At PAX East 2018 we sat down with Blizzard’s own Ben Brode to discuss Hearthstone’s upcoming new expansion, The Witchwood.

Hearthstone‘s spooky first expansion of the Year of the Raven is right around the corner! The Witchwood expansion will introduce 135 new cards and a new Monster Hunt single-player adventure for players to enjoy starting this Thursday, April 12. At PAX East 2018, we had the chance to sit down with Hearthstone‘s Ben Brode to discuss some of the game’s upcoming cards and play a friendly 1v1 game to see these new mechanics in action.

Ben Brode is the Game Director for Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft and is involved in all aspects of the design of the game. Brode is also known for being active on social media and is generally very open about discussing the game with the community. Many consider him the public face of Blizzard’s Hearthstone team, and his charisma in-person showed us why.

Upon arrival, I was met with a hearty “Well Met!” from Brode, a signature of both Brode and Hearthstone‘s Paladin Hero. Over the next 40 or so minutes, we had the chance to talk about what to expect from the upcoming The Witchwood expansion and other design philosophies and decisions the team makes when printing new card sets.

After showing me a slideshow of some of the previously unrevealed cards, Brode was eager to challenge me to a one-on-one battle while I continued asking questions about The Witchwood. Joking that some of my inquiries might land me the infamous “Blizzard Jail,” Ben laughingly assured me that that the Blizzard Jail only has one cell and it was reserved for Hearthstone streamer Disguised Toast (and that of course, no such thing really exists, and he was happy to answer my questions).

App Trigger: One thing I noticed was that last year in all of the expansions, each class had a new mechanic: There were Quests, then Death Knights, then legendary weapons. I don’t see that this expansion, is that the case?

Ben Brode: No you’re right, that is definitely the case. We were kind of going for a cycle of themes there, so we did the quest, we did the death knights, we did the weapons. And then we decided not to do that for The Witchwood on purpose. And I think that’s something we might go back to at some point, but for The Witchwood the mechanics that we were excited about didn’t wind up in that way elegantly. And I just don’t think its required to carry a set that way.

AT: I saw that Shaman got a new hero card in Hagatha, and you confirmed on Twitter that they were the only class that was going to get [a new hero card].

Brode: Yes.

AT: Would you ever consider adding a new Quest [card] in the game for only one class? What’s your general stance on the fact that a bunch of mechanics gets added to the game and as sets cycle out, some [mechanics] go away, and some don’t? I’m curious how much you take that into consideration when making a new set.

Brode: We have some general philosophy about when things should come back and when they shouldn’t. There’s a theoretical cap on the number of keywords you want in the game, right? Like at some point every card is its own keyword if we just keep adding and never taking away. So a part of the Standard rotation’s goal is to have some kind of limit on the total memorization bar you have to pass before you can effectively play the game.

Obviously in Wild that gets blown out of the water, but in Standard, you want to keep it at some number. I don’t know if we are at that number yet, we’ve been kind of going up and down. We added things like Poisonous, Lifesteal, probably Rush that we are planning on being more evergreen. The commonality with all of those is that they are really great combat keywords at making combat more interesting, and those are the categories of keywords we are most excited about being evergreen. Things like Inspire are not combat keywords, and so they are just less likely for us to make those evergreen.

I do think that in Hearthstone it’s important to keep trying fresh, new exciting things, and if you’ve seen it already, it’s just less likely to be fresh, new, and exciting. And so I think we would have to have a fresh, exciting spin on something or have it been long enough since the last time so that it feels nostalgic and fresh and exciting again. Quest are examples of…if we did them we would have to have like a fresh new exciting way.

Now Hero Cards are a little bit different in that they help us do something that nothing else can do, which is that they feel like a tier above even legendary, they are even more exciting than that. So we wanted to focus the set around this one character Hagatha. And we tried this in the past where we had Thermaplugg from Goblins vs. Gnomes, he was like the biggest, baddest boss in that set but he got way outshone by Dr. Boom, and that became the big character of that set. So we wanted to focus the story around a single character, and we felt like Hero Cards really helped us do that. And so this is who you should be paying attention to, this is our big important guy. And Hero Cards do something no other keyword or effect has been able to do for us.