How's the Maw and Disorder reveal season going? Have you seen any cool cards? While we still have a few left, a good portion of the new cards is already available for theorycrafting and discussions. With this being said, many Hearthstone developers found some time to answer questions from community regarding how certain cards work, why they got designed that way and many other interesting insights.
In this article, we're going to go over the most meaningful contributions from Team 5, which you can see listed below. If you're interested in a particular paragraph, make sure to click on one of these titles, as you'll immediately jump to it without the need to endlessly scroll.
- Accusations - A Brand New Card Cycle
- What Came First: the Card or the Pun?
- Clarification on How The Jailer's Immune Effect Works
- Tight-Lipped Witness - A Callback to The Witchwood's Monster Hunt
- Totemic Evidence - A Step Forward for Infuse?
Before diving in, keep in mind that, just like Cora "Songbird" Georgiou for Throne of the Tides, with Maw and Disorder it was Leo Robles who came up with all the cards - of course, he was not responsible for balance changes, but all the cards' ideas came from him!
Quote From Leo Robles Ayyy so this mini-set is super cool and special to me because I was responsible for doing the first pass of all the cards! Some stuck, some changed, and I wanna give some insight into how the cards came to be as they get revealed!
Does that mean you were tasked with creating 35 initial ideas? To be refined by the rest of the team afterwards?
Essentially, yeah! i basically made the "first pass" or "rough draft" of the mini-set, with ideas for card cycles, card names, individual designs, etc. Then once that was in, everyone just playtests and makes changes/tweaks from there!
If you like our content and you're interested to read more, consider checking out some of the following links:
- The Hearthstone Devs Answered Your Questions in Q&A #1 - Battlegrounds, Solo Content Returning, New Ways to Play, & More
- Reminder: Full Dust Refunds for Hearthstone's Second Castle Nathria Balance Patch End Soon - Added Tips & Tricks
Accusations - A Brand New Card Cycle
Back when Murder Accusation got revealed, Leo Robles stated that this card would've been "the first [revealed] in a cycle" consisting of "accusing a minion, then 'find' the evidence to deem them guilty".
Quote From Leo Robles The first in a cycle! Accuse a minion, then "find" the evidence to deem them GUILTY.
Later on, two more "Accusation" cards were revealed, unveiling one for all the card cycle's theme and mechanic.
Moreover, we received confirmation that this "accusation" card cycle consists of 3 cards, all of which have already been revealed.
Quote From Leo Robles Theft Accusation - the final accusation! This one lets Thief Priest take care of threats preeeetty efficiently.
To put it simple, here's how these cards work:
- Choose a minion - any minion actually: you can target both yours or your opponent's
- Provide the Accusation's evidence by meeting the card's condition.
- The chosen minion gets destroyed.
On a side note, it seems like Team 5 was aware that the card text may appear confusing.
Quote From Leo Robles Can you explain Murder Accusation’s card text? It says "Choose a minion." But the second sentence assumes that you picked an enemy minion by saying "after another enemy minion dies.”
You can choose any minion - we figured in most cases you're picking an enemy minon, but yeah we did talk about the wording on this card a bit.
What Came First: the Card or the Pun?
If you've taken a look at all the Maw and Disorder cards that have been revealed so far, you'll notice that many of them have law-related puns - while some are rather easy to spot, others may need some specific knowledge to be uncovered. Here are some examples.
Dew Process - Pun created by replacing 'due' with 'dew'. A process being due for all those who participate, doesn't matter their role, is a fundamental principle for any state of law.
Imp-oster - I am sure you guys have played your fair share of Among us, so you'll definitely figure this one out by yourselves.
Habeas Corpses - This one might be a little trickier to understand. The name comes from the Latin "Habeas Corpus", a principle that protects one's inviolability, and the consequent right of the arrested person to know the cause of their arrest and to see it validated by a decision of the magistrate. Nowadays, such principle is codified in (almost) all countries.
Regarding Dew Process, which is such a good pun, people questioned what came first during the design process: the pun, which was then turned into a card? Or the card, whose effect was perfect for such a name? Hearthstone Game Designers Leo Robles and Cora "Songbird" Georgiou took some of their time to answer the question.
Quote From Songbird & Leo Robles I'm starting to wonder if the puns are made first, or the cards?
Cora - In this case, pun
card. But usually card
Leo - There are a good handful of pun
Clarification on The Jailer's Immune Effect Works
The Jailer's reveal made a lot of people go ham: we rarely see cards with explosive effects like this! In particular, Immune is quite the strong keyword: granting it to every friendly minion is eventually going to break the game (Mal'Ganis, Bolf Ramshield).
However, how does The Jailer's effect actually work? How does interact with Freeze effects and AoEs? Hearthstone Game Designer Alex "Gonnzo" Smith stepped in to give us some clarity on the matter.
Quote From Gonnzo I sure hope that the tool tip for Immune will be clarified. Does Immune protect from Freeze? From AoE destroy effects? From being targeted by friendly spells? Many people wouldn't score well on that quiz.
Immune minions can be Frozen by non-targeted Freeze (Flurry (Rank 1), Blizzard, etc), AoE destroy effects [e.g. Twisting Nether] will destroy them, and you can target a friendly Immune minion with friendly spells.
Additionally, we'll remind you that Immune turns off Taunt.
Moreover, Hearthstone Writer Nicholas "DeckTech" Weiss stated that we may receive an update of Immune's tooltip (the little squares that appear of the board once you hover on a card with some keywords in its effect) relatively soon.
Quote From DeckTech I do think it’s a good thing that Raid Boss Onyxia has been so popular since it came out because it taught players a lot about Immune, which was previously significantly less common.
Brought this issue up and I think we’re in agreement that it’s a good time to update this. Not sure what timetable that update would be on, but should be coming soonish. Thanks for the flag.
Tight-Lipped Witness - A Callback to The Witchwood's Monster Hunt
One of the first few revealed card of this mini-set was Tight-Lipped Witness. If you've been playing the game for a while, you'll know that this unit is terribly reminiscent of Darkmoon Races' Deathwarden: both are Epic cards from a mini-set with 3/2/5 values and strong disruption towards a specific mechanic - while Deathwarden denies all the Deathrattles, Tight-Lipped Witness does the same for Secrets.
Even though Tight-Lipped Witness perfectly fits into the Maw and Disorder Mini-Set's theme, we've already seen this character in the game. Do you remember The Witchwood's Monster Hunt? In that solo adventure, you were able to get matched against The Mute, a Silence-focused hero with . . . as Hero Power.
Quote From Leo Robles After Songbird [FYI: another Hearthstone Game Designer] lost a tourney match to a random Deathwarden, I felt the need to make another 3mana 2/5 tech card.
More seriously, Tight-Lipped Witness felt like an interesting textbox that was thematically at-home in the mini-set! Plus, we got to revisit a fun unique character from Monster Hunt :)
Totemic Evidence - A Step Forward for Infuse?
Totemic Evidence was one of the very first few cards revealed, and caught the players' attention for mainly two reasons:
- The first one is the blatant Windshear Stormcaller synergy: Odd Shaman fanatics will have something new to try out!
- The second one is the peculiar Infuse requirement.
That's right, because we've never seen a Hearthstone card asking for minions belonging to a certain tribe to die in order to upgrade. Such design reminds us of Forged in the Barrens' Bru'kan, which combines Spell Damage and the Nature Spell School.
As much as this choice feels like Infuse 2.0 to us, Leo Robles confirmed that we'll probably see even more takes on tribal Infuse in this mini-set.
Quote From Leo Robles Totemic Evidence - a tweaked take on Infuse! You may see more for other minion types :)
And in fact, here's another tribal Infuse, this time for Hunter!
Did you find any of these dev insights interesting? Are you excited for the new mini-set? Let us know in the comments below!
Comments
The best explanation of how Immune works that I saw is that it is permanent Stealth + Divine Shield.
I'd say the puns are the best thing to come out of this mini-set