The most recent Hearthstone

Work in progress Lackey was bang on.

The king of roadblocks.

“ "Having powerful defensive options was important to us. That's one of the things that Kobolds & Catacombs has a fair number of." - Peter Whalen.

All upside in Cubelock.

Cube with temp art...

Skull with temp art...

Break the seal(s).

“ "We have a lot of people talking about Corridor Creeper... It's one of the cards that raises a red flag." - Mike Donais.

Psychic Scream's original name!

“ "I'm glad that Barnes is a card that is not in the Classic set. It's the kind of thing that's around for two years and then rotates, because he does very interesting, very powerful things, he pushes decks in powerful directions." - Peter Whalen.

A pair from the start.

“ "We tried a lot of different cards for the Rogue legendary Weapon, because we knew we wanted that one to be particularly cool." - Peter Whalen.

A couple of the work in progress concepts for dual wield Rogue!

A cool idea that didn't make the cut.

Too easy to exploit...

This one also didn't make the cut.

I think we’re always going to see this. As the Standard cycle goes through there’s just fewer cards in the meta game, so there’s fewer super powerful cards in the meta game… by the third block, the third set of a year, we've done a lot of different cool things and so there's a lot of powerful things pushing in a lot of different directions. So there's a number of different archetypes that you can play that all do very powerful, very cool things. It's a lot of fun to feel that level of power but still have things balanced because there's a lot of great stuff going on at the same time. I think we're seeing that right now…I think there's a lot of really powerful things like Cubelock going on and I think that a lot of decks being powerful and exciting can often be like, "Oh, look. All these different classes have different decks. Lots of them have multiple decks and they're all very powerful," feels like you're always doing something really cool. After the World Championships we're planning to do a patch next month and that's when we'll talk more about stuff like that.Ben [Brode] talked about it a little bit . It's going to be a patch. It contains some new event stuff and we're going to take a look at the meta game as it's been and as it is in the World Championships and we'll take a look and see what kind of changes we want to make.I think we'll see more after the World Championships. Right now we're just learning and we're listening to the players and we're thinking about all kinds of stuff, like Wild and Standard and stuff like that.Sure. One of the things we try to do for each set is to have one or two, maybe a third, theme that each of the classes is going for. In Kobolds & Catacombs, Warlock had “big demons” was one of their themes and “self damage” was the other theme. There's some other cards in the set for Warlock that don't push in either of those themes explicitly but those are kind of the two things. One of the things that's nice is when those two themes can play together, that's cool because it means that you can push your deck more towards there's the sort of the control-style Handlock type decks the are just doing the self damage things and less of the Cubelock, Possessed Lackey type thing. Then there's the Cubelock deck that you're talking about that pushes more in the big demon space versus doing Possessed Lackey and Voidlord, Dark Pact and Carnivorous Cube. It's cool when you have different decks that kind of go back and forth between those.Those were the two real themes for Warlock and, so Skull of the Man'ari, Possessed Lackey, pushing the big demon direction, and then we have things like Kobold Librarian, Vulgar Homunculus, the Spellstone, that pushed in the self-damage direction. It's nice that those kind of get to play together.It's a natural extension of doing Recruit as a major mechanic in this set. One of the things that we are definitely doing in Kobolds & Catacombs is that there's this sense of discovery, this sense of you're going into a dungeon and finding amazing stuff, and one of the ways we wanted to capture that was that, you would go into your deck and find amazing stuff, so Recruit, Possessed Lackey is a good example of that, where you're getting this crazy thing. Spiteful Summoner is another good example of that, where you are getting this crazy thing from your deck because you built your deck in a particular way. You're a little bit surprised by what the outcome is, maybe it's a Doomguard, maybe it's a Voidlord, but it's very consistent because you paid this deck building cost. You are not playing little demons that would otherwise be good for you.Obviously, we designed the Recruit cards specifically to do this, and we tested out versions that were very close to what's live now, sometimes we had two more demons than they have now. The general idea of Cubelock was something that we were certainly concerned about and played a bunch of games with it. That was one of the decks that we came very close to the current live version, within maybe four cards.That's really good against Warlock right now. It's pretty good against Paladin too. I think there is a couple matchups where it's not quite as good, but it's definitely a tech card. Mages are starting to run more Polymorph because it's really good against Warlock and their ability to bring back their demons over and over again.Big Priest. It’s a good answer there.Almost not at all. It was basically the same. I think the numbers on it might've changed, but I'm not 100% on that. I think it was almost exactly the same the whole way through.We did try out a second version of Possessed Lackey, some time in final design that was a battle cry version. So, “battle cry: if you control a demon, recruit a demon.” And that was pretty different because you need to actually get the demons out, and there's not that many ways to create demons via spells or via other effects, because you want all the minions in your deck that are demons to be enormous, like Voidlords or Doomguards, that kind of thing, but the minions in play, you want to be getting for a not-minion card, so you don't Recruit it out. That was a weird one to play, and it made the build-around very different. We ended up going with this one because it pushed in the same direction as Skull. It was a more natural thing too. It was, “I'm just going put big demons in my deck,” so it was a little bit of an easier idea to get your head around, and then you could take advantage of it in cool and clever ways, like with Carnivorous Cube without needing to jump through a lot of hoops to pull it off.It's a different deck.That was just three Void Walkers stacked on top of each other for three times the cost.Yeah, I think so.Yeah, there's not a lot you can change on that. We talked about if it needed to be one less or one more mana, but in the end, the mana costs worked out just right. The fact that it was a huge demon was important to enable the other cards in the expansion, I think it does a good job of doing that. We wanted to do it in kind of a defensive way, and it certainly is like the king of all defensive cards, and then the flavour throwback of, oh yeah, these are the three little Void Walkers and of course they make the Voidlord and they are wearing a big trench coat. When you break the trench coat, they all start running around.I like that piece of art too. That's an internal artist.Having powerful defensive options was important to us. That's one of the things that Kobolds & Catacombs has a fair number of.It was at zero mana at one point. We axed that though.Yeah. It was at zero mana at one point. The idea is… gaining life is something Warlocks want to do, but sacrificing your own creatures is also something that's very flavourful for Warlocks, so the two combine pretty well together. We already had Sacrificial Pact as a starting point that we thought about and talked about. We liked the idea of it only working on your own minions. It feels a lot more like a reasonable design. You don't randomly kill your opponent's huge demon with it or their Jaraxxus. So we thought that design worked a lot better, and it's kind of a skill testing card too. Sometimes you need the life because you are playing against an aggro deck, but more often than not, exactly how you want to use it is a pretty significant decision to make.And you have to wait one more turn. Do you want play your 2/2 demon on five, or do you want to wait until six and sacrifice it right away?That card's been floating around for a while actually. So, in One Night in Karazhan, we had Moat Lurker, which was “destroy anybody's minion and then resummon it when it dies,” and one of the most fun things with that card was when you got to use it on your own things, and so, we wanted to make a card ever since Karazhan that could take advantage of the cool things that Moat Lurker could do without [the same downsides]. One of the reasons we had to cost Moat Lurker so high was, it could destroy your opponent's minion and then you Shadowstep it back, and they don't get it back. So if we could get rid of that, the power inherent in that, we could make the card better at killing your own stuff, and having that fun Deathrattle game plan.And, so that's where Carnivorous Cube came in. I don't remember how much the numbers changed, but the spirit of it – “destroy your own minion, Deathrattle, get back two copies of it,” was basically the same for a long time. We knew that card was powerful, and it's also very fun, and like Mike has said, very skill-testing.Carnivorous Cube is a card we play tested a lot, and the more we played it, the more we were like - oh wow, this has a lot of potential. Not just in this set, where it has a lot of potential, but even with future cards, or in Wild with Sylvanas or something... all the different things you can do with it, and just the stats, and the power that you get for it - especially if you’re hitting a good Deathrattle minion - is very, very high, so we think this card will not just see play when we ship it, but also for a long time after that.Yeah, and people have certainly played with it enough to find – “hey, how can I use Carnivorous Cube to do as much damage as possible in one turn,” and that's certainly where it escalated today and that's certainly the obvious way to go and something we think about a lot, like, “hey we are putting out this card that looks pretty safe, but what if people wanted to do 30 face damage in one turn with it, what would they do?” That's where they always end up.Doomguard’s an obvious choice. We also tested it in Hunter because there is some big charge minions, and Recruit, Deathrattle type stuff. King Krush was coming out and hitting people in the face.We played a bunch of it in Druid too. It's less of an OTK deck and more of a - I generate a large board with Hadronox - or something.I think we're seeing a little bit of the generate a large board Quest Druid combo decks getting created too. Those are very challenging to play and really cool to watch. They do some awesome stuff when they go off. It's nice to see when Quest decks, which have been around for almost a year, come out and do some really cool stuff, and people start using different Quests in different ways.Yeah. I've even seen Quest Rogue, and I saw StanCifka playing a new version of Quest Mage, with giants as the win condition. All those Quests being used in different ways in this last month or so have been really cool.It was always going be a demon thing. So, Skull of the Man'ari is an artifact weapon from Legion, from World of Warcraft, and so it's very much tied into demon summoning and that aspect of the Warlock kit, and so we very much wanted to capture that in Hearthstone. I don't remember if there were other versions that we tried. We tried a bunch of numbers with this, whether it's start of turn, end of turn, exactly when you get the demon. But we liked where this was, balance-wise - that it was not super, super expensive so you could play it in the mid-game, and then your opponent had a turn to interact with it before you started getting value from it.No. One of the goals with it was that when you are doing the Recruit demon stuff, sometimes you end up drawing all the demons you want to Recruit, and so if you are playing a bunch of big demons, how can you get them from your hand into play if you can't recruit them anymore? And so, Skull was trying to solve that piece of the puzzle.It's voiced. That's awesome. It talks to you.Skull of the Man'ari is cool because it makes you want to play a lot of big demons, which is a bit different than the Recruit. Recruit you might get away with just playing two or four. With Skull, if you are only playing two then it's not really getting any value, so it makes the decks a little bit different. When a new big demon comes out, Skull might get more attractive because it’s like, oh, now there's eight big demons or something like that.There's some good emotional moments with that from both sides, where you're hoping they don't have anything, and there is some good tension there.When Skull of the Man'ari came out, and there were a lot of players speculating about it, one of the most common responses was, “oh this is just dies to Ooze, which everybody is obviously running,” and we haven't really seen that yet. The number of weapons being played is somewhere in the middle, so Ooze is very much a sometimes card. So the legendary weapons actually have been getting to sneak out and see play.If you are scared of Cubelock, and you are scared of Skull, you can tech in Ooze and that's a good amount of counter play that you can have.Sure. Polymorph.And that guys who turns things into squirrelsTinkmaster.Well, in play testing, I was playing Control Priest, and several times, my deck got destroyed, and I was like, oh, this is actually a card. Right? This is not just a fun meme card. This is a real card, and you don't really know that until you’ve play tested that, and I think that's why the community... they saw it initially, and they're like, that's going to take too long. It will never actually happen. And, then, nowadays, people actually are running it. We’ve seen the Hearthstone World Champion decks announced, and there's a couple in there too.The idea was very much top down. We had a story that we wanted to tell, and then we captured it in the card. The story actually changed over the course of the design. Originally, it was going be this sort of noble guy that was guarding the horrible ritual, and so you would defeat the guardian, and then you could actually start going on the ritual, but we thought that was a little bit too complicated. Maybe, if that was in a book, you could tell that story more easily. It was easier to say, this is the evil Warlock, and she's going to set you on this evil path.The first part, I don't know if any numbers changed. I think maybe her cost went up one in final design. She started off as a taunt minion, sort of medium sized. When she died, she started you on the quest - the ritual. You would play each of the seals. There were always five seals. Originally, they actually had five different effects. One of them dealt damage. One of them restored health. There was a summon a demon. A couple of other things. They all did something different. We said, okay, this is way too complex. Let's find the simple version. What's the cool part of this? The cool part was going on the quest to get the uber demon at the end, and so, we said let's have the demon scale up as you complete the ritual. So, 2/2, 3/3, 4/4, 5/5, 6/6 and then Azari. Azari used to be a 15/15 untargetable.Everybody got to that point and they were like, “oh, that's it?” We're like, but it's 15/15 untargetable, come on guys. They were like, but, we've seen untargetable things before. That's Fairy Dragon. I just went on this whole thing. I was expecting something unique that you’ve never done before. We're like, okay. So, we brainstorm, what are horrible, unique things that we could do to your opponent if you had to spend 40 mana on it. And, so, this is what we came up with. It was “destroy your opponent's deck.” We showed that to some people, and other teams from around the Hearthstone team, and they said, “oh my god, that's amazing. Of course, I want to do that!”That was kind of how it went, and we finally show that at BlizzCon, onstage, as part of the panel. People loved it. People were out of their minds with, “oh my god. You get to destroy your opponent's deck. That's insane!” So, I really like Rin. She's fantastic. The animation for Azari is, I think, one of the best in the set, one of the best in the game.I feel like the Warlock cards are seeing the most impact in general from the set, because there are so many cool, different things going on. Gnomeferatu is another good example of a Warlock card that got a lot of mixed reception, and some people were like, “oh, that's amazing. That's for sure going see tournament play.” Other people were like, “I'll eat my hat if that sees tournament play.” So, that one got, maybe, the most exaggerated responses in both directions. There are four of them in the World Championships, maybe six of them in the World Championships, so check that out, and maybe someone will eat their hat.We'll see. One of the pitches for King Togwaggle at some point, not the collectible card, the mission one, was disenchant a card in your opponent's hand.Well, it sounds insane until you realise it’s in the Dungeon Run, and so it's not actually from their collection. It's just from their dungeon deck, but it was still a funny line of text to be able to put somewhere.We have a lot of people talking about Corridor Creeper. I think there's some valid points of course. We certainly have some data about it, too. Feelings are important to us. Data is important to us. Obviously, the Warlock and Priest decks that we're seeing are not running them, but most of the other decks are. It's one of the cards that raises a red flag.Yeah. Whenever a card can go down to zero cost, it has a lot of potential, and this is one example of those. There's many.A small amount, but not a lot. That was a card that stayed very similar throughout the entire process.My general philosophy is, if it's a week before a tournament, like it's a week before Worlds, you don't want to change stuff, but in general, the point of Hearthstone is to be fun and have fun playing it. So, when I can help that be true, I'm a fan. At the same time though, there is the opposite side of the spectrum, which is you log in and you just finished crafting your deck, and suddenly your deck is no longer viable. It feels terrible. So, we’ve got to find a balance in between making people sad and making people happy, and that's always a trick because there is very little way to know exactly how many people are going to be sad because you made their deck, which they just... they love, or they play every day, or they just crafted, you ruin it, they'll be sad. Hopefully, we can find the right balance in Hearthstone.The big spell theme is something that Mages are doing very much, and some of the [other] classes do a little bit. There's a couple of neutral cards that play into it. We wanted to capture that feeling of - there's really powerful magic in the Kobold dungeon, in the Catacombs, and so, to capture that, we said, what sells powerful magic as a fantasy? And big spells make a lot of sense. Big spells capture the fantasy of powerful magic, and so, we wanted to do that, and Arcane Tyrant is a natural thing. I'm casting big spells. Probably that's a sweeper. Maybe it's something like Ultimate Infestation. What do I want after that? Well, I want to be able to get some of these cards out of my hand. I want to be able to establish some board presence. Arcane Tyrant was a pretty natural fit for that.I'm not even sure the numbers changed on that. I think that was basically identical. 4/4 is about the right size for free, or very cheap minions, sort of in that 4/4 range if you worked for them, so this was about right… and you have to have spent a bunch of mana before you can play this, right? You have to spend at least five mana on a spell, so there is some amount of balance there as well.One of the things you'll see is - decks that are pretty solidified and doing pretty well, don't get as many new cards that are viable for them. The Highlander Priest deck, for example, got maybe one card this expansion while the big demon Warlock deck got a bunch of cards because it is a whole new deck. You'll see that the big spell Mage deck got a bunch of cards because it's a whole new deck type. That's something we do intentionally, if the deck exists and it's pretty good, we give it just like zero, one card, and if the deck is brand new, we give it a bunch of cards so that it will exist and has a chance to be competitive if people figure out a good way to use it.Yeah, so we tried a bunch of different sweeper effects in Priest in the past. Less, sort of, in live and more internally... a couple of years ago, we were trying out a card that was, “shuffle all minions into your deck,” and that was pretty brutal. It meant that Priests tended to just play the fatigue game, so you would shuffle four or five minions into your deck, now you have four or five cards more than your opponent. You would just play defence for the entire game, and it was kind of miserable. It was really powerful, even at 10 mana, and it meant games tended to drag on forever, and your win condition was stealing all of your opponent's stuff, which felt kind of bad for them.So, we said, what if we flip that on its head, and instead we said - you can play this sweeper, it's really powerful, but it turns off fatigue as a win condition. You're going to shuffle extra cards into your opponent's deck, and that's where Psychic Scream came from, is - let's shuffle all the cards into your opponent deck, and now you need to have a powerful win condition on your own so you can beat them before you go into fatigue because now their deck is bigger than yours.So, Priests right now have a powerful win condition, Anduin's great, so we are seeing that in Highlander Priest, Big Priest as well. There's win conditions there. As long as the Priest is playing a win condition, you can take advantage of Psychic Scream, which is a pretty interesting place for a sweeper to be. It's a little bit different than sweepers have been historically.Yep. It can also be beneficial too, depending on what you are doing. If your game plan was that the game was going go to fatigue, or somewhere close, then, you might not be able to play Psychic Scream as the Priest because you'll end up losing because you give them five or six more turns.A lot of play testing.You have to think about a lot of things… we have other, similar cards, right. In Warlock, we have a similar effect for eight mana, and so we think about that - does that have downside or upside compared to this card? How much is that played in tournament level decks over the last four years of data that we have, and where do we want this positioned, how fun is it? The play testing for the card was actually called Run Away, which is very much a word that you would expect Kobolds to use when they're in dungeons and seeing crazy monsters running around. In the end, I think it's a very powerful card which will give Priests a way to turn games around where they're losing and they are no longer losing. I like swing cards like that, especially when they are double-sided AoE, cause then it doesn't change things from they're winning, to they're winning more. Like they spend their whole turn, and your opponent gets to play minions first again.A lot of minion-based Priests are showing up. There are like four or five Priest archetypes right now that are seeing play, and that's really cool, and the minion-heavy ones don't run this spell, the various dragon ones, and...Big spell Priests.Big spell Priests don't run it even though it's a big spell, a relatively big spell. Two or three different Dragon Priests. So that's cool. I like that. In the right deck, with Big Priest, Big Minion Priest, they have to fit 25 spells in so for them this is a great card.I like it because it plays a lot differently than some of the other Priest decks. A lot of people enjoy playing a sort of spell-heavy control Priest, and this is sort of a unique version of that. I think, with all decks, if a deck shows up too much and you lose to it too much, or a deck has too high a win rate, you can get tired of it. We have to be careful to not give it too many more cards, but right now, it's a pretty fun deck to play, and has a pretty medium win rate, which is perfect. I think, obviously, some people don't like getting all their minions removed for eight turns, and that sort of feeling of like - wow he keeps killing all my stuff, can be a pretty negative feeling, but I personally think it's a really cool deck.Yeah, I think Big Priest is a really cool deck. It's fun to play. It's interesting to play against. There's certain removal spells that you have to be able to answer. There's certain minions that you have to be able to answer. It's a deck that has... some games are going to play out very differently than others. Sometimes you are going to have to play out your minions, at eight or nine mana because that's what your minions cost. Other times, you're going to be able to get them out a little bit earlier with “summon a 5/5 copy of a minion from your deck.” So, there's a lot of interesting decisions that you make in that deck as well, with Shadow Visions and with trying to predict what things are going to summon. There's some interesting stuff going on with that deck.It's also interesting in that it's a deck that's going to change meaningfully in rotation. It's going to lose several cards that are very powerful in that deck, things like Barnes, so we'll have to see how it evolves over the next year or so.Depends on what makes you feel bad. Some people really don't like having their minions killed over and over again, like Mike said, in which case some of the removal spells might be the most feel bad ones. Barnes is certainly a card that has powerful emotions associated with it, when you play Barnes on turn four, you feel really excited. When your opponent plays Barnes on turn four, it's a point of stress. And some decks are better at dealing with a turn four Barnes than others are, and so Barnes is very much a card that if you build your deck in a particular way, it has a huge impact. It is a card that drives you to build your deck in a very particular way, and so, that's a cool thing. I'm glad that Barnes is able to enable decks like this.Sonya is awesome. I really love that design. That went through a ton of iteration. We tried a bunch of different things to try and capture what... We had the name super early, Sonya Shadowdancer. What does that mean? Is that a stealth minion that does cool things with stealth? Is that a card that plays with Secrets? We knew we were having Secrets in Rogue. We tried a bunch of different designs for her, and then very, very late, in final design, one of the final designers pitched this one when we didn't really like the other designs that we had, and we loved it. I think this is a fantastic design where you can do all kinds of different cool things. You mentioned Quest Rogue, you can try out some stuff. Tempo Rogue is cool, if you are playing a Deathrattle Rogue deck. There's just a ton of different things you can do with Sonya that are fun and interesting and feel Rogue-y.I just love giving Rogue cards that we don't really know what they're going do or how they're going to get used, but we know people who love Rogue, and love doing shenanigans and tricks with those cards will figure something cool out, and we'll let them figure it out, and hopefully it's not broken. We'll just keep giving them tools to do cool stuff and let them have fun.Yeah, I think so.We were guessing at this, but we always know that we can miss, plus or minus one, so I wouldn't be hugely surprised if there was something really dangerous and powerful going on. It's nice that we sort of hit it at just the right level where they’re seeing play and people are having fun with them, and building around them, and somehow, they are just the right balance level. With new expansion releases, we can spike it up or down a little bit. There will be rotation first and then there will be new cards, so whenever a Rogue is able to buff their weapon in any way, it will be very significant for them and that is kind of cool.They were hand in hand.We tried a lot of different cards for the Rogue legendary Weapon, because we knew we wanted that one to be particularly cool. Rogues do weapon stuff. Their hero power’s a weapon, so how do we make something that's cool and that they’re interested in playing despite the fact that they have this on demand weapon. Once we got to Kingsbane, it didn't change very much. We tried other things that were completely different, but once we got to Kingsbane, it didn't change very much… we tried it a little bit bigger, but having it smaller made the buffing matter more.Being able to put it out at one mana meant like, it'll feel really good, and giving it three durability meant even just the Deadly Poison on it would make you feel pretty good about it, because then it's kind of a one mana 3/3 weapon. Once we realised three durability is important, and getting it out for one mana each time is important, we play tested that and it felt like, hey this will probably work. Who knows what those Rogue players are going figure out with their recursion tricks, but let's try it.We had the idea that, in spirit, you would be using two weapons somehow. We were trying to make that work, one weapon in each hand. And, that was kind of a cool Rogue-like thing, but we couldn't pull it off exactly in a way that we were super happy with.We tried a version where you would pick the card you would draw for the rest of the game, so as long as this weapon was out, you would always draw the same card over and over. It was like “Battlecry: discover a card, everything you draw is a copy of that.”You could get rid of it by using your hero power, if you didn't like it, but otherwise maybe you were just drawing preps for a while, or Eviscerates or whatever it was.And your opponent could Ooze your weapon, because the weapon was the reason you were drawing that, so you could either attack with your weapon to destroy it, or your opponent could Ooze it, but in the meantime, you are just drawing the card you discovered.You actually felt like a dungeon boss while you were doing it, because you were just doing this one very, very powerful thing. We tried that out in Warrior at some point. I think one of the first games we ever played with it, my opponent had Grom, so she just played Grom every turn for the rest of the game, which was surprisingly interesting. In another she got Upgrade. She played Upgrade every turn for the rest of the game. That was also surprisingly interesting.It was pretty fun.Yeah, it's cool, and sometimes you just discover three and all three of the cards are like, “oh I don't want to be drawing these for the rest of the game.”Yeah, and then you just replace it with your hero power.Mm-hmm (affirmative).I think Valeera is in a cool place. A lot of people experimented with her in different decks. She actually does get played in one of the Kingsbane decks with very good effect, so I think there's space for her. I thought she was going be a bit more powerful than she ended up, but she’s certainly within plus or minus one in that sort of area, which is sort of what we expect. I wouldn't be surprised if in the future, like after rotation maybe, people find a way to use her more. The challenge of Rogue is that they really don't have much defence, so, when they start using the Life Steal poison, and getting a bunch of life back that way, they live longer, and they are able to cast nine mana and hero cards, so I think that makes a difference.The Secrets help with that a little bit too. We're seeing Sudden Betrayal seeing some play, Evasion seeing some play, in that type of defensive deck.I think it's cool. I think it's a great class fantasy for them.I think people are experimenting a lot with different Shaman decks that are pretty cool. There was a deck from Jambre, pretty recently, that did a lot of really neat evolve stuff. Savjz just played some more aggressive evolving type lists, so there are definitely people experimenting with some cool Shaman decks. I think Shaman has a lot of very powerful cards right now, even Guild Recruiter pulling out Flamewreathed Faceless is very powerful. Their Spellstone is powerful, though maybe there’s not a deck for it. There's a lot of cool stuff to experiment with, so I think Shaman has a lot of tools, and I think there is stuff that people are trying out right now, which is cool, and I think in the future, they have powerful things that they can try out and experiment with as well.Yeah. We played a lot of Unstable Evolution. It was very much a card that we were worried about.Very fun card. Sometimes when we were play testing, we got one of the two minions that reduces the mana cost of your spells by one, and that of course worried us, but-You get [Archmage] Antonidas, and then-Antonidas, and then infinite Fireballs, but lots of other crazy things happened. So, we played it a lot, but if you are spending a bunch of mana doing this, like you spend six mana to evolve your board, say, that's something that maybe you previously could have done for one mana with just Evolve, so in the sort of tempo of it, maybe you could have just Bloodlusted instead. In the end we were like, yes, it's scary. It's really cool. It's fun. It has a fun push your luck mechanism - if you want to keep evolving this guy who's already pretty good, or do you want to stop and quit while you're ahead and not risk turning him into a 1/1, all that was really cool gameplay. There is a lot of play skill, and I think, yeah, like the deck that Jambre’s been playing with two Unstable Evolutions is a good example of how to play it and get some value out of it. It might be a card that sees a lot more play after rotation as well.It was cool. It’s cool in Unstable Evolution. It's a lot of fun to see how many times you are supposed to cast it, to figure out exactly what you are supposed to do with that card.The card text changed some over time. The actual gameplay of it stayed the same. We just iterated on the wording some, to try to get the right thing. It's a fairly complicated concept to try to get across, and so, I'm pretty happy with the wording we ended finding for it. The numbers on it, we tried a couple of different things but we came back around to this, as we were trying to figure out what the right balance points for it were.Sure... I think King Togwaggle evolved a bunch as time went on. It started off as just “Battlecry: swap decks with your opponent,” and it turns out we really couldn't do that. There were some very much feel bad moments, and so we fixed it: “Battlecry and Deathrattle: swap decks with your opponent,” but then somebody Shadowstepped him and didn't let the other guy kill him, so we couldn't do that either. That lasted exactly one game, and involved Hemet [Jungle Hunter] as well. It didn't survive past that.Then we tried a number of different things in that direction of “while this guy is in play, you each draw from your opponent's deck.” That was pretty cool. There was some cool stuff in there. Then, we had this one: “Give your opponent a spell to swap back.” We tried a certain number of cards from each deck, so like swap five cards from your deck for five cards from their deck, or 10. We tried a couple of different things in that space. That was interesting. Meant if you didn't have any cards in your deck, it didn't help you at all. So, it wasn't a huge problem with people playing Hemet, blowing up their deck, and then playing this, which was a problem with some of the other designs.So, that was one that we iterated on a bunch, and I think it ends up in a cool place where it tells this really cool story about King Togwaggle who steals stuff, but as long as you pay him enough mana, he'll give it back. It's cool.I don't know if that's a card that we want to be super competitive.Yes, it is not high enough, and that is intentional. It tended to be pretty safe. You've got to do some real shenanigans to take your opponent's deck from them, because, yeah, we wanted it to be fun and maybe someone who wants to play off-meta decks can figure something out for it. That's basically how it ended up which is perfect. If you wanted it, there'll be a deck with a slightly better version of it, but hopefully, it will never be, oh, the way you play your deck is you destroy your opponent's deck every game.And you play Coldlight [Oracle]s so they burn the King's Ransom and yeah, we play tested that a fair amount, actually. Just in case.One of the cards that we changed a lot, to move on slightly, was the Diamond Spellstone in Priest. For a while we had a big minion Priest deck where the only big minions were Malygos and Velen, and we had some ways to basically do a 30 damage Smite or Mind Blast and OTK with it. So, we looked through all the cards that were involved in that, and we changed a couple of them so that it was harder to do, and the Diamond Spellstone is one, and the other one was the Twilight's Call.Twilight's Call only brings back Deathrattle minions now. Which made it stronger in some ways, if you are doing the Deathrattle thing, then it's not going bring back your other minions, which is great for the Deathrattle deck, but it also doesn't bring back Malygos or Velen anymore, so it's good for not having that OTK deck, and the Spellstone changed to be “different [minions].”Right, so now you can't get back three Velens or three Malygos’. You have to get back three different minions, but yeah, Twilight's Call would give you back a 1/1 Malygos and a 1/1 Velen before. Just all the things you could do with that.I think there are certainly cards that don't have a home yet. The Shaman Spellstone is very strong. I think the 2/2 in Warrior that gains a lot of armour is very powerful, just on its face value, but like a lot of things, it's very contextual. There are cards that are stronger in some meta games and weaker in other meta games. We see that with Y'shaarj, who saw very little play when Whispers of the Old Gods came out, and now sees a fair amount of play in a couple of different decks, and so I think there are definitely cards that, as the meta game shifts, we will definitely see things change.

Cam Shea is senior editor in IGN's Sydney office and tries to spend as much time as possible in Japan. He's on Twitter