also quite an exaggeration to say that he can't be played because of that. He's still good against non-Highlander decks (which are the majority, currently), and I've heard multiple pro (GM) players state that they'll still run him, and just save him for after Zephrys is played.

Can do, thanks for calling it out.:)

(Sorry for the late response.)

So I think since launch we’ve really honed in a lot more on what we want Hearthstone’s art style and tone to be (I think the old opening cinematic vs. the Hearth and Home one is another really good example of this shift), and a big part of that is making a game that looks more cohesive and feels welcoming to everyone. Looking back at the art we already had, there were a few of these oh-so-infamous cases where we wanted to change some of the original art that was a little more gorey or had a bit more front-and-center sexualization to it. Stuff like dark themes and sexiness definitely aren’t blanket-banned (three of my favorite pieces are still Priestess of Fury, Felsoul Inquisitor, and The Mute (Inquisitor being the sexy one, obvs)), but the limitations on overt gore and sexualization are certainly stricter and we’re a lot pickier about where we put it.

As far as how much attention the changes drew to them—I think we just… didn’t expect as much upset as there was to it. I know that sounds incredibly naive now, and I don’t think knowing what the backlash would be would’ve changed our decisions there, but it certainly caught us off-guard with how much attention it drew haha. There were just some pieces that stood out as outliers from where we wanted things to be.

It’s certainly not something we’ll ever be able to convince everyone to agree with, because taste is personal and it’s like anything creative; people have a wide range of preferences and we just try our best to find a happy medium that feels friendly to everyone. Some artists have been frustrated by the lessened sexuality in particular too, but that was also the case with the art direction at launch - no art style or ruleset is going to speak to everyone. Personally, and I’ll grant that this me speaking as someone who genuinely enjoys the challenges art limitations bring (but also someone who really loves a good pin-up), I think we also just get better/more interesting art as a result - when you can’t rely on Tiddy Good to make a piece appealing, I think it pushes you to find more varied ways to make it compelling.

So yeah, I think the attention it drew to those poor girls’ boobs was unexpected/unintended, but Iunno, I really like Hearthstone’s art style and having more cohesion to that style, and personally I think it makes for a bit cooler/more creative art going forward.:)

Some things are intended to be part of the core strength of Priest (hard removal, control), so those things got buffed (Shadow Word: Death, Smite).

Other things are not intended to be part of their core strengths (card draw), and nerfing them to the point that they fit would have resulted in just a useless card, so they were Hall of Famed (Northshire Cleric). Others could be changed to still fit and are useful, so that was done instead (Power Word: Shield).

Why doesnt metamorphosis change the hero portrait while its in use? Its a legendary card and we already seen that Hearthstone can change hero portraits with card abilities (Shadow Form Priest anyone?)

Because I suck and I ran out of time to to finish implementing the overlay (I even mentioned the intent to do it in an interview so ^{you can imagine what a tit I feel like}). It’s still something we want to add, I just haven’t been able to finish it yet (because I didn’t want to just do Shadowform-but-green). It is actively in progress, though it unfortunately won't make it into the next patch, sorry.:(

Hey there, this is a great question!

When it comes to class identity, it's something we are still seeing through and want to be noticeable for the Year of the Phoenix and all future years. So yes, we will be amending and revisiting those class strengths, limitations, and weaknesses as development continues. DH will also be included in that process.

More to the second part of your question though, while developing and honing in on these more specific class identities, we've learned quite a bit. Hearthstone games definitely play out different when you know which classes have the large removal vs. which don't, or know which classes can kill you from hand and against which classes you feel a bit safer at say 8 health. That's important for the game and creates a more varied experience.

We've also learned that pushing some of those strengths really does help establish the identity further. I think Druid is a solid example of this in Ashes of Outland and that was part of the intention when development started on the expansion. When you have cards like Overgrowth, it goes a long way to reinforcing the mana generation of Druid. We will be leaning more into themes like these for specific classes in order to showcase their strengths.

Finally, we do realize that some of the outlined weaknesses can be a bit too limiting in a card game like Hearthstone. Card draw, for example, is a natural part of our game. The class identities should detail and remind which classes draw a ton of cards vs. which classes draw fewer cards, not which classes draw a ton of cards vs. which classes draw no cards at all. This is something we are actively discussing when it comes to class design and how classes will be shaped in the future.

We love communicating with players. It's natural that we tend to talk more when there's new stuff to talk about, but we're still trying hard to communicate more at all times, not just around expansion launches. It's also easier to respond to things when we have great things to respond to, so I'd also throw a huge part of the credit for this AMA back at the community for all the great questions, feedback, comments, and yes, even constructive criticism, over the past couple months. Let's all try hard to keep this going!

As for how we've been following through with this on our side, whenever there has been an issue in the live game in the recent months, our community team has been quick to put out information. We also released a roadmap covering most of our development efforts and goals for the year during our Year of the Phoenix summit. And members of our development team have spent a great deal of their time both in work and outside of it communicating with players, whether that's on social media, here on Reddit, or in our forums.

Hey! So I don't think there are cards that we thought would be really good but ended up seeing almost play (we have a pretty good feel for this) but rather I think there are cards that we think have some potential but just haven't gotten there yet. Cards that are waiting for their archetype to take off, cards looking for a home.

We can look at some recent examples of this like Exotic Mountseller. It's not something we thought was going to be super strong, but possibly had potential if the right deck came along. There's definitely some cards like that still out there! I know some of the most fun I've had playing in playtests is absolutely going off with a card like Whirlkick Master. There's potential out there, but it's not always the right meta or deck for certain cards.

To add a bit to what Ben mentioned above. We like when cards have varied uses that might seem out of the norm. In the case of the decks you mentioned, they're still building around the card in a different way (heavy card draw versus pure no duplicates). We love it when players come up with creative deck ideas like this and definitely encourage it. We did try the version where it was a hard condition at the start of the game, but it just wasn't as fun and liked the current version that's more open-ended and up for experimentation and has opened up room for a lot of the varied pseudo-no-dupe decks that we see now in the meta.

Meow. =^{. =}

It’s uncertain, unfortunately, for exactly the reasons you’ve mentioned. It’s still the first place most of our minds go when the possibility of some free VFX time comes up (as I think Dominic’s kick-ass dragon updates indicate:)), but it also still hinges on free time. That’s gotten tougher to find over time since our first focus is always on maintaining the current quality bar for new sets and content and there’s more and more of that, but on the flip side, the VFX team is now five people rather than just, er, me like it was when I did Deathwing and Thalnos. So I guess that's a long-winded way of saying there isn’t a specific plan for how/when to hit all of them, but also that (I think:3) I hired some really good artists who also care about this, and a big part of the goal of hiring more VFX artists was to give everyone's schedule more breathing room for these sorts of passion projects.:)

Also I'm really glad you like how the animations have been leveling up, the guys will be so happy to hear that! I'm still constantly amazed by all the cool stuff they come up with.<3

Not design, so I'm going to be a little high-level, apologies. Peter also wrote about the flip side of this when we removed Enrage, and when we didn't evergreen Recruit, and he is a designer, so you should probably listen to him more than me.:P

Recurring mechanics and keywords generally just come down to fun and flexibility. Discover was before my time, but my understanding is that it just opened up so much playspace and was so fun they really wanted to make it evergreen (I think that one worked out well haha). Lifesteal already existed a fair number of places and we wanted to continue using it enough that keeping it a keyword made sense; Rush helped assuage a lot of the problems that people were facing with too many Charge minions without just completely removing the fun of being able to drop a minion on the board and smash it into something. All of these are also, importantly, pretty intuitive words, and save a lot of text space.

Dormant is another one that - while we don't see a ton of it the way we do something like Lifesteal or Rush - has become low-key perennial since we kinda-sorta introduced it in Un'Goro and then iterated on it... all the way up through Ashes, haha. Even though there are way fewer uses of it in print and they're much more spread out, there are lots of cool and varied things we can do there whenever we do have the right card for it, so it's worth keeping around.

There are a lot of keywords that aren't necessarily that flexible - we feel like they can fill a cool niche for a set's worth of cards, but taking them beyond that might just be forcing it when we could be exploring other fun new stuff. Design has a really good understanding of how much space a mechanic does or doesn't open up, but we always go into these things with an open mind because hey, if we've stumbled upon the next Discover, we probably want to keep it around.:)

Good question! "Titan's Script" actually refers to "Titan's Grip", a Warrior ability from World of Warcraft that lets you equip a two-handed weapon in each hand. Not at all related to Zephrys.

The Hearthstone design for Titan's Grip that they were talking about was a spell that read "Equip a minion." You'd pick a minion up and put it in your weapon slot, using its Attack as Attack, and Health as Durability. Fun idea, but there were a TON of technical issues with it. There were also a ton of gameplay issues with it as well, like, do you just use it as a way to protect an important minion from being killed? What do all these combat keywords like Taunt mean when they're on your weapon? Does 'Can't Attack' on a weapon mean that the Hero can't use it to attack? Do all of their triggered effects still happen? Imagine putting Armorsmith in your weapon slot and just never using it up!

We may find a way to do something like it, someday. We're brainstorming and prototyping similar ideas, and you may see something very lightly inspired by it in a card coming a couple expansions from now; but we'll see if it makes it live!

Hey! We are planning something soon, but here I will shed light on what we are looking at.

With the Year of the Phoenix and Demon Hunter especially, we want to make sure we are active with our approach to balance. There will be additional changes coming shortly that is focused on Demon Hunter, Standard, Wild, and Arena.

For Demon Hunter, we are still monitoring the data as it comes in but expect 1 or 2 cards to see a change. We are thrilled by how players have responded to Demon Hunter, but we want the class to be in a healthy state for years to come. Will be adjusting as we see fit in order to get it into a great spot.

For other standard cards, we are looking at a number of cards including Sacrificial Pact, Bad Luck Albatross, Frenzied Felwing, and Kael'Thas. Some of these cards present some raw power that is just a little too high (Bad Luck Albatross, Frenzied Felwing), while a card like Kael'Thas can create some crazy swing turns but that's usually only fun for one player. Kael'Thas is a super interesting card though so we don't want to kill off his combo potential entirely.

When it comes to Sac Pac, we don't believe it is fun if it plays such a large role in the metagame. That says a lot about where the meta is and your ability to play certain cards. Also, it would be awesome to see more Jaraxxus!

For Wild, we know there has been a lot of very strong reactions to Quest Mage and Darkest Hour Warlock. These decks play in a one-player fashion similar to other decks we've nerfed in the past. There's going to be crazy combos in Wild, but we don't think these two decks in particular are healthy. Expect to see changes to Open the Waygate and Bloodbloom.

Finally for Arena, we are looking to do a full microadjust patch alongside these changes or shortly after. DH is still a little too strong here and we want to bring up the other classes to close this gap.

Archetypes that focus on minion type synergies are some of our favorite in Hearthstone and we like to have them ebb and flow in and out of the meta. We revisit them from time to time like with Dragons in the Year of the Dragon, or have more regular minion type archetypes like Demons for Demon Hunter and Warlock, Beasts for Hunter, and Murlocs for Paladin and Shaman. We also have decks like Treants and Silver Hand Recruits that can work fine without having a specific minion type tied to them and can even get some benefits by not being affected by cards like Waste Warden. We'll continue to explore the use of minion types in the future with various mechanics and archetypes. It was cool that we were able to tie a mechanic to Dragons in Blackrock Mountain, Elementals with Journey to Un'Goro and something that we could do again if it makes sense in the future.

Hey! I just answered this in the thread, but yes. Expect to see changes to Open the Waygate and Bloodbloom.

I have a task for animating deck shuffles!:D It's probably going to be some time next expansion cycle rather than this one because both art and engineering need to get their parts in, but it's very much planned!

Oh man, we haven't talked about maintaining original owner cardbacks since like... KnC Togwaggle or Azalina, I think. There aren't any plans for it right now, but yeah it'd be cute as hell.:)

Totally agreed on a Guild/Clan social system - it's something Hearthstone would greatly benefit from. As you mentioned, it would be a great springboard for many new features and game modes.

Social System been on our list for a while. This year we decided to pursue Progression, Achievements, and New Game Mode as higher priorities for now, but we will reassess in the future.

We've actually discussed "Upgrade Card to Golden" as a new feature - it's an idea we like and are considering. It'd probably work just as you'd expect. We don't have any specific timelines to announce - hopefully we'll be able to in the future.

Hey! Alec talked about a few changes additional changes coming for Demon Hunter, Standard, Wild, and Arena elsewhere in this thread - https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/g0okne/hearthstone_team_ama_april_14/fnel6p8?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x

1. "Restricting design space" is something we refer to as a downside of certain designs. However, I wouldn't take that to mean that all cards that restrict design space are bad. All cards restrict design space to some degree, but ones that do so more tend to also be the more interesting ones, and good for the game, especially in expansions.

In some cases, it's merely the presence of a class already having something for that role and not needing more (Polymorph), or adding more would give them a dangerous critical mass of it (Freeze and damage effects in general). In other cases, it's potential combo interactions that we have to be careful of (Tundra Rhino, Arcane Amplifier, Archmage Antonidas, Lightforged Blessing, Holy Wrath, Al'akir, etc).

There are a ton of cards that "restrict design space" in some regard, but that's not always a problem, and often goes hand-in-hand with doing good things for the game too. When it doesn't, especially when it's Basic/Classic, that's where we tend to step in.

Hey! We love doing events like these and last year you saw us experimenting with a variety of different ways to do them. Some were received better by players than others and we learned a lot about the timing of those events/which ones had the best impact.

You will see more of that in the future, but you will also see events that bring different types of play experiences to Hearthstone. Ben detailed some of this in our Year of the Phoenix video, there's a lot of great stuff in the pipeline!

Hey! So we actually looked at a number of these when we reverted changes to cards like Raza. When evaluating which candidates to revert, we chose the ones we thought would enable the most fun and interesting decks (lots of Raza fans in the Design pit). This is something we are open to doing again in the future!

Early on in the initial design phase of an expansion cycle we explore a ton of mechanics for a set and try to hone in on the ones that we find most fun. That's where we explored things like Red Mana and Fury, but there were a lot of other keywords and mechanics being explored at the same time. For Demon Hunter, we found the Outcast mechanic to be more fun and flavorful. It really tied well into the fantasy of who the Demon Hunter were, these outcasts of society, but also mechanically, it was a super fun space to be able to think of your hand in different ways and try to move cards to the sides, plan ahead for future turns, and reevaluate your turn anytime you drew an Outcast card at the start of your turn. Ultimately, we went with Outcast as the more fun mechanic. If we had thought Fury were more fun, we would've went the other route. In shore, its handled on a case by case basis and we just try to go with what ends up being the most fun and fits the best for the theme of the expansion that we're currently working on.

The current requirement to receive 11 star bonus the following season is 3.0 MMR. This is very roughly top 1500 Legend (<0.1% of players). However, the exact Legend rank cutoff varies based on the season, number of players in the region, MMR distribution within the region, and Standard vs. Wild.

We've discussed making this cutoff a flat Top X Legend instead of MMR requirement so Legend players had a clear target to aim for to get 11 star bonus the following season. However, due to the aforementioned variances, there'd need to be several different cutoffs, and they'd probably need to change season to season, so we haven't settled on any changes. It's the first season of the new Ranked system, and this is something we are watching and discussing.

Appreciate the feedback on the new Ranked system, hope you're enjoying it overall.

Hey! Ben replied to a similar question in this thread https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/g0okne/hearthstone_team_ama_april_14/fnecdn1?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x

Hey! Regarding Wild, Alec posted in this thread about a few changes you can expect soon - https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/g0okne/hearthstone_team_ama_april_14/fnel6p8?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x

and Ben gave a little bit of info on the new game mode elsewhere in the thread as well - https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/g0okne/hearthstone_team_ama_april_14/fnef41p/

https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/g0okne/hearthstone_team_ama_april_14/fnebpg7/

No details on dates and it likely won't be as soon as you want, sorry for that. But we've locked down who is the next Rogue hero and we think players will be happy with this Legendary character. - Ben

We'd like to have Dual Class arena happen at least every Halloween, so expect to see this again in October 🙂. -Ben

We recently talked about this internally. It isn't high on our list of priorities, but it is on the list! We like the idea and hopefully we’ll get to it at some point. -Ben

Hearthstone's clean and intuitive UI is a huge part of its charm and success, and so we're very careful when it comes to UI complexity. "Options" can just turn into "messy and confusing" quickly, if we're not careful.

1) We have some long-term goals of revisiting the Collection Manager, especially on mobile, and I think this sort of thing would likely fall under that. Nothing planned in the short-term though.

2) We hear the request for auto-squelch, but still think it would be a net negative for the game. Emotes are implicitly good-natured, and we want to support them as such. Manually squelching can be used for the extremely rare outlier of toxicity.

3) One of the great things about Demon Hunters is that they attack a LOT. It's super fun! However, that has the downside of sounding repetitive, hearing that voice line over and over. In the next major patch, we'll be adding some alternative exertion lines for Illidan attacking, to reduce the repetition. Not TOO much though, what would Lord Illidan be without his VENGEANCE? ;)

4) We'll keep this idea in mind. In general, there's risk of clutter; when you're in a game, we want you focused on playing that game. But, maybe there's something here we can do, in the rare case that you're wondering "have I played enough Pirates for my Pirate quest yet?"

Oh no you asked one of the magic questions, LET’S GOOO:

1. The simplest answer is just - team size. Rastakhan’s Rumble was the first expansion where we really had two dedicated VFX artists, over the course of Year of the Dragon we went from three to four, this year we’ve had one departure but brought on two new artists who are now ramping up. A lot of improvements from team size simply come down to how much time we can spend on a given card, but the cooler part, I think, is that it’s meant people come in with totally different perspectives and techniques, and we keep the bits that make things better. Nick doesn’t come from a VFX background at all but has been in Hearthstone art style and whimsy for almost as long as I have, and he comes up with the most off-the-wall shit that never would’ve even entered my mind, figures out nutsy technical workarounds to get the visuals he wants, and just has a great mind for charming little stories (things like Teron Gorefiend and Kael’thas, The Lurker Below’s persistent water jet, and Highkeeper Ra are all his). Dominic brought a beautifully clean style and really pushed a lot of our color usage and mesh animations beyond what they were before (things like Soul Mirror, Plague of Murlocs and Flames, and all of the Dragon Breaths are his:)). I’m super excited to see what the newbies add as they get their boots under them. We all make each other better.

2. Better tools! Unity has made some pretty nice changes over the last year or two, which are mostly pretty subtle (things like noise, particle offsets, really nice little quality of life changes), but also some major ones like their Timeline editor, which is the first time we’ve been able to preview more-or-less a complete CustomSummon without having to load up the whole damn game. The combination of all those various features has meant we can spend way more time actually making the effect in our heads instead of fighting with the engine. Just as significantly, I think, one of our (now former, may he rest in peace on Diablo) VFX artists, Sasha, wrote us a sick new ubershader during Uldum that’s let us create a ton of different materials/ribbons/etc. that are more vibrant and juicy, easier to animate, all sorts of rad stuff like that (compare Uldum animations to even just RoS animations and they’re so much cleaner-feeling it’s crazy). It’s something we’d been wanting for years and it’s so flexible and powerful it’s almost completely replaced the two dozen-ish hyperspecific shaders we relied on before.

3. We’ve evolved the rules around VFX a lot. This is kind of a two-parter - a big part of is just the new approaches that people bring to the team when they join that I mentioned in #1. The other factor there is that as time's gone on and we make more FX and develop a stronger sense of exactly what we want FX in Hearthstone to look like, we’ve just changed a lot of the old rules that our VFX had been adhering to. Probably the single biggest example of this is that there used to be a (fairly, unless you were Patches’ cannon) strict no-physical-objects rule for VFX in Hearthstone - the logic being that VFX were the magic contained in the physical cards being unleashed, and therefore shouldn’t contain physical assets (pretty big part of why many of the older animations are very magical and particle-based, with fewer big clean focal shapes). You can’t really maintain that when you’re creating at least 23 new big FX every four months (you can all do the math on how many that is per year, it’s pretty nice), plus however many smaller ones - everything eventually just becomes a slightly different ball of sparkles or lightning. So we’ve start doing a lot more with big, easy-to-read objects like wings, books, weapons, etc. that , and we keep the “unleashed magic” aspect by having these appear and vanish via magic sources, giving them fresnels and outer glows to keep them feeling ephemeral, etc. At their core these sorts of evolutions are very practical - our principle of a Simple and Clean art style is more important than “no physical objects in VFX” - but I think the results are better than either of those alone.:)

4. Regarding cards like the Plagues and Breaths in particular - one of the things that’s become really important to me is getting more cool custom VFX out of the legendary-only space. It’s a really fun opportunity to push the visual flavor of the sets better and get cards that feel a little more special to more people, and on the VFX team it’s a nice creative break from the legendaries where we spend most of our time, so I like to think it’s a win for everyone.:) We still pick-and-choose where we put those unique FX, because we have like, 137 cards that use the gold buff and 30-something that use the lil’ Fireblast fireball, and trying to do 137 different versions of the gold buff is just asking for a lot of FX that either visually power-creep each other or just don’t feel that different but take up disc space, but we try to find those opportunities to add more flavor and variety throughout a wider range of cards in the sets now.:)

We are excited to explore more minion types and try to figure out how they fit into Battlegrounds! We work on new stuff decently far in advance. We started working on Dragons before Battlegrounds went live.

Who doesn’t want to see some Elementals in the Battlegrounds at some point? I personally love the idea of Totems and Pirates in Battlegrounds. Yaharr!

Conor Kou, Game Designer

He may return one day! But with a new hero power :)

Conor Kou, Game Designer

Nathan Lyons-Smith - Production Director

Hi Hearthstone Community!

Thank you for the question u/dadozer - this has definitely been a challenge. 🙂

I am immensely proud of the team for preparing and launching Hearthstone's biggest-ever release, while simultaneously shifting to working from home 100% of the time. We transitioned almost the entire team to WFH in the second week of March. Blizzard's IT team did an absolutely phenomenal job providing the right hardware and software solutions, and helping us through the transition.

Our most significant technical challenge was figuring out how to develop and test new iOS and Android builds. Our prior development process relied on Blizzard's trusted wifi and shared devices across the team. In early March we audited WFH gaps and realized mobile would be a major problem. We ended up shifting priorities to develop a remote solution, learning new remote device testing software, and purchasing additional phones. We were able to get ahead of this in early March, and validate solutions just as we shifted to WFH.

There are a handful of challenges we continue to face that are common across other remote development teams I have spoken with.

(1) All communication feels formal - We previously relied on a lot of casual conversations and dynamic collaboration to riff on ideas and deliver the fun of Hearthstone. It is _much_ harder to do that remotely when all discussions feel more formal because you can't just turn your chair around. Today we are testing having an 'open video call' for anyone to join to see if we can recreate some of this experience. If you're reading this answer and have solved this challenge for your teams, please share! 🙂

(2) Burnout - When you're working from home, it's important to segment work time from home time. We have asked the team to not have meetings before 9am, after 6pm, or between 12-1pm. We want everyone to have a healthy balance.

(3) Morale – Hearthstone is fun because our team has fun making it together. We are finding new and creative ways to have fun together remotely. We are playing more games together, more frequently. We’ve done trivia, party games, and we just started an internal Hearthstone team Overwatch league. The other directors and I are on a team together and I hope we're able to get a win...

(4) Social Isolation - We know that it's important that we keep connecting as humans. Our leads are spending extra time connecting with individuals, understanding their challenges, being there for them, and helping where they can.

The team is tackling these challenges with enthusiasm, and I continue to be impressed with our ability to develop remotely.

I'll end with a plug - Hearthstone is still hiring! Come work (from home?) with us - https://careers.blizzard.com/en-us/openings/all/hearthstone/all/all/1

We have a lot of content yet to come in the Year of the Phoenix—you can see this in our roadmap. A lot of the teams’ time and energy is invested in “larger” endeavors, such as new game modes and large-scale systems additions like achievements. We also haven't forgotten our seasonal events and hope players will enjoy what's in store for them with the next one that‘s launching this expansion cycle! It’s an Outlandish take on the Fire Festival! - Ben

We have considered hand mechanics in the past and it is definitely possible for them to appear in some form one day in Battlegrounds. One of the design goals of Battlegrounds was to put emphasis and focus on the gameplay of each individual round. In practice, that equates to trying to make your warband as strong as possible every turn with the minions you bought during that turn. A mechanic such as “If you’re holding a Dragon…” is functional but encourages some undesirable gameplay. There are some exceptions but in general, if you buy a minion, we want you to feel like you can play it and don’t need to hold on to it in your hand just to enable some trigger.

Here is a fun little design story. When trying to figure out the identity of Dragons in Battlegrounds, we of course had to consider the “If you’re holding a Dragon” mechanic, as it is one of the big themes in Dragons. So we asked ourselves, what is the equivalent of that in Battlegrounds? Dragons care about another Dragon being around right? We talked about doing “If you control a Dragon” – which is similar, but the condition was too easy to meet forever. Eventually that led us to what we have now on minions like Razorgore, which is explicitly caring about having a large Dragonflight (the number of Dragons you control). Basically we tried to keep some semblance of the Dragon identity but translated into Battlegrounds.

Conor Kou, Game Designer

Generally, we'd prefer to welcome Classic and Basic cards to the Hall of Fame rather than changing them. People have a lot of fond memories of their cards and we like that they can play with them as they remembered in Wild.

As for reverting changes, we recently reverted some changes for cards that are exclusively in Wild. If a Basic or Classic card were to go to the Hall of Fame, we'd be open to reverting any of their changes in certain cases. - Ben

Cats? - Ben

Hi there, this is Alex one of the Hearthstone Producers,
I believe Coreycarries answered this but just to confirm this for you, the system tracks the first two copies of Common, Rare, and Epic cards you receive and tags them as owned in terms of duplicate checks. So let's say you have 1 regular copy of Overconfident Orc and then 1 Golden copy of Overconfident Orc. The system will note that you have 2 copies of that card and therefore prevent you from getting another copy of it unless you have all of the Common cards from the Ashes of Outland set.

Even if you disenchant one of your copies of Overconfident Orc, the system still notes that you had received 2 copies and will therefore skip that card until you have all Commons from Ashes of Outland.

For Legendary cards, we do the same thing but we check to see if you have 1 copy of the card instead of 2.

Hope this helps (although credit should go to Coreycarries for answering this initially).

We want to continue to make class identity important, the fantasy of playing as each class and keeping them feeling unique is important to us. What changes would you like to see here? - Ben

We take this feedback seriously, and Resurrect Priest has been the source of lots of discussion on the team. The flip-side of this, though, is that a huge number of people are really enjoying playing Resurrect Priest and have invested a lot into building their decks. If its prevalence and win-rate reach an alarming point we'd almost certainly make changes, and we'll cross that bridge if we come to it. - Ben

Yes, the new game mode we plan to launch this year will allow you to use older cards and there will also be achievements that link into older expansions, so you may want to keep your Wild cards. We are a collectible card game and would like our players to feel better about their collection and its value. The recent change we made to prevent duplicates across all rarities in card packs was in part done to help here, and we want you to be able to collect the majority of an expansion for a reasonable price. - Ben

When we launch this system, we want people to play and try to achieve the gameplay goals we've laid out for them, so we're not hugely fond of retroactive achievements. But there are some cases where it makes sense and we don't want to ask players to retread familiar ground. I think the best example for this is the Golden Hero portraits and the 1,000 win Hero portraits. We aren't going to nullify or restart your progress here, as that feels really bad and unfair.

As for example achievements, what would you all like to see? We'd love to hear your suggestions! - Ben

During the development of these cards, we thought about giving them a requirement related to your deck at the start of the game rather than your active deck to account for players wanting to do this. We opted not to go with this as there was no form of counterplay—with the current version you can try to shuffle cards into your opponents’ deck as a way to try and mitigate the powerful effects of Alexstrasza and Zephrys. - Ben

It's more like Shadowform but tattoos, I wanted to make sure it was something of similar visual loudness and equally flexible - since other classes could steal it, we'll inevitably release alternate heroes for DH, etc. I just didn't want to tint Shadowform green and call it a day.

The Ragnaros card back was a test for how the community would react to this, there were some complaints but we believe this was mostly seen as a positive. No specific plans to announce here but expect to see more on this in the future. - Ben

Maybe my reply came off a bit out of touch. I'm not at all saying that he's currently a strong card, merely that he's at a reasonable power level, similar to numerous other general-purpose legendaries.

I also wasn't sure if we were going to announce the Sacrificial Pact change yet, but we decided to announce that below as well, so great!

Madame Lazul - I think we overvalued the knowledge you gain from the Discover.

Nozdormu the Timeless - This card is super unique and interesting and would love for it to see more play. It’s a pretty scary amount of stats for this point in the game, so it’s risky.

Valdris Felgorge - This card is awesome and broke a bunch of conventions—I’d love to see it be played more!

-Ben

The Basic and Classic changes we made this year felt necessary. We are taking a longer, more in-depth look at Basic and Classic internally. We've nothing specific to announce on this front yet, but there is more work to be done on Priest, and on other things. - Ben

We like Rogue Secrets too and are following how they play out. It may be something we see more of in the future if it goes well 🙂. - Ben

I'm easy to bait lmao.

Hey there, this is Alex one of the Hearthstone Producers who worked on the new Ranked system so I can answer that one.

For each rank floor such as Diamond 5 or Legend, we also have a system to prevent players from tanking their MMR for the next season. We know a lot of players like to test new decks or just try fun decks at the rank floors so we made sure this was in place for players such as yourself.

For reference, I would look at this thread where one of our data scientists wrote a number of things to clarify how the system works.
https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/comments/ft5muf/faq_ranked_mode_overhaul_matchmaking/

Hope this helps!

Valerie Chu, a designer on our team, heads up the process for flavor text. She does a lot of the writing herself, but also sources ideas from across the whole team. - Ben

No current plans at this time, but this is an interesting question. If we were to reprint a Wild card for Standard, which one would you like to see and why? - Ben

We have no short-term plans for this, but in the long term would like to revisit the Collection manager, especially on mobile. - Ben

We've done a lot of work in the Year of the Dragon and in the upcoming sets to try and strengthen and better define class identities and mechanics. While we like Neutral cards, and they do serve various purposes, we really want to see class cards being played more in general because then those decks feel more unique and create more fun and diverse games. - Ben

The team has had a lot of practice at this over the past six years with Hearthstone's nine other Heroes 🙂. Characters like Uther and Thrall are very grounded in Warcraft lore and history, but they and their cards manage to have their own flavors in Hearthstone while remaining true to the source material. - Ben

Some of the most iconic Legendary cards around are from the Classic set and many of them have seen play consistently throughout the years: Alexstrasza, Malygos, Harrison Jones, and Edwin Van Cleef all come to mind. But there are certainly a few that haven't aged well, such as “The Beast."

We recently made some changes to the Priest Basic and Classic sets and are waiting to see how those play out. If players enjoy these changes and we feel they’re better for the game, we're certainly open to making more changes to the Basic and Classic sets. - Ben

Hi, this is Alex one of the Hearthstone Producers.

While not necessarily my favorite in terms of play mechanic, the Wild cards in Standard was definitely the most interesting one to setup because it had some unique questions we had to answer and solve. Buffs and cards granted through adventures are things we have done in the past, but for the Wild-to-Standard cards we needed figure out how that would work. To do this we started with the base core goal of shaking up the meta. This then lead to some derived core goals such as access to those cards.

Normally for something like an adventure we are granting you cards that you can carry until set rotation occurs, but for the wild-to-standard cards these would only be relevant to Standard for the duration of the event and we did not want players to use Dust to craft the cards or have to open a wild packs to find them. Our solution for this was to grant temporary versions of the cards that would last for the duration of the event. Like many things in game development, this lead to a host of secondary issue to solve such as having to show players multiple versions of the cards in the Collection Manager and making sure decks in Wild would not allow players to add both versions.

There were also a number of UI considerations and card decisions that went into this so overall I think it was the most interesting of the three to work on. Hope this answers your question!

The new game mode coming later this year will allow you to use cards from older and newer sets. Currently, we aren't putting any restrictions on which sets can be played within it, and there might even be some cool hidden secrets for using some of the older cards 😉. - Ben

We don't have any current plans for something exactly like the Rise of the Mechs event from last year. In general, if cards we release aren't achieving our aims, then we're open minded about making changes. Don't be surprised if you do see the odd buff alongside other card changes we make throughout the year. - Ben

Zephrys didn’t cause any of the balance changes to the Classic and Basic cards and it’s unlikely that they’ll be undone after the next rotation. That said, we’re more open minded about things in Wild and recently reverted some Wild cards back to their original forms. It’s possible we could do the same for some Basic and Classic Hall of Fame cards. - Ben

Since the beginning of the Year of the Dragon, we've made a concerted effort to try and take more player feedback on board. This is a request that comes up consistently—we’ve heard you loud and clear and are taking it seriously.

Edit: and yes, The ability to rearrange your decks should be coming during this expansion phase.

- Ben

The fun thing about Pure Paladin is that all Paladin cards are potential Pure Paladin cards! But really, we've got some balance changes coming soon, not specifically targeted at Paladin, but the meta overall, and the meta will look quite different after that. If any class is left in a bad state after that, we'll continue to adjust.

Implying that Morgl isn't already heavily tatted up.

#'-'# <3

I really didn't expect the wholesome anti-suckage brigade haha, now I feel bad for making people feel like they had to counter me. (But also DAMN y'all are real sweet.<3)

Hat, having retired from reddit for the evening, stands in his kitchen waiting for dinner to finish cooking. Suddenly, unbidden, the warm glow of pride washes over him. He smiles quietly, unsure how he knows, yet certain that someone, somewhere, has just made a dreadful pun.