At the beginning of the year the team committed to increasing the cadence of content and the variety of ways players get to interact with the game and the team who makes it. With the first round of single player found in Rise of Shadows there was focus on making the most exciting and re-playable single player to date, and the team continues to be proud of this experience.

The “Rise of the Mech”, the recently announced “Fire Fest-E.V.I.L.”, and a more open outlook towards changing cards more frequently (as seen with the recent nerf, buffs and classic rotated cards) are just a few of the examples of this commitment to date. We fully intend to do more like this especially between expansions, and identify even more opportunities going forward. [Source]



Do you think that 135 collectible cards are enough to keep the meta diverse between each expansions? If you guys had enough resources would you make more/bigger expansions or is the current ammount ideal?

Really good question! There are a bunch of factors that go into making a decision around how many cards to release. Usually when people talk about meta diversity they are talking about the length of time they can go before the game seems solved and becomes less interesting. The two things that impact this the most are the amount of cards we release, and the cadence in which we release them. In the past, some of our content releases only came with 30-45 cards, which we don’t think ended up being enough card content to fill a 4-month window with enough interesting decks to explore. We landed on releasing 135 cards per expansion because it felt like enough content to last the full 4 months. Nowadays, as players are consuming the content faster we’re trying a bunch of different ways to freshen things up around the 2-month mark. One of our first swings at that was the Rise of the Mech event, I would be curious if players think that releasing a small subset of cards during the 2-month timeline would be a good idea or not. We have a bunch of ideas that we’re going to try over the new few expansions. [Source]



Will wild get any balance changes implemented at the next expansion launch?

Barnes comes up as a topic of conversation a lot and it’s something we’ve been looking at a little closer in the last week or so as Saviors of Uldum gets closer and closer to release. One of the biggest concerns we’ve had with changing Barnes is that the Resurrect Priest deck is a favorite of many Wild players, and taking away Barnes might make it feel like they can’t play their favorite deck anymore. The spirit of Wild to some degree is that it should be a place where you can go to play your favorite deck no matter when you come back to the game. That said, there have been so many cards released that fall into the Resurrect Priest archetype that I think we could make a change to Barnes without making it feel like that deck is unable to function. We don’t have any changes planned on or before the release of Saviors of Uldum, though we’ll revisit this topic once the expansion releases and we have a better idea of what Wild looks like post-Uldum. [Source]



There has been a lot of discussion in regard to “class identity” recently. There are many who believe the criteria listed in your recent article goes against current design philosophies, particularly concerning Mage and Shaman. On the other hand, I do understand the need for flexibility in order to enable new archetypes and playstyles for each class. Can you provide any sort of clarification to what “class identity” means to you when working on a new set?