The latest Book of Heroes released recently and has me wondering about creating custom content like it. It's an interesting challenge, because in addition to creating some amount of new cards for these story sections, you'd also have to flesh out an entirely new story for your original character. Or I suppose you could go in a different direction, and try and retell some of the more famous Warcraft stories in purely Hearthstone game form. A thread to pull on later, I suppose.

Conversation this week is short and sweet - and this time that's thematically appropriate.

Heart Of The Cards

Congratulations, of course, to the winner of the latest WCDC - Arkasaur and their Heart of Y'Shaarj!

We look forward to seeing what they ask us to do next week!

Snakes In A Game

It's time for another Battlegrounds Tribe in the Fan Community Spotlight this week. Cydoniaknight is back, this time to show off their Naga tribe.

 

I've been impressed with the diversity in ideas we've seen from custom Battlegrounds content. It seems like a tricky task to come up with new and interesting ideas to base a tribe around, but the Hearthstone team managed to pull it off a few times now with their official additions, and all the custom content I've seen has been varied in both theme and mechanics.

The mark doesn't always seem to be hit in terms of balance, but that's nothing exclusive to custom card creation - Quillboars are much more reasonable now after their nerfs, but oh boy was that a fun little meta to try and wrap your head around before then.

 

Custom heroes have also been fantastically varied in what they bring to the table. I think a huge part of what makes them easier to design comes not from the difference in mechanics between Battlegrounds and regular Hearthstone (though that surely does help), but from the fact that you aren't nearly as restricted as you would be in regular Hearthstone, where for the most part Hero Powers cost 2 mana.

Being able to envision anything from a completely passive effect right up to some very powerful 5 mana one-use button, and anything in between, gives such an amazing amount of creative space to work with. It reminds me of designing custom Adventure bosses back in the day - though with a bit more attention paid to making them not completely broken.

Click the link above for the full interview, as well as a link to the full set.

Keep It Simple, Stupid

We're making simple cards this week - use your words sparingly! Click the banner below to find out more.