We’ve got replacements for the Hall of Famed basic and classic cards internally and we’re looking for the right patch to introduce them. Won’t be in the next one (that has the mission content), but we’re hoping to get them out before the next expansion.

We’re working on delivering it before the end of the year.

Greetings, fellow Explosive Villain In League(of EVIL)!

Sometimes we can write exactly what will happen on a card, sometimes it’s better to write the gist of it as most people will get it. Or at least think they get it enough to matter. This is similar to how we wrote Gral’s eat mechanic, it’s mostly for flavor, but there’s some benefit to save space on a card.

That said, we don’t have plans on teaching spells to more things yet, but I don’t see why not.

We’d love to bring back the Tyrande alternate hero and things like missing Card backs. It’s one of the most asked for things from the community. It’s frustrating knowing you missed out on something while you were away or before you started playing Hearthstone. We’re working on the right way to get them in to your hands.

We’ve been working on figuring out what an awesome long term cosmetic reward would look like. Medium and long-term goals are one of the most consistent pieces of feedback we’ve gotten from long-time players so we’ve got some stuff we’re looking into to address it. Nothing to announce now, but it’s something we’d like to improve.

One of the earliest cards I pitched in Knights of the Frozen throne was Mass Teleport: “Fill both sides of the board with random minions.” It sounds really silly and fun on paper, but once you realized the opponent always had initiative over your minions, you just died. 100% of the time. I thought “Well maybe as a dreamy card it’s fun. Or what if the enemy has a full board?” But it just never happens. It SOUNDS SO COOL. It feels awful to play it every. single. time.

These little hidden interaction voiceover lines are super fun to add. We try to do them where they’ll be most impactful, but not clutter things up with having too many. Rise of Shadows features a ton of lore-important characters, and so we picked the lines we liked best, and tried to spread them out between multiple characters. I’ve seen people notice and comment on a few of them, but I’m not sure if anyone’s found them all. I believe there are 8-9 (depending upon how you count it) of these in Rise of Shadows!

I heard a rumor from Dr. Boom that it’s actually “Explosive Varmints Importing Loot.”

Khadgar says they’re Extortionists. Vile. Immoral. Louts.

A couple of things going on here. For Basic cards, we’ve always nerfed in the past. If we Hall of Fame a Basic card, we need to replace it at the same time since it’s in everyone’s collection. That’s something we might do in the future, but haven’t yet.

For Classic cards, it’s a question of whether the effect is something we want around long term in standard. There are a few of pieces to that - how well does it fit the class’ fantasy, is it a healthy effect for the game to have around always, and is it something cool and exciting that we want to preserve in Wild. For Cold Blood, it’s a healthy effect, something we want rogues to be able to do, and not so unique that we felt like Wild rogues badly needed it, so we nerfed it instead of Hall of Faming it.

Don’t listen to these guys it clearly stands for “Evil eVil evIl eviL”.

Legendary is easiest to decide. Mechanically, if we only want something to happen once a game (ignoring shenanigans), we’ll make it Legendary. Or if it needs to be the only copy of something. A good example is the no-duplicate cards like Reno and Kazakas. Or if there’s something that doesn’t make sense to happen twice in a game, like this scrapped card: “Battlecry: Detonate all Bombs in your opponent’s deck.” After that card, there’s no Bombs in their deck, so the second copy feels like a dud. We try and avoid that where we can. Also, if the design is top-down and can only fit one named character, we’ll make it Legendary. Ragnaros, ...

Oh really? I heard from Rafaam himself that it was “Every Villain Imbibes Lemonade”.

We are working towards a world where class strengths and weaknesses are better communicated and more easily defined. One option players have when their class may have difficulty with wide removal options is to tech in cards from Neutral, like Dragonmaw Scorcher and Mossy Horror, if they’re running to a lot of decks like Token Druid. Neutral options are generally weaker than class removal options, but they’re something you can reach for if that’s something you’re running into a lot on the ladder. We’ll continue to provide these types of options in Neutral for classes to look at to either bolster things their classes already do well, or help shore up some deficiencies they may have.

Happy Birthday!

I wrote an article about a year ago about some philosophy on keywords when we changed Enrage (https://playhearthstone.com/en-us/blog/21614307) and that’s stayed pretty consistent. At a high level, keywords do some really good things. They condense card text, they make it easier to learn a new card once you know the keyword, they can tell a good story, and they can give us mechanical hooks to make other cards that care about them.

In exchange, when we do focus tests with people that are more casual, just starting Hearthstone, or coming back to it, the single biggest thing that turns people off in card text is keywords. People have a much easier time with “Teach it 2 ...

That’s a good question! I’m not sure… I’m not sure if even Rafaam is sure! Maybe “Elaborate Vision of Ideal Leaders”?

Tribes, or ‘minion types’, exist for a few reasons. Mechanically, they link a wide variety of disparate cards, so that they can be referred to and interacted with (“Whenever you summon a Beast…”, “If you played an Elemental last turn…”, etc.). They also help add flavor to a card. We have a variety of minion types right now, and are open to the idea of adding more in the future. However, each minion type we add does add a bit of complication, so we look at what the upside of each one is.

Take Treants for example: We’ve designed Treants to be consistently 2/2 tokens, with “Treant” in their name. So, if we add a Treant tribe, what do we gain? Treants are already quite recognizable, and searchable. It would allow us to print cards that are Treants, but not named “Treant”… but that would conflict with the goals of Treants to be 2/2 tokens, so we aren’t p...

• Don´t you think the epics should have the same rule as legendary cards? (Can´t open duplicates.)

We’re happy with the no duplicates rules for Legendary cards, but have no plans to extend it to epic cards.

• Are you pleeeeeeease going to do something about wild soon?

When we release a new expansion, we’re always excited to see players try out new cards and discover synergies and decks that will shape the meta. We’ve seen this with Rise of Shadows and have been monitoring the ebbs and flows as decks rise in prominence and get countered by other decks. With the Wild meta in particular, we tend to see crazier interactions and stronger decks and this is something we’re generally happy with. In certain cases when decks seem out of line with what we’re comfortable with, we have stepped in, like in the case for Naga Sea Witch and Aviana. We’ve discussed the possibility of nerfing cards, such as Barnes and Bloodbloom, but the meta is still settling down and we’d like to continue to gather...

We’ve learned a lot about hero cards since we launched the Death Knights. In general, we like them to either have a fair amount of variance in their gameplay or to have their hero powers be at a power level more in line with Justicar Trueheart than, say, Bloodreaver Gul’dan. Zul’jin is a good example of this. There’s some wiggle room here, but the core idea is that we don’t want the hero power to drown out the rest of the cards that you’re playing.

With each expansion, we’re going to continue to make powerful cards – a card being powerful isn’t necessarily a reason for us to change something. The most important thing here is that the game doesn’t feel hopeless or inevitable. I think the variance in Dr. Boom’s and Hagatha’s hero powers helps a lot there. You could get lucky, your opponent might get unlucky, and there’s still a lot of gameplay back and forth between you after those are played. It’s meaningfully different from some of the very powerful and more repetitive hero powe...

Designs go through a lot of iterations, and this one happened to be a little later than others. We try to get the flavor, mechanics, and art to all line up but getting the right design is the most important part. We tried Boombots, shuffling in bombs, dealing damage, but this is the one we landed on. We wanted to give them some more defensive tools to help out that archetype more than the damage and bomb version.