Following the announcement of Murder at Castle Nathria as the new Hearthstone expansion of yesterday, Hearthstone Game Designer, Cora "Songbird" Georgiou, decided to hold a quick Twitter Q&A regarding the new set, allowing players to clear potential doubts on the new mechanics and sharing some behind the scenes facts.
Among all the replies she wrote, there's one piece of information that is quite interesting. Cora stated that the new Location Cards, which are being introduced with the Castle Nathria set, are not an expansion-exclusive mechanic: they are a permanent new card type for Hearthstone, which we are going to see again in the future.
Quote From Songbird Do you see Locations as Hearthstone’s way into more non-minion permanents that stay on the board? Are you guys looking to iterate on Locations for future expansions? Is it too soon to ask questions like this?
Nah not too soon to ask! Locations are a permanent part of Hearthstone now, so we'll be using them going forward. We want to be careful not to overuse them, and we started intentionally simple with the designs.
Such a statement is consistent with how Team 5 has always behaved towards new card types introduced after the game came out of beta:
- Quest cards, introduced in Journey to Un'Goro, made a return in Saviors of Uldum and United in Stormwind.
- Hero cards, introduced in Knights of the Frozen Throne, were printed in The Witchwood, The Boomsday Project, Rastakhan's Rumble, Descent of Dragons and Fractured in Alterac Valley as well.
As of now, the reveal season of Murder in Castle Nathria has just started, so we are yet to see more Location cards than the two revealed with the expansion announcement on June 27th.
What mechanics do you hope to see implemented in the remaining Locations? Let us know in the comments below!
![All The Great Dark Beyond Card Reveals for October 23 - Day 13 [Finished]](the-great-dark-beyond-day-13.webp)
Comments
I kind of wish a compass was used instead of the durability symbol that is used on weapons. I guess it is fine for new players because once they learn how weapons work they will instantly understand how locations work too.
I think that while compasses may be more esthetically pleasing, Durability hits are easier to understand as a concept.
I wonder how legendary location cards will look with the dragon on top.
Hopefully we won't have to wait too long to find out
I can't see how anybody would think Team 5 would create an entire new card type, then only use it for one expansion. Keywords, sure. I think every expansion adds a keyword or two that is never seen again afterwards.
I'm a bit dissapointed on how locations look and function, in my opinion they should have found a way to visually affect the board, maybe just the area where you place creatures and that not all seem to affect all minions which one would expect of the name of the card type.
I wonder if the visual side is like that because of a technical difficulty that they didn't want to assign enough resources for.
I wonder if they'd convert the Alterac Valley locations into the new Location style at some point?
I don't see any reason why they would do that. The altarac objectives have some major differences compared to location cards, like how they trigger automatically, that they don't take board space away and that you can't have the same objective twice in play.
I hope we will see them more often than quests and heroes though. Those ones are legendaries with often game warping effects, so of course they cant be overused. But locations should be viewed more like weapons than quests and heroes. And I think we can see a couple of locations every expansion without much issue.
Regis said it best. They are more like alternative hero powers that can be used x amount of times. I remember in one of the developer discussions someone asked if they would ever consider replacing hero powers with a spell that was cast during the game. I think it was Iskar who responded that they thought about it but didn't think it would be fun if mage could keep casting Devolving Missiles every turn. Well it looks like they may have found their workaround.
I really hope they make a card that allows players to swap the basic hero power effect with a location effect for the rest of the game. For example, Warrior could tap into armor 3 times but use the Cruel Taskmaster -1 effect for the rest of the game. That could lead to a bunch of different ways to play your deck. The shaman one is also in the game already via [Hearthstone Card (Deathseeker Thrall) Not Found]'s hero power in wild.
Cora mentioned that Locations will be more frequent than Hero and Quest cards, but less frequent than weapons - I think it's a reasonable compromise.