r/CustomHearthstone Celebrates Its 500th Weekly Design Competition, Let's Look Through Fan Creation History

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r/CustomHearthstone has just celebrated a huge milestone. It has now run 500 Weekly Design Competitions, with the 500th iteration won by Machadogps (who was featured on Fan Community Spotlight back in 2022) with the card Cut Through.

The history of fan-made Hearthstone content goes a long way back. The subreddit hosted its first competition way back in June of 2014, won by Coolboypai (who was also on Fan Community Spotlight way back when) with Varanis Bitterstar, which incidentally has been printed as Kirin Tor Tricaster in Rise of Shadows, several years later.

Coolboypai has always been one of the most high-profile members of the custom Hearthstone community, having been there since basically the very beginning. He stepped down as a moderator of the community in 2022, but otherwise I still see him hanging around.

Original prompt: Spell Damage

Looking back at extremely old card designs is a fascinating trip since the game was still brand new and no one was good at making their own cards yet. The standards of the game have changed so much and are always evolving with every passing release.

The 100th competition was held on May 14 2016, won by GateKeeperHS with Murloc Holmes and Watt-son. Comparing this to Varanis Bitterstar already opens up a lot of eyes as to how things have changed, namely the fact that HearthCards now exists. Discover was just added in LoE a few months ago and people were still trying to find ways to design around it creatively. This happens with each new mechanic. If you look on the current HearthCards gallery, I assure you that you will find some custom Prepare cards already there even though we know little of the mechanic yet.

Original prompt: Original prompt: Design around any of the past 99 competitions.

The effect of Murloc Holmes also looks a bit interesting. Kinda like a Sketchy Stranger, but way ancient. The stats and Cost don't add up the same because cards were generally weaker back then, which is another thing that really hits you when you look back at older card designs.

The 200th Weekly Card Design occurred on September 29 2018, won by WeoWeoVi with Zandalari Nightstrider and Silas Darkmoon.

Original prompt: Design 2 separate cards around one of four themes.

Remember the old weapon frame? The new one really is such an improvement that it makes me wonder how we didn't have it for so long.

Zandalari Nightstrider is an example of the fact that a card doesn't need to be incredibly flashy and do several different things for the card to be "good". If two simple mechanics interact with each other well enough, it can create something that's larger than the sum of its parts.

Silas Darkmoon though is of course a token-heavy machine that does a lot of stuff, and everyone loves those... when they're well made, because I've seen some of them that aren't well made. How does this compare to the version of Silas Darkmoon we have in the game? That's for you to decide.

The 300th competition was held on April 24 2021 and involved three cards with three winners: Meager Inheritance by Quacak, Perceptive Appraiser by Shoemanbrand, and Muradian's Pocketwatch by TwoManaPriestSpell.

Original prompt: Tell a story with 3 different cards.

A lot occurred between the 200th and 300th competition. In between 2018 and 2021, we received one of the biggest power spikes in the game's history, and the addition of the first new class in the game, Demon Hunter. If you want to feel really old, Demon Hunter recently became older than the game itself was when the class was first added.

The 400th competition, held on March 27 2024 wasn't won by a simple card or series of cards, but by a whole expansion: Fallout of the Exodar by Vee and Wassculaire.

Original prompt: Design a set.

It's a set about the Draenei, predictably enough, meaning that it's submission only a few months before The Great Dark Beyond makes it perfect timing.

It contained a Mutate mechanic, making it upgrade in hand after you spend a certain amount of Mana. Sort of an interesting variation on Corrupt. It also featured a new Colossal, which was a popular, but bold decision given that we weren't sure if the mechanic would be brought back (and it was)pp. Sometimes set mechanics hit just right and people keep using them after their initial set.

You can view the whole set here. Fan-made Hearthstone creations have always been a very underappreciated part of the community, and from my experience, also the least toxic. It's easy to look at players on the internet lose their mind over a card/deck that's overpowered or stupid, but safe refuge was something that could always been taken in custom Hearthstone spaces.

Wanting to spread the word around what custom Hearthstone was all about was why I initially signed up to have a job writing articles on Out of Cards, and it's why I started the Fan Community Spotlight series all the way back in 2019 with the Summoner class by Maxlot (or "The Flawless Walrus" as some of you might've known him as, and to my knowledge, he no longer makes his own projects anymore).

The Summoner class came with an Invoke mechanic, that is not like the one we got in Descent of Dragons in the slightest. Instead, this one came with a choice of spending an alternate mana cost for a new effect. It was an incredibly common mechanic idea, but then along came Manathirst which didn't ask you to spend the extra Mana. It also came with an extremely varied art style, with one card having anthropomorphic fruit and then you'd seen some sort of eldritch monster on the next.

A very fun custom class, and it also highlights one of the biggest hurdles in custom class making that we don't see anymore: Starting from the very beginning.

Before Demon Hunter was around, the biggest argument as to why we would never see a 10th class in the game is that they'd be horribly disadvantaged in card count, so every custom class was made with the assumption that they'd always be there from the very beginning.

Demon Hunter being added to the game at all was a huge stepping stone for custom classes because it nullified that rule, which was the biggest roadblock. No longer did you have to think about your class in old sets to get to the new ones. Now you're free to just do whatever it is that you wanted.

Speaking of custom classes, do you remember those really old custom Hearthstone videos from way back when. Here's Amaz's old Death Knight class video from August 28 2015, just 4 days after TGT was released.

From here, we can see that Amaz actually got the Hero Power exactly correct all that time ago. I mean, they definitely copied Amaz and Fullas. Not blaming them. It's a good Hero Power after all.

As you can tell, the balance on some of these things is not perfect, and that goes in both directions. Rotting Frost Giant is much stronger than Ur'zul Giant several years prior, meanwhile Dark Transformation is a dramatically worse Evolve, which came out less than a year after the video did.

He also made a Monk video too just a few days before the Death Knight one.

The class breaks the rules of basic class design by... having a 1 Mana Hero Power way before Demon Hunter ever did. I actually quite like the idea of having this Hero Power that you change to a new one and choose which one to start with. Should Monk actually be added to Hearthstone one day, what do you think it'll contain?

Just like the Death Knight one, the balance isn't perfect, even for it's time, but it's a very fun time capsule video to look at.

Who remembers Fullas Games? His last video was 9 years ago! Then suddenly he just vanished. He was a creator known for designs that were often not really balanced, but there's no denying that the man knew how to present his ideas.

His most popular video is titled Hearthstone - 4 Beyond Legendaries, 6 Golden Legendaries, and features him essentially at his peak. If you want to look at what Fullas Games was all about all those years ago, this is it.

The video features 4 Legendary cards with art that pop out of the card, making them "Beyond Legendary". This ended up being somewhat of a precursor to Diamond cards.

Between you and me, I think I would've rather preferred his version of Algalon over the one that we got in the game instead.

You may also remember that Trump had a series of rating custom Hearthstone cards, though given his infamously incorrect judgements in calling card power levels...

His first video reviewing fan-made cards happened on June 4 2018... almost exactly 8 years ago today. His most recent one, at least on the playlist was on January 9 2023.

After all these years, the custom Hearthstone community is still cooking. I got my last Fan Community Spotlight up... 2 months ago. I promised I wouldn't let the series die, and I mean that. I will post more of them.

The set in question is one by Palestar, in which Genn Greymane is slowly getting old (his mane is grey after all), Tess is being coronated, but not everyone is thrilled about it.

What do Tess's Coronations do? Go look at the set to find out. You really should because Pale put a lot of effort into it, and it's really cool.

What comes next?

Good question. The subreddit also had a good answer for you, and that's The HearthCalendar, which is a huge collaborative project to make a set, and all of you are invited. This whole little part of the community has always been about sharing our creative minds together, and this project is bringing all of those minds together for one goal. If you're interested in being a part of that, go try it out.

Hearthcards reached 10 million cards made on June 22 2020, and at this current moment, is sitting on 15.1 million. I will be making another celebration article once we hit 20 million cards.

The custom Hearthstone community, despite being a small and overlooked part of the fandom, has always been there and it's always been a passionate and creative little part of this group of people that play this card game. It'll always be important to me, and if you're reading this article, chances are, you probably feel the same way.

What are your favorite memories from within the custom Hearthstone community? What are your favorite custom projects? Let us know in the comments below.