The Final Design process is 16 weeks long. We receive the spreadsheet from Initial Design that has all of the cards that they created, and from there it's a lot of building decks and play testing. We usually start with the major mechanics of the set to get a feel for how they play and if they're fun (i.e. Spellburst, Dual-Class cards, etc). We build all of the archetypes for the 10 classes, and play until we have a feel for their strengths and weaknesses. If we feel archetypes are lacking in certain areas, we'll redesign cards until they're in a good place. A lot of the design work in Final Design is ensuring the archetypes are fun and have the pieces they need to see play, but we also do more significant redesign work if it's necessary. If a mechanic needs to be changed, we can and will do that. A good example of a card that was changed fairly late in the game is Instructor Fireheart. During the 16 week Final Design process for Scholomance Academy, I believe it read something along the lines of "At the end of your turn, deal damage to a random enemy equal to your Overloaded mana crystals." We tested with it during that time and felt it would be a decent seed card for maybe an Overload deck down the line, but that it wouldn't be really impactful during this specific cycle. Later in the process we actually decided that it was just too underwhelming, and we changed it's design to what we ended up shipping.

The 5,000 gold that I reference is my personal experience based on how much I am able to play per expansion. Yours would be different depending on how much time you can put in.
This is categorically not a statement that the system is capped at 5,000 Gold. The section highlighted in bold clearly address this also.
-Ben

Thanks for the question. We do have some interesting plans for the Basic and Classic set that we aren't quite ready to talk about yet.

Which cards, beside Whizbang, would you like to see return to Standard?

-Ben

My son. The day you were born, the very forests of Lordaeron whispered the name, Arthas. My child. I watched you with pride, as you grew into a weapon. Of righteousness. Remember, our line has always ruled with wisdom, and strength. And I know that you will show restraint, when exercising your great power. But the truest victory, my son, is stirring the hearts of your people. I tell you this, for when my days have come to an end, you, shall be king.

-Ben

Glad you like them! There are some things for us to consider when looking at creating dual-class cards in the future. First, how much of the set should they take up? For Scholomance, that answer was a lot, 40 cards is a decent chunk of the set. Dual-class cards give us a lot of space to create unique designs but if we did this number for all future sets, there could be some issues with that. A lower number would be more appropriate if dual-class cards became a staple of Hearthstone.

Another thing for us to consider are the pairings themselves. With Scholomance Academy, we wanted to pair classes that had overlapping themes or mechanics. That's why you see Warlock and Priest together with a focus on changing health or Druid/Hunter with a focus on Beasts. Players come to learn those pairings and what they are about, so we'd most likely have some distance between Scholomance and another big focus on dual-class with different pairings.

Finally, they are fairly challenging to design! A dual-class card that drives archetypes and highlights mechanics or flavor from both of its classes is difficult to get right. Our goal with Scholomance was to have at least two of the cards in the dual-class speak to feeling like a dual-class card (example: Coerce) while the other two cards were more buildaround pieces that the classes would utilize in different ways. We'd want to deliver on those dual-class feelings at a good enough frequency to make them worth doing.

I'm sure we'll see dual-class cards again in Hearthstone's future, but those are some of the things we are thinking about when deciding when is the right time to do it again.

We love Arena. It has a passionate and dedicated following, and one of the things that we think is most important to Hearthstone is that there are many different ways to play. Our main focus right now has been on developing new game modes, while keeping Arena in a stable place. I can definitely understand wishing for 'something new' (beyond new expansions); are there little changes that you think would help Arena out?

To some of your specific points:

• Set rotations had some downsides as well (a more complex format, old sets out of place at times balance-wise, etc.). Since they were removed, we’ve seen a large amount of vocal support for them, and are considering bringing them back in some form for the next expansion.
• Buckets were a mixed bag; we could spend all day tweaking buckets, but we didn’t really see positive results from them. Even just a few poorly-bucketed cards would cause significantly negative community reaction/experience, until we could fix them. They made individual draft picks more interesting, but made decks more same-y over the long term. We think it’s OK to have some easy picks in your draft, and feel like the current drafting still offers interesting choices a lot.
• Offering rates, particularly on certain extremely powerful cards like Twin Tyrant and Dragonqueen Alexstrasza are mostly tweaked with class balance in mind, so the strongest classes do get less of these powerful cards. In the future, we’re open to removing cards that are too powerful for Arena. We’re considering doing some of this for the next expansion, but Descent of Dragons cards also likely won’t be in the rotation anyway if we do an Arena Set Rotation as mentioned above.

There are several human-language documents. They range from step-by-step walkthroughs of interactions to collections of "tribal knowledge" to pass down to future generations. None of this is really fit for public consumption. I think the most important part of our documentation is our collection of unit tests. These tests validate that specific card interactions work and that those interactions don't change as we make other changes to provide new functionality or improve processes.

When we're presented with new card ideas from the design team, a common question that comes up is "How would this effect work in this situation?" One thing I love about our design team is that the response to that question is usually "How would you expect it to work?" This helps us derive the right wording for a card or even to determine if an effect is too complex early on.

When we're thinking about the right way to implement a card we rely heavily on what we've done in the past. Sometimes we get brand new things and we try to find the closest parallel. It helps to have encyclopedic knowledge of every card in the game and if we ever have a question about a card it's easy for us to boot up a game and test the interaction out ourselves.

I’m pleased to share that we have way more Hero skins in the works than ever before (and we believe a lot more than players are expecting)!

Some will be earnable for free, while others are going to be available for purchase. Hopefully there'll be something for everyone! :)

-Ben

Yes, we've recently started rotating older card backs into the shop and in the future we'll be doing the same with some of our previously released Heroes as well, because we know lots of players who missed out the first time around would love the opportunity to welcome some of these characters to their Collection.

-Ben

We still like the idea and it is something we'd like to get to. It isn't currently on our schedules though, as we're focused on a number of big and exciting features and game modes. 🙂

-Ben

We do have some balance changes heading your way pretty soon! Should have more to say on that in the coming weeks. Eudora in particular is one we want to address.

We’re really glad you’re enjoying Scholomance Academy. As for our previous year-long narratives, we really loved telling the story of the Year of the Dragon, but it isn't time to return to that longer-form approach just yet, but it is likely something we will pursue again. 🙂

-Ben

The Earth Mother watches over you.

-Ben

Yes! We like the idea of this for previously released Heroes and recently started this process with card backs.

-Ben

This is a complex system. There are two different types of effects: things that happen as a result of something else ([[Knife Juggler]]) and things that apply a constant modification ([[Stormwind Champion]]). The execution order is based on the type of effect as well as several other factors including the card's zone, the time the effect became active, and a priority set by the card's designer. When it comes to individual cards, we try to be consistent in the common cases. When you read a card and have an idea about how it will work, we'd like for that card's effect to match your expectations. When you bring in adventure cards to the mix there are bound to be things that don't end up behaving the exact same way. In practice, any card can be set to have any priority and it really depends on what the designer intends to have happen.

Short answer: there is a base set of rules that the server uses to determine order of execution, but on top of this is a layer that allows cards to execute at earlier or later priorities relative to other cards of the same type. Most cards will not utilize the priority layer and will execute in the order they were played. One nice thing about Hearthstone's digital format is that the server will let you know exactly how cards work and interact with each other.

We've been discussing this at large for sometime and have a plan in place to address this soon! Things we're planning to cover are seasonal resets and more. We will be sharing the full details as we get closer to our next major Battlegrounds update.

Conor Kou, Game Designer

Hey! Answered the part about reverts in another comment but yes we will be looking at reverting some nerfs when those cards go to wild.

For the question on buffs, we'll continue to do it when we see a good opportunity but they can be trickier to get right. When we nerf a card, we know the card is going to get worse and therefore the deck gets worse (in the majority of cases). When a round of nerfs go out, we know the meta is going to shift in some way. Buffs, on the other hand, may not shift anything unless they are a bit more drastic (Luna's Pocket Galaxy or Extra Arms). That doesn't mean we won't do them (we will), but most buffs won't tend to have the same direct effect on the meta that nerfs do. In the future, buffs will be used as more of a correction tool, aiming to get a class more in line with the rest of the classes rather than making drastic changes like Luna's.

Murlocs are on our radar, and internally we're testing a few different ways to tone them down. We like that they have a strong identity, but right now they're too consistently powerful. Ideally, not every game with Murlocs available would end with Murlocs in 1st place, and right now that does seem to often be the case. We also think there's room to make the Beast minion type a bit more exciting now that Goldrinn is at tier 6. They have a few gaps in their curve that we'd like to address. Other than that, there should be more information about balance changes heading your way in the coming weeks!

Yes, there's a fix checked in for Polkelt's animation so it should be out next patch. We'll take a look at Lightning Bloom as well, thanks for the heads up! - Dominic, FX Artist

Short answer is yes! When we have some free time, we have the opportunity to work on something we're really excited about that's not a part of the standard set rotation cards--at the end of last year, that was the Classic dragon legendary FX for me. It's absolutely a goal to keep that going as much as we can, thank you for the suggestions! - Dominic, FX Artist

We've been really excited to see the creativity and ingenuity of our players in experimenting with all of the new cards from Scholomance Academy. The meta has been evolving rapidly with new decks coming in and out of the meta every day. With Lightning Bloom in particular, it enables some early combos at the cost of card advantage and Overload for your next turn, so if your opponent can deal with that board reasonably you can fall behind. That said, we've been closely monitoring the meta and the variety of decks that are seeing play and are having balance discussions about them. In particular, some of the decks we're looking at addressing are related to how they feel to play against (like your example of Kael'thas), but we're still gathering data and feedback before we'll make a final decision.

We really like this idea and it’s something we want to get to in the future. It’s not currently on our schedule, because our current focus is on big new additions and systems for the game.

-Ben

This is a very "engineer" answer, but when Battlegrounds first launched we had some issues where combat wouldn't play out the same way for both opponents. This took a lot of effort to track down and required a lot of more robust logging and reporting implementation. Finally figuring out the root cause and being able to confidently reproduce and fix the issue was a huge relief!

Hey! No current plans, but I could see us doing something similar in the future. If we did another Wild to Standard event though, we'd do some things a little differently. We'd make the event a bit shorter and react quicker to any balance challenges that may arise. There's a lot of good potential bringing back player favorite cards, but Evolve and N'zoth overstayed their welcome in the previous event. At the same time, those are exactly the types of cards we want to bring back in some way. They can build decks and shift how you think about the cards in the current landscape. It's more about having the flexibility to send some cards back to wild swiftly if they lead to unhealthy gameplay. So yes, would love to do it in the future, but it would be shorter and we'd be more aggressive about taking some cards out of the event.

Totally agree, that's why we'll be doing some more comprehensive changes to basic/classic in the future. Not ready to talk about it just yet though.

Secrets in Paladin are an interesting topic. The concept of Secrets fits so well it something like Hunter (traps!), Mages (magic counters/tricks!), and even Rogue (surprising you is basically their main shtick). But in Paladin, the flavor is harder to find. Paladins are so open and non-secretive and fair and just. And additionally, 1 Mana is a touchy balance point; gotta bridge the gap between feeling like too minor of an effect to even be bothered by, and feeling unfair for only 1 Mana.

So yeah, as a designer, they definitely are the hardest Secret for me to design. But, despite all those challenges, we still keep finding cool new Paladin Secrets, and ways that we want to use them. I don’t want to be too much of a tease, but I will say that one of my favorite cards currently planned for the next expansion happens to be a Paladin Secret. ;)

We don't really see our expansions branching out into other Blizzard universes—Azeroth and Warcraft are core to Hearthstone. That said, it is possible that we may celebrate a special occasion with some other Blizzard favorites during limited events. 🙂

-Ben

Let’s talk about why we do, and don’t turn some effects into keywords! It’s much more than just “do multiple cards use it”. The downsides of keywording are usually small. It’s not that it's “too confusing”; our players are smart. But it is something that players need to learn. That’s not a big downside, but it’s not zero.

The upsides vary dramatically between potential keywords.

• It saves card text space and reading space. Now, importantly, saving text space isn’t much of an upside on its own; to capitalize on that space, we need to have some designs that we want to do that make use of that space.
• It also lets us interact with it from other cards. We can make effects that draw cards with that keyword, or buff cards with that keyword, etc.
• There’s also a vague sort of “weight” that is implicitly given to a keyword, which can be good, if it’s fitting for the set.

Consider these upsides/downsides for Outcast. We’ll put it on a ton of cards. Lots of cards will have Outcast along with a bunch more text. We want to make cards that interact with it (“Draw an Outcast card.”). It also matches the expansion flavor (or class flavor in this case), and delivers on that in a meaty way. Small downside, huge upsides.

Compare that to something like Cleave. All of the fun designs involving Cleave that we’ve found are already doable in the card text space we have, and none interact with it from other cards. Same thing with Elusive. It’s only a small downside, but the upsides just aren’t there, at least not yet. We certainly might find those designs in the future, or feature them heavily in a fitting new expansion, and then it’ll be Cleave’s time (or Elusive’s). We’ll see!

Hey! We'd love to do more of these kind of blogs. I know we're planning one for later this expansion cycle on how the team adapted to WFH in shipping Scholomance Academy. Beyond analytics, what kind of dev insights would you be interested in?

This year we took big steps towards making it easier and more affordable than ever for players to acquire an awesome card collection, including making the game more friendly to our free-to-play-players.

With the launch of Ashes of Outland we implemented the no duplicates rules, introduced free competitive decks for new and returning players, significantly increased ranked rewards, added 1st time ranked rewards, held multiple events with hefty reward packages, offered rewarding expansion quest chains and we’ve also committed to providing free single-player Adventure content for the foreseeable future.

We chose to do these things, because they are good for our players and we believe they are the right thing to do for the game. They weren't reactionary measures to competition or a dwindling player-base. We have many millions of players and are going to be here and strive to remain one of the most popular, relevant and fun games around for many years to come.

We are grateful to our players for their continued support and as described above have worked hard to try and value their time and financial investments fairly. We have no intentions of going back on or undermining the progress we have made on this front.

By the above statement I very specifically mean to identify and clarify that we absolutely intend to maintain the value that players can earn within the game and keep the flexibility of purchases that current rewards provide.

We are undertaking a major rework of our rewards and progression systems. A survey did go out about this recently with the aim of gathering information to help us refine the design of the systems. This isn't something new, Hearthstone has been sending out surveys for years and often what is discussed in these surveys does not represent what ends up going into the game.

One of our goals for this new system is to allow you to play Hearthstone your way, you won't be tied to playing only Standard or Wild in order to obtain the majority of the games’ economic rewards anymore.

We are also planning on repackaging (not reducing) the current rewards that you can obtain in Hearthstone and put that information in-front of you in an easy to view and understand manner. We want you to know how many rewards you've acquired, how many more you can earn and what steps you need to take in order to obtain them. In addition, we're adding a number of exciting cosmetic rewards that players can receive during every expansion.

Finally, we are investigating broadening the benefits of the existing Tavern Pass system to supplement the rewards of the upcoming progression system with exciting new cosmetics.

There’s been some discussion that a huge time investment would be required to complete the levels in the system. We don’t intend this to be the case.

I'll use myself as the example here. I reach Legend every month, during an expansion cycle I typically earn more than 5,000 Gold (I would not expect to earn less under the new system). Outside of Hearthstone I am busy father of two children, I have a demanding full-time job, an active life and I play a huge amount of other games outside of Hearthstone in my spare time. We want people like me who love Hearthstone but also have other responsibilities and interests to be able to complete the rewards track levels.

We want our players to feel good about participating in this new take on rewards and progression, without feeling that they might miss out if they don't have time or that they'd have to make sacrifices in their lives in order to do so.

We look forward to showing you this and a host of other things we've been working on to bring more exciting content to Hearthstone during our Year of the Phoenix Mid-year check in at the start of our next expansion's reveal phase.

Ben Lee

Game Director - Hearthstone

Hey! For Scholomance's dual-classes, we started out by brainstorming which combinations we had to do. The first that stood out was Priest/Warlock and then we started building out the full circle which ends at Priest/Paladin. Since we were being more strict about class identity than previously, we wanted to have combinations that had overlapping mechanics or themes. We landed on these fairly early in the initial design process, then just needed to figure out structure and archetype focus.

Thanks so much for the poster! Haven't been in the office for a bit but I'll track it down when we go back. Always love seeing the designs from r/customhearthstone, you all keep up the great work too!

We're currently looking at the Basic and Classic set in its entirety. Hearthstone has changed a lot in the last six years and we're researching what a more modern take on Basic and Classic looks like.
-Ben

We have something a little different in the works that we hope players will enjoy. Our current plan is for a new type of vanity card type that can look different in both the Collection, hand, and on the board. The team is pretty excited about it and we hope players will like it!

-Ben

Yes, when some of those cards rotate into wild we'll evaluate whether or not we want to revert the nerfs. At that time, we'll also do a pass on some of the cards we didn't revert previously. We think there are some good opportunities there to allow players to relive some of their favorite decks with their power pieces intact.

There won't be. But we have some exciting plans for the Basic and Classic sets that we hope to launch with the year rotation. We aren't ready to discuss the details just yet though 🙂

-Ben

We’re always happy to see players enjoying Hearthstone, whether they’re in Battlegrounds, Standard, Adventures, Arena, Tavern Brawls, and so on. From what we’ve observed, the most popular way to play Hearthstone at any given time is whatever is newest, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.

For example, when we launch a free single-player Adventure, it is easily the most popular way to play until most people have played through it. The same goes for Battlegrounds, for a new expansion like Scholomance Academy, and sometimes even for our more special Tavern Brawls.

At the end of the day, we just want players to have fun. With the introduction of more modes, the many millions of people that play Hearthstone every day have more ways to do so than ever before!

We believe you should play what you enjoy, your time is your time, and we are happy whenever you choose to spend that time with us in the Tavern. 🙂
-Ben

Yeah, we love that there's interest in this. As your update says, we just added a bunch of Scholomance Academy card art up on the press site, and we will try to post card art there whenever possible!

Hey!

We've discussed this a fair bit internally. I think the problem does exist mostly with The Tide Razor and Nat Pagle right now, and being killed from 30 after your opponents Nat Pagle spawns a Golden Tide Razor can be a really bad experience.

That being said, we're exploring design options for those two cards in particular that will hopefully eliminate that from happening. Battlegrounds is still in Beta so we're willing to make larger changes with the game, but tokens as of now feel ok to us aside from those two instances. If that changes in the future, then we'll address it.