“ At one point Grim Patron was a 4/2 because we wanted him not to get charge and... multiply a little bit less, but then he wasn’t quite good enough.

Quite a sandwich.

My liege.

Replacing your hero is definitely cool. There's a big difference between 8 health and 15 though.

Boom is played in almost every deck.

C'mon Sacrifical Pact!

There you are!

Two heads, two cards.

The dragonflight curses from the boss battle.

The smaller adventures are a little bit harder to do, because since you’re getting so few of the cards each one has to be more relevant, change the meta more, be more exciting when you first see it, and fit into the class flavour more. They have to hit all of the goals of the big set but to do so with one quarter as many cards. So we have almost no cards that are unplayable in a 30 card set, or even below average. Most of them are above average, so they have a huge impact. It’s almost like taking the 30 best cards from a big set and getting rid of the 90 worst cards. So yeah, it’s almost just as hard to make 30 cards as 120 when you look at it that way.We playtested Grim Patron a lot, but he actually started off pretty close to how he ended up. At one point Grim Patron was a 4/2 because we wanted him not to get charge and because we wanted him to multiply a little bit less, but then he wasn’t quite good enough. He didn’t have all those cool combos. We love it when there’s a whole new deck type. We like it when people can feel like ‘wow, Hearthstone’s a really rich game and it has some really weird ways of building decks and playing games that feel different from a typical battle of creatures,’ so we like to have a mix. And this definitely did all that, delivered on that. And one of the things we’ve been doing with Warrior for a while is their theme of damaging their own guys and being able to deal one damage to a bunch of things, so putting another card into that theme pushed it over the edge, especially a card as influential and powerful as Grim Patron.Yeah, sometimes we’ll put cards out there that have a lot of potential and people will experiment with and maybe they’ll find something awesome, but maybe if they don’t find something awesome now, they will in a month or in six months when there’s more cards out. That happened with a lot of cards that combo with Grim Patron. And that’s really good to have in this environment. We want to make sure that not everything’s obvious right away, not everything’s discovered right away. It’s kind of a sleeper card. Who knows, maybe in a month or six months it’ll be a card that’s used a lot.There are classes that counter other classes and I think to some extent that’s true. Maybe Paladin can put in specific cards that are good against Grim Patron if it expects a lot of it, but if you just build the obvious Paladin deck it doesn’t naturally have those cards, so they actually have to make an effort. But I think it’s okay to have certain cards counter other cards. When GvG came out we saw Paladin a lot for the first month and people were like ‘please nerf Paladin, Paladin’s the best, Paladin’s too strong’ and suddenly, no one’s playing Paladin, so maybe the meta will just shift by itself again. Maybe Grim Patron will be a thing of the past in a month or maybe it’ll just be a small percentage, we don’t know.This card goes into the same kind of boat of - hey we want to blow your mind, this is what some of the cards do... The dream is huge with this guy! Sometimes he just ends up being a six mana 5/5, and that’s kind of why he’s close to balanced. He has a downside too. If your hand’s empty he’s just trash – a below average card. So I think we’ll keep doing cards that blow your mind, but we have to be really careful with those. Those are actually the cards that we playtest the most. We want to make sure that if they’re pushing the edge in an unhealthy or dangerous direction we actually have a really good idea of what the decks are going to look like after that card comes out and after two months of iteration and that’s hard to do with the amount of time we playtest and the amount of people we have versus the millions of people in the real world who are playtesting the same card.I think it started off as something completely different, but we got to the current design pretty quickly, and we playtested a lot in its current design and thought maybe we’d have to change it, but in the end we were like – okay, it looks really scary but it’s actually just very good, not broken.There was a bug at one point where it also reduced the cost of all the cards in your deck by one. [Laughs]I wanted Ragnaros to be one of the cards you got from the adventure, but we already have Ragnaros. So the next direction I went was – how do we somehow get a version of Ragnaros into the adventure that isn’t just having the same card again? The first version of Majordomo I tried was a lot more complicated. It was something like ‘Battlecry: summon a Sulfuras’ and the Sulfuras had a deathrattle power that says ‘if it has zero durability then summon a Ragnaros’. So it was a chain of things you had to do. You had to play Majordomo then you had to attack with Sulfuras a number of times then you had a Ragnaros. It was a lot more complicated than we wanted it to be.But then we had the idea – what if it just makes your hero Ragnaros? You can play as Ragnaros. We love that with Jaraxxus and we thought that maybe it was time to do another hero replacement effect. And so we just made it a lot simpler. 'Deathrattle: turn your hero into Ragnaros'. We felt like that was a more fun way to get Ragnaros into the game. It was really appropriate from the flavour of the World of Warcraft side as well.This card has tonnes of flavour and it tells a cool story. It sort of captures the MMO idea of Ragnaros coming into play and you get to be Ragnaros, which is one of the coolest things in the game. But! It does some things to the game that aren’t super healthy. It gives you this repeatable eight damage for two mana you can use over and over, so if that gets on the board in front of you and sticks for a while it’s a really bad play experience.We do this [kind of effect] every once in a while and when we do we have to compensate by reducing the power level a little bit, because when you’re ahead you stay ahead, and in addition, it also uses up the Jaraxxus space. Jaraxxus is a super awesome card. It changes everything. When we do more cards like that we can’t make one that’s a neutral own that space by itself.And the third thing is, it’s a neutral card, and our neutral cards that aren’t specific 'build arounds', like Mimiron’s Head or something, we have to be really careful with those or they’ll just show up in every deck. Dr. Boom and Loatheb and Emperor Thaurissan are good counter-examples that prove the problem. So this guy, because of all the challenges, we had to make him a lower power level. So he still has a great story, but his power level is lower than some other, more situational cards.I think it’s awesome. It’s definitely a different type of thing you get to do when you’re designing for a nine mana minion rather than, you know, a two or three mana minion. You can do a crazy effect, you can have something really exciting happen, and Nefarian is really exciting.I was playing today and I was doomed unless I played Nefarian and got an Execute. It was my only out. And I played him and got two Executes, and I was like - boo-ya! I figured out a way that I could still win this game, so a broad knowledge of the game and what’s possible plays into what makes Nefarian cool and how you can use him smartly. But yeah, in general the space of what’s possible up in those high mana costs is really different, and you can do some crazier stuff.He’s definitely a little worse against Shaman because Shamans’ average spell is at a lower power level than some other class' average spell. He’s a little bit better against Mages, and he’s also a little better against Warlocks because of Sacrificial Pact.I knew that I wanted to do a class call mechanic for Nefarian, but I don’t know if there were any versions prior to the one that published. Do you remember, Mike?We knew right away it was going to be some kind of class thing. I don’t know if we had it at exactly two spells though. Two class spells. I don’t think it was. I think we iterated a bit.I think it was like ‘at the start of the turn get a spell from your opponent’s class’ or something like that.Hmm… it was, like, a year ago! [Laughs]Chromaggus was one of the hardest legendaries to design, actually. First I tried to do things that were more related to the fight in Blackrock, so things that had to do with giving the debuff cards – the dragonflight curses. I wanted to do a lot with that so I tried several designs that related to that mechanic, but we couldn’t find anything that we could latch on to and say – this is a good design that feels like Chromaggus – so I just wrote a list of the most exciting, crazy legendary card designs I could come up with. And this one was on that list. And because Chromaggus has two heads I was like – yeah, maybe it kind of works! [Laughs] But this was definitely not a design that came out of thinking about ‘what is Chromaggus? What is the essence of him?’We wanted to have some big dragons that weren’t nine [mana]. There’s a big difference between eight and nine, so we put him in at eight pretty early on, and he stayed like that for a long time. He didn’t change too much. We tried him with a bit more stats and a bit less stats but for the most part he didn’t really change. We like him a lot. He combos with any kind of card draw you’re running, like Power Word: Shield or Acolyte of Pain. If you have one in play when you play him you can get the card draw right away. And just by himself, if your opponent doesn’t deal with him, he’s really cool…Really early on he worked more like the normal and heroic Chromaggus encounters where you had to get these cards out of your hand that sucked but that’s not very fun. We wanted to playtest that more and find the most fun versions of that [mechanic], and we ended up with this Chromaggus design.