Demonxz95's "Gladiators of Brawl'Gar" Custom Set - Hearthstone Fan Community Spotlight

Hello everyone and welcome to another Fan Community Spotlight.

It’s been a very long time since we’ve heard that time around here. The last Fan Community Spotlight I did was 2 years ago. Almost exactly too. What happened between then and there? The answer to this question is twofold - The first is that for quite a while, there were simply not that many fan projects coming out.

The second, and more significant reason, is that the site redesign prior to this one got rid of the dedicated Fan Creations button for the Hearthstone forums, and also because of the way the news way laid out on the front page, there wasn’t a good place to put any projects I wanted to cover because the previous system of only having four news articles visible meant that making “fluff” articles was simply not viable. Why do you think we suddenly stopped making fun filler articles? Because there was never a space to put them.

With this new set redesign, there’s now a lot more space to put these so-called “fluff” articles, which I believe is going to help us immensely in the long run. To celebrate this open space, I can finally bring back this long-dormant series of custom Hearthstone fan projects (and every once in a blue moon, some other game). This time around, I’m going to be looking at Gladiators of Brawl’Gar, which is a custom Hearthstone expansion by… me! Normally I wouldn’t advertise my own content on this series (even though this is the fourth time I’ve done that, I think), but I think this is a special occasion given that this column is seeing a huge revival so I’m taking it a bit easy for the inaugural edition of this reboot. That and I’m also personally just really proud of the set.

So because the “modern” thing to do is to remake every old video game, TV show, movie, or what have you, let’s follow suite and bring this series back from the grave.

The Keywords

Gladiators of Brawl’Gar is a set that I started designing in-between Whizbang’s Workshop and Perils in Paradise, and it took me about 5 months to fully finish this set and the mini-set, although the base idea for the set actually goes back a few years before that. At one point, I was part of a group custom expansion project on a set themed around the Brawler’s Guild that never ended up getting anywhere really significant. For one reason or another, the idea to make my own take on it got back into my head and I took on the challenge of making my own Brawl’Gar arena set.

When coming up with a keyword, my initial reaction to the theme was to just put Trample from MTG into the game to emphasize the violent nature of the gladiator arena and the pure bloody damage of the arena. All I had to do was think of a name and I got Overpower, and then I made a couple of Overpower cards to demonstrate. These were the first four Overpower cards I made:

This was a good start, but the keyword didn’t feel like it really propped the expansion up by itself. It would be a fine deciduous keyword that sometimes comes back from set-to-set. Bloodthirst came about when I needed the set to have its own keyword that similarly went with the theme, and my mind jumped to Spellburst-like keywords that trigger after the first time something happens. Since you’re already dealing a lot of face damage in this set, why not have the effect trigger after the first face hit?

The keyword was originally called First Blood, but the name did not exactly stick with a lot of people so I effectively reversed the syllable order and landed on Bloodthirst. Bloodthirst’s synergy with Overpower was a real turning point for the set because now I had two keywords that worked well with each other for the set theme. I theorized that some cards like Shady Bookie wouldn’t care about how much damage you dealt, whereas some other cards like Combatant Manager would scale their effects based on how much damage you dealt. For the mini-set, I also made a cycle of “Teammate” cards which had Bloodthirst effects that scaled on damage, but while all of the main set cards encouraged you to deal as much damage as possible, the Teammates instead want you to plan more meticulously. For Hotshot Teammate, sometimes you might want to deal less damage on purpose to get a smaller Elemental.

At first glance, these two keywords seem like they encourage the face-hitting gameplan we all know and love, but there’s also a bit of an aggro-control hybrid element to them since Overpower can be used for chip damage over a long game and Bloodthirst adds a bit of an extra element in deciding whether to hit the face or the enemy minions. Normally you wouldn’t use burst damage spells to hit the enemy hero if you’re not pushing for lethal, but maybe you really want that big buff on your Combatant Manager. Bloodthirst also presented a challenge to work around since I needed to ensure that the cards could be impactful for any player at any time even if they’re not the aggressor.

Overpower's simple nature also made it a very easy keyword to put onto any card since I could basically make any card I wanted to and then put Overpower onto it. This isn't to say that I just haphazardly slapped the keyword onto anything and everything, but it was an easy way to make any card a little bit stronger. Overpower did come with some limitations though because I had to rely on ensuring the card was "playable" without Overpower so it wouldn't go the route of Overkill or Honorable Kill (bad cards because minions need to attack with them), and cards that granted Overpower are problematic because of how much they can unexpectedly swing a card's strength. You don't want a Flame Lance with Overpower, do you?

Designing the Set

The set is themed around the Brawler’s Guild in World of Warcraft, which is separated into Bizmo’s Brawlpub for the Alliance and Brawl’Gar Arena for the Horde. I’ve never actually played the game before, so I don’t know the specifics of it, so I took some creative liberty and turned into a single arena with a bit of a WWE flair to it, and themed Bizmo and Boss Bazzleflange to be two different arena commentators. They’re both Neutral hero cards that each player would get for free - One of them as soon as the expansion launches, and the other one at the end of an in-game event regardless of how much XP you got. They both use the same Hero Power.

Since I was adding hero cards to the set, and Neutral ones at that too, this gave me the idea of rewarding the player for interacting with as many card types as they can. This evolved into one of my favorite parts of the set, which is the Black Market cycle. - A group of ethereals that will help you get a less-than-honorable advantage in the arena for those of you willing to deal with some shady business.

These two groups of cards also added some extra challenges to the set. Since the Hero Power of the Neutral hero cards could give you any card in the set, I wanted to make sure that no archetypes in the set were too “parasitic”. In other words, I wanted to minimize the chances that you would be stuck with a card that’s entirely useless because it belongs to a synergy that you have absolutely no means of accessing. Avoiding this entirely is pretty much impossible, but I stuck to making archetypes around generic mechanics where I could.

The Black Market cards also meant that I would need to design a lot of locations and hero cards and focus on classes that have access to weapons. My favorite hero card, and one of my favorite cards in the set in general, is Libbiara Blightrunner. She started when I tried to make a “hero Deathrattle” card until I realized that there’s a much more streamlined approach to this. - Give your hero Reborn! Pro-tip: Replay her with Xan-Sallish. This won’t trigger her Battlecry again, but it will give your hero Reborn again... and also the 5 extra Armor for even more life.

Thinking of my class themes was really fun. I wanted to emphasize themes that capture the spirit of fighting. This gave me the opportunity to revisit some themes like 5-Attack Druid, which we haven’t seen since the original Un’Goro. Spell Damage Hunter was an easy one since I already had Johnny Awesome.. - Storm of Arrows is a card that I’m still sad I had to nerf. It originally dealt damage to all enemies, but this sadly felt like it was a bit too scary with Johnny Awesome.

Additionally, this allowed me to take some aspects from classes that for some reason don’t tend to get synergized much - Weapons in Paladin for example. It never made sense to me that Paladin doesn’t get weapon synergy, but it gave birth to cards like Naaru’s Champion.

Demon Hunter went with Taunt synergy, which might sound like a weird direction until I realized that the class had a huge number of Taunt minions in terms of the ratio of Taunts to non-Taunts (at the time). After nearly 6 years, Demon Hunter still feels too one-dimensional to me, so anything that breaks up the monotony is a good one to me. Bolderon the Unbreakable actually created a bit of a ruling discussion, though we ultimately ruled that your minions having spell Taunt would not prevent you, the person who played it, from targeting other minions with spells.

(I made this set before the Draenei tribe existed, but I later went back to tag appropriate cards)

Working with a theme of an athletic competition, I took chances that I saw to throw in references to things you've find in combat sports. Heat of Battle is a classic Hearthstone design of taking a name with a figurative meaning and making a literal interpretation of it, and the way it interacts with Bloodthirst was well received by the group I was making the set with. The idea to make a Priest card called Shadowboxing was an idea I knew I needed to make, and it's a funky way to cheat a lethal out or get a big Bloodthirst trigger. Showboating Voidwraith depicts a classic pro wrestling trope of a performer showing himself off at every chance he can get while also being accompanied by his goons.

An interesting challenge that I had to overcome as someone who's never played World of Warcraft was researching boss encounters of the Brawler's Guild to figure out how to implement them into Hearthstone. This ended up being a mix of trying to figure out how to represent the card in Hearthstone in a faithful way to the boss encounter, and also doing whatever the heck I wanted and not giving a damn. Ahoo'ru and Leper Gnome Quintet are examples of the former, and Rokara, Arena Queen is an example of the latter.

In the modern era of custom Hearthstone designing, one huge problem also exists in the form of AI art and the ethics of using them. In the custom Hearthstone community, opinions on using AI art basically range from "eh, whatever" to "never acceptable". When I originally made the set and the mini-set, there were a total of 11 cards that featured AI art. Ordinarily, I wouldn't actively seek out to use it, but I decided to use some AI art anyway when I simply couldn't be asked to find anything better. As the negative sentiment towards AI art on custom Hearthstone started becoming more apparent (not necessarily growing mind you, just more well known), I eventually decided that it would be best for myself to remove all of the AI art and find non-AI art to replace them. Finding some of the artwork was actually really difficult because a few of the cards were made around the original art, but eventually I was able to find replacements for all of them.

I can proudly say that the set is now fully free of AI art. A problem that does persist in the modern era is trying to find fantasy art on Google Images that isn't AI art because the search results nowadays are littered with them. If you feel strongly that AI art shouldn't touch anything, this will be a significant hurdle to overcome when trying to make your custom expansions.

Random Closing Thoughts

There's no real segue here, but Right-Hand Ruffian and Prismatic Performer are just two cards in particular I wanted to point out. Right-Hand Ruffian ended up being one of my favorite cards in the expansion, and I can't quite figure out why, but something about its design just "clicks" with me in a way that's satisfying. Prismatic Performer is a card that sticks out to me because of the way I designed it. The character and the background are actually two entirely different pieces of art that I superimposed onto each other after I cut out the background of the character. If you don't know this, Faerie Dragon was actually designed the same way. - The background, and the dragon are also two separate pieces of artwork slapped onto each other. - The card did end up being very similar to Cabaret Headliner, though Prismatic Performer can be played much more actively without needing to wait for a hand full of spells.

If you're interested to see what I'm designing next, I actually am in the middle of making another set. This one adapts all 22 of the Major Arcana into Hearthstone cards. Here's a few examples of that:

(What does Foretell do? You'll have to find out what I finish the set.)

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE FULL SET

So that does it for this installment of Fan Community Spotlight. I'm bringing this series back in full force, so be sure to stick around for more of them. And no, my next article will not be another excuse to flex myself again if you were afraid of that. Gotta show off talents from other guys too, hehe.

What do you think of the cards I posted in this article? Do you have any questions about the set? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.