Some are very very cool indeed. We salute you, Sir Finley!

The resulting Tavern Brawl.

“ Whenever we put something on the top of your deck, you just know that you’re not going to get saved next turn. Or maybe you do you know... but it takes all the drama and excitement out of that draw...

Tracking has a similar mechanic.

Comes in and out of the meta.

Tomb Spider is significantly better for Hunters or Druids as they have good class beasts.

Four classes got their own Discover cards.

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Of the 45 cards introduced with The League of Explorers, nine have Discover, and they run the gamut, allowing players to Discover both minions and spells, to synergise with beasts and mechs, and even to Discover cards of a particular cost.I caught up with Hearthstone's Senior Game Designer Ben Brode and Associate Designer Dean Ayala to chat about the origins of Discover and the thinking behind the mechanic.It started out a really long time ago, probably even before The Grand Tournament. I can’t remember exactly when, but [Senior Game Designer] Mike Donais pitched this idea of choosing a random card where you had a lot of agency in which of the three random cards you got to choose. It seemed super fun, so we kind of mulled it around for a long time until we started design on League of Explorers, and we tried it on that set.Do you know what came first? The Tavern Brawl or the League of Explorers cards, Dean?The League of Explorers cards.Yeah, so we tried it out there and we liked where that was heading so we also experimented with it a bunch of different ways for Tavern Brawl, because we were also working on our first round of Tavern Brawls at the same time.Mostly just through playtesting. We tried putting it on top of your deck or shuffling it into your deck. Turns out that putting it on top of your deck was a real problem [in combination with] anything that dealt with the ordering of the cards in your deck. So many of the cards shuffled your deck – Forgotten Torch shuffles the Roaring Torch into your deck and that ruined any kind of treasure that went to the top of your deck.Whereas now you have hope throughout your entire opponent’s turn that you might draw that AoE or that big kill spell or something to save you from this bad position. So whenever we put something on the top of your deck, you just know that you’re not going to get saved next turn. Or maybe you do you know that you’re going to get saved, but it takes all the drama and excitement out of that draw, so putting these on the top of the deck just didn’t work.Shuffling them in made them feel like... sometimes they mattered, sometimes they didn’t matter, so it was hard to value that type of effect. All that was left, really, was either putting them into your hand or putting them directly into play, or things like that, where you actually got to experience – immediately – the result of the choice that you made.Discover, also, it’s new, right? Discovering one of three random cards is something new to a lot of our players. Whereas, putting them on the top of your deck is something that we hadn’t really done before. If we have the choice, if we’re already doing something new and we can do it in a really exciting way that players already know about - because Tracking already used it in a somewhat similar way. You’re not drawing random cards, but you kind of know how that spell works - so I think trying that version of it and it worked and it was really fun, I think that solidified it – at least for me – as, oh yeah, we should definitely do it this way and not try to do too many things all at once in a new mechanic.For us, well, we playtested a lot, and we already kind of know what the value of “draw a card” is, so really, when we were playtesting a lot of Discover cards, we were trying to decide whether or not “draw a card” or “Discover” was better, and most of the time, “Discover” and “draw a card” are relatively similar, so I think that we just looked at past cards and said – what kind of stats work with “draw a card”? A 2/4 on a 4 mana card with “draw a card” is pretty balanced. It doesn’t get played in a tonne of decks, but it’s pretty balanced. So we looked to our past cards and put Discover on cards based on those stats. The fact that we had something so similar balance-wise really helped us determine what the stats for creatures with Discover would be.It was actually pretty late. It was one of the last decisions I think we made with Discover. We playtested a lot of games with Discover and a lot of them were really really cool and I think the reason behind that is pretty specific, actually. One of the really fun parts about Hearthstone for me is, when you’re starting to learn the game, you learn a lot about what other classes have, so on turn nine, you’re worried about Druid playing combo against you, and on turn ten you might be worried about Priest playing Mind Control, or turn eight you might be worried about Tyrion, and so on and so forth.With Discover, when it pulls from the entire card pool, then a lot of our games ended in ways where, like, Druids would be playing Tyrion on turn eight, or, just crazy stuff like that. You could never play around it and it was actually pretty frustrating. So, Discover was already fun enough on its own, and we sort of felt like if you were pulling from your own class and the neutral pool, you can kind of – what could he possibly have picked from that? If he pulled something on turn five and he wasn’t playing it and you’re tracking the card, you can kind of understand what that card could possibly be, but when it’s the entire card pool and all the class cards, it’s really really hard to do that.Getting blown out by a card that you couldn’t predict happening wasn’t as fun. It was really wild and crazy, which is good in some circumstances, but Discover brought enough wild and crazy that we thought that we could just leave it as your own class and the neutral pool.Yeah, when classes start doing things that other classes do, we call that class bleed, because that unique thing that makes a class a certain way is now bleeding over to other classes. And sometimes that’s cool – you get to experiment with different flavours of things, like when a Paladin card pops out of Sneed’s Old Shredder all of sudden, that’s interesting. But it’s the kind of thing that’s good in the right amount, and because Discover was going to be the marquee keyword for League of Explorers, it was going to be on lots of cards, we felt like it was passing that line for us for how frequently that was occurring in games.That was the very last tweak to Discover that we made. It happened, probably, weeks before we locked down the set. It was towards the very end and mostly it’s just a problem with certain Discover cards, there’s so many neutral possibilities and so few class possibilities - it kind of boiled down to the same type of thing we do in the Arena. There’s a lot of neutral cards, there’s less class cards, so in order to give you the feel of your class in Arena we give you a huge boost to the class cards that you see there. We ended up doing the same sort of thing for Discover.They were actually kind of independent. We were excited about Discover and we thought it was worth playtesting, and we were excited about a couple of different ideas for the adventure, and we built out several different imaginary storylines and potential bosses you could fight until the team really got centred around the League of Explorers, and by that point we were like yeah, the League of Explorers seems really fun and treasure seems like a really cool new mechanic. We just kind of smashed them together and it turned out that they felt very natural together.Even when we were considering calling it Treasure, exploring and treasure feel like a natural fit. Discovering new things and exploring, those are natural fits together also. We also were - when we were trying to figure out how to template the cards and name it, we looked at it through the lens of League of Explorers as well, once we knew that those were two things we were going to focus on.As the game continues to grow, we feel a little bit more open to adding new keywords to the game. When the game was brand new we really wanted to keep ourselves in check as far as the number of keywords we added and how quickly we added them, so there weren’t any new keywords in Naxxramas, for example. But now, if there’s an awesome keyword we’re excited about, we explore it and we think about putting it in there. We were so excited about the Discover mechanic. It felt like a really cool way to brand the set, sort of, as a mechanical binding theme for it. So that’s where we went with that.

Aggro Shaman puts Sir Finley to good use.

Yeah, I mean, we have cards that draw you cards, but traditionally those have actually been a little bit dangerous for us - it enables you to set up combinations of cards that are fine when they’re at a certain level of consistency, but if you become too consistent, maybe those are a little bit dangerous. And also the game I think gets less fun when every game feels sort of the same. Card draw means you see more of your deck each game, and so the games start feeling more similar.Getting a random card, through things like Unstable Portal, those still give you lots of options for what cards you’re playing, but they’re making games more different, which means every game you’re learning about new board states and trying to figure out how to solve new problems, so I think that makes Hearthstone more fun.And this [Discover] is kind of the blend of both of them, where you are still getting cards that are maybe new to you and you have to figure out how to use the right way, but they’re not making the games less varied. And you still feel like you have a lot of control in how the games are playing out, they don’t feel too random, so it’s a really good spot between too consistent – and you’re seeing the same thing over and over again, and too random – where you feel like you don’t have any control over it. They occupy this middle space, which I think is pretty awesome.