Leo Robles, Game Designer on Hearthstone, wrote a thread on X to talk about the new Excavate keyword arriving in Showdown in the Badlands expansion and how the design process went. Check out his insights below on the development of Excavate and let us know what you think of the keyword in the comments below.

Quote From Leo Robles

Excavate is a super fun keyword that had a looot of work put into it to feel juuust right. Death Knight's cards are actually a great lens to talk about that, so: Here's a quick thread about how we designed Exacavate and the cards around it!

My original pitch for Excavate was basically "what if you dug for random treasure that got cooler the more you dug?" The shell of the first-pass was close to what we shipped: multiple tiers and pools of treasures. But a few things changed as the set developed.

Some of the treasures had unique tokens, like Living Stone. IIRC it would summon a 2/2 with Taunt rather than a random 2-Cost. While this seems inoffensive, these treasures are ALREADY themselves tokens. A mechanic about tokens where those tokens have tokens was… a lot.

We tested 5 tiers vs 4 tiers for a bit, but decided on 4 tiers for one main reason: its much less to learn. Not only in terms of card count but also because of the Rarity connotation we added. Players already understand how many Rarities there are, and it made thematic sense!

Originally, there was no Legendary treasure tier. One of the big issues with this early version of Excavate was that every deck played really similarly. Adding in class-unique Legendary treasures fixed this AND made the mechanic much more enticing with that as a focal point.

BUT that wasnt enough on its own. Games where you never got the Legendary felt samey. One solve was making cards that Excavate do so in a cool way. The keyword is complex so we still need cards like Reap What You Sow, but cards like Skeleton Crew added some much needed spice.

But even THAT wasnt all! We still wanted to push class identity even further, and that's where cards like Pile of Bones come in. Cards that hook into Excavating without doing it themselves opened up a whole nother way to make each class and deck feel more unique and fun.

So with all of that, Excavate was feeling rad! But we wanted to push it ONE STEP FURTHER!!! We wanted to make cool Legendaries for Excavate decks that you can actually open, craft, draw, etc. Thing is, we didn't want all of these Legendaries to ONLY work for Excavate decks.

The solution varies from card to card, but Reska, the Pit Boss might be my favorite one. They're a super expensive minion that becomes cheaper as minions die, which can be played outside of an Excavate deck. But with DK's Legendary treasure resurrecting your highest Cost minion…

Hopefully this was a fun/insightful/whatever-you-wanted read :) i love giving a peek behind the curtain whenever i can Im super excited for the rest of the card reveals, and i hope yall are too!