Now that Hearthstone's

“ "We like having two legendary minions in each class [per set]... it means that your legendaries can push in different directions." - Peter Whalen

Two of the "monster" cards that made the final set.

Wait, what??! Tess - you've changed.

Worth building a deck around.

Genn and Baku - powerful out of the gate.

“ "We use data of what players are actually doing, but in terms of predictive data, it's mostly based on feel." - Dean Ayala

A Hero card version!

The ultimate turn two play.

These cards emerged from the mist and have mostly disappeared again.

“ "Murkspark Eel is a good example of [us saying] we think Even Shaman's pretty close, let's give it another little bit of power so that maybe it gets there." - Peter Whalen

Even and Odd support cards.

An apt name given the effect.

An interesting alternate version.

The final, bad-ass version of Tess.

Rogues - always taking your stuff.

A useful spy.

A little too much RNG?

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Very versatile.

PLEASE NOTE: This interview was conducted a few weeks ago but I decided to hold it until after the post-nerf meta settled, and until after E3 had come and gone.Sure. We like having two legendary minions in each class [per set]. It's really nice because it means that your legendaries can push in different directions. You get a lot of cards that you're excited about and if you're a Rogue player, you have… two different options rather than just one, for what your legendary is. It's much healthier than having say, 13 neutral legendaries - having a lot of neutral legendaries - because those tend to either be very strong and go in all of the decks or they tend to be very weak. You end up with cards like Dr. Boom who, as Dean's Twitter has told us , is the strongest card in the game, or you end up with cards that really don't see a lot of play. With five neutral legendaries, it's much easier to have cards that are narrow and only go in some decks or that do a really cool extreme thing and you can try it in a bunch of different places.And so when we started on Witchwood design, we said, “All right, we want one Worgen or one Gilneas member and one monster.” So one member of the town and one member of the woods. And so we had exactly that and the woods ones, all of the monsters cared about your deck in some ways so they upgraded your deck, either they shuffled something in to make it better or they transformed your cards to be cooler like Prince Liam, or they buffed your cards like Lady in White.There were a number of different designs in that space but as we explored more, we just said, “The most important thing is having fun cards. So let's just make the two best legendary designs we can in each class.” And sometimes that meant keeping the deck-affecting monster type card and sometimes it just meant, let's make something new and awesome.Yeah. It's a lot more subtle than that and I think it would have been difficult to communicate, though I think a lot of our players, especially our more engaged players, would have caught on to it.Sure. So one of the ones I just mentioned was the Hag. It was a Baba Yaga reference. And it was when she died, it shuffled her heart into your deck, and then when you drew the heart, it resummoned Baba Yaga, the Crone. That was actually Glinda's old design. It was the Warlock legendary.I think Hagatha at some point made your minions in your deck stronger. She gave them +1/+1, or +2/+2. I think that it might just have been odd minions in your deck that got +2/+2 but that was a while ago.That was like predating the Baku, Genn [designs].Yeah that was well before Baku and Genn.All of the sets have a different feel to them. First set, you have a lot of room to explore because so many cards just left the Standard environment. There are fewer dangerous interactions that you have to worry about and so you can think about, okay, what are the kind of scary cards that I'm comfortable doing and trying out for a couple of years and we can do now because whatever cards just went away. So when Radiant Elemental goes away, Priests can do some different stuff in Standard because Radiant Elemental's a really powerful card that shapes what kind of spells you can do. When N'Zoth goes away, there's a different type of deathrattle minion that you can do. Wild, as a whole, is a much safer place for these kinds of interactions. There's just more powerful answers that exist and more powerful proactive strategies you're fighting against. And so in Standard, we have to be much more worried about things like N'Zoth or Radiant Elemental.So yeah, when we have the first set, that's very much the kind of thing we think about. What are the things that we can make now that we couldn't have made a set ago? When you look at something like the last set in the year, one of the things that we think about a lot is, what are the cards that are about to rotate that we'd like to give one last hurrah to? So maybe dragons were a cool thing or when quests are about to rotate - are there things we can do to make quests cooler for this last set before they rotate because we want to give them another chance? We want to put things in that are exciting with them. It's also a little bit less risky because they'll only be powerful in Standard for four months, after which they'll rotate to Wild which is again, a much, much safer place to have strong interactions.It’s the kind of thing that we did putting Drakonid Operative in Mean Streets of Gadgetzan. A lot of the dragons are rotating from BRM so we're able to make a really strong card like Drakonid Operative and let it play out until rotation happens. And I think it turned out, with that particular card, that we just really liked dragons in Priest and sort of just kept building on it over time. We probably wouldn't make a card like Drakonid Operative for dragons, if dragons are already pretty powerful as the first set in the year because it's hanging out for a really, really long time, but in cases like that, we can take little bit more risk with the decks that are already powerful in the last set of the year. Whereas the first set of the year, we do a lot of experimentation with a bunch of different archetypes.There's some worry about that. We tend to always make cool, powerful things. One of the things we'll do with new archetypes is have a little bit of a lighter touch in the first set of the year because we have so much time to do cool things with them in the future. Odd and Even has really taken off because Genn and Baku are awesome but that's one of those places where if it hadn't quite worked out, we could put a couple powerful odd cost or even cost cards in a class in the future and let Genn or Baku shine in that deck.From a game balance perspective, doing things on the rotation set is always a bit more difficult. Just because when you think of things for the second set and the third set of the year, you have a pretty good idea of what the meta game is going to be like. A whole new set is going to come in but there's still all these powerful decks from the previous set. You can look at the meta report and maybe there's the top five decks and you say to yourself, “Well, maybe we don't really give a bunch of awesome pieces to these decks that are already very powerful.” But when rotation happens, it's much harder to do because you have no idea what the top five decks are really going to be. I think for, in cases where you had a deck like Cubelock that didn't lose a lot of pieces, those are the rare cases where rotation happens and you know something's going to be pretty powerful still. But for the most part, we have to do a lot of predicting of the meta game on our own versus using data to figure a lot of that out.Only in the sense that we play a lot - a lot of games. I think of Dean a little bit as just a Hearthstone robot and so that's kind of like automation. He just plays infinite games of Hearthstone to figure out what the decks are and what's fair and not fair.It's actually a pretty big misconception that a lot of people have - it surprised me a little bit - but there's not really a process that says we put all the cards into a machine and it spits out the meta or anything even really close to that. We use data of what players are actually doing, but in terms of predictive data, it's mostly based on feel. A lot of times, even if you could predict a lot of the powerful things in the meta, the things that people choose to play are a lot different than that a lot of times. Decks like Shudderwock or Mill Rogue or even early Jade Druid. People just like playing those decks and the win rate wasn't really that high but they just had a really good time playing them. Because of that, it warps the meta in such a way that I think data wouldn't really be able to show you.There's a lot of classes that can do Odd and Even things. Some of them are very powerful right now and then there's potential for other classes to do Odd and Even things in the future.Luckily for balance, if an Odd and Even deck is really powerful, then the answer for us on final design isn't super difficult. It's like, maybe you just don't give the Even deck a very powerful even card.It's dangerous when they're both really good. Then you don’t have a lot of options.(Laughs) That's the problem, yeah. But it doesn't come up too often. I think we adjusted a lot of the problems, the issues we were having with Paladin, so we're going to monitor that going forward.Genn actually was in Old Gods a long, long time ago with a totally different design. That was way back when Heroes of the Storm was recording him and putting him in Heroes and so we piggybacked on that voice session and recorded some lines and did some cool stuff with him and had a cool design that was very similar to the Worgen mechanic that we ended up doing, where he transformed in your hand every turn. I think it went between a charge guy and a taunt guy, with different stats. That was really cool a long time ago.So when we made the Gilneas set, of course we're going to do Genn. Genn is this awesome Worgen character and so we had to find a sweet design for him. At some point, Genn and Baku, who wasn't Baku, she was Szikei - Szikei the Serpent were the two neutral legendaries. They were both Hero cards that cared about your deck being Odd and Even. They were super powerful when you played them and they had cool Hero Powers that were related to it. Szikei, her power was to give minions in your deck +1/+1, I think.Seems good!It was pretty good. I don’t remember [exactly] anymore, but they were very much in that space - powerful Hero cards with cool Hero Powers that cared about your deck being Odd or Even for their battlecries.The problem we ran into was the Reno issue of when you draw your cool card, your deck is awesome. When you don't draw your cool card, you don't have any even cost stuff in your deck. Your deck has a pretty bad curve. So we wanted to change it to smooth it out a little bit and so the pitch was - start of your game, something cool happens - and one of our designers said, “Okay, what's the thing that you always have? You always have your Hero Power so let’s just make it good to fill out your curve. So if you have a bunch of odd cost cards, let's make your Hero Power extra good and if you have a bunch of even cost cards, let's make your Hero Power odd cost so you can fill out your curve and make it work.” And that ended up being perfect. That worked out super well.It was actually sort of shocking because that's basically how it happened. We had that conversation and we're like, “Wow, that makes total sense.” But what are the chances that we'll just do that and then all of them will just be, okay? Like, none of them will be too powerful or whatever and I think when you have cards like Call to Arms that may have been slightly too powerful but it wasn't really the even or odd cost Hero Power I think. It just sort of all worked out which is really awesome I think.When we were talking about doing the Odd and Even decks originally, at least the start of it for me was when we were talking about Reno from the really positive angle which was - you build a deck with no duplicates, that's a really interesting challenge that I think a lot of people tried a lot of different decks. There was some negative, like Peter was saying, when you draw it or you don't draw it, so alleviating that by doing the start of the game trigger solved that for us, but when we first started talking about it, it's like how can we do this problem solving before the game even starts in deck building? How can we make you think about your collection a little bit differently when you're building this deck? When people were talking about that, doing a deck with all Odd costs or all Even cost cards, I thought was really interesting.There's pros and cons to having incredibly powerful swingy cards. They're interesting in the sense that when you draw them, your games are a little bit different than when you don't. That you have a meaningful change from this game to the next game because I got my super swingy powerful card. Reno was like that. Keleseth is like that. There's some downside too, that when you get them, your deck is much more powerful than other times. So your opponent knows that as well.I think there's great stuff about it, it's just something we need to do in moderation. I think Keleseth was cool, Reno was cool. Doing Baku and Genn I think is also a great version of that.That's something that we try to be really careful with. I don't think any of us really want games to feel like you absolutely won or lost based on the fact that you drew this card at this time or not at this time. I think Wild Growth is sort of the softer example. Sometimes you draw Wild Growth on turn 17. It doesn't feel that bad, the card still does something, and I think when your opponent plays a Wild Growth against you on turn two, you don't automatically feel like you lost the game.Having cards that are good at different times in the game, I think that's sort of an unavoidable [thing] - that's just going to happen. It’s like, you're going to want your two drop on turn two. It just can't feel like the entire outcome of the game was based on whether or not you drew this card.So those situations will continue to come up. We just have to make it feel like the rest of the game still really matters and this powerful thing that happens isn't the only thing that mattered.Slowing them down too, with some amount of upside. Keleseth happening on turn two is very different than Keleseth happening on turn eight.Yep, that's true.It means that your strategy is much more consistent. You have something that you can rely on. There is a little bit of a downside in that, you use your Hero Power a lot. So sometimes you’ll do that instead of playing cards. And so that means that your turns are a little bit more similar, your games are a little bit more similar. That's something of a con but I think the trade-offs here are absolutely worth it. You get cool deck building like Dean said, and you get some very new decks and you're seeing a lot of cards that I personally haven't seen since classic, like Amani Berserker, Raid Leader, Stormwind Champion. That's pretty cool.Yeah, I think if people are using the Hero Power every turn and they're not playing as many new cards, there's some downside with that, but only if everyone is playing… Even and Odd cost decks… When you have just a few of these archetypes that are Odd and Even cost decks, well then you get in sort of a situation where when you see them, it actually changes things in a way where you're able to sort of predict what your opponent is going to do and is not going to do and it actually makes things a lot more interesting. But as long as the population size doesn't go totally out of control and it's just one of the types of the decks in the meta and not the only types of deck in the meta, then I think it's generally upside for us.The goal with those was to shore up either the side that we thought was going to be weaker or the side that we thought - this is pretty close, let's help it out a little bit. Murkspark Eel is a good example of [us saying] we think Even Shaman's pretty close, let's give it another little bit of power so that maybe it gets there.Yeah, we certainly thought about like, “Oh, is this something that we should do in all nine classes?” But we never got as far as designing all of those cards. We just thought like, “Okay, four is enough to make the Even and Odd thing feel like it's more of a piece of the set.” And when you're seeing cards that have a lot of the same text on them in terms of thematics, I think it makes the set come together a little bit more like when you're reading, “Oh, the Even and Odd thing. That's pretty cool.”And Peter's right with Murkspark Eel, and the Black Cat - I think the Odd Mage is pretty cool. Maybe if that gets more pieces, then it might actually show up in the meta game a little more than it has been lately which is essentially none. But Even Shaman is really awesome and the Priest one as well. I think there's some room there. It just needs some more support I think. Like what we were talking about earlier, Witchwood is the first set of the year so we're going to have a lot of time to add onto those things even if they didn't hit right away.I don't think there's any plans to do more Odd and Even call-outs but as Dean mentioned earlier, of course we're going to print Odd and Even cost cards.(Laughs) It would be pretty hard to avoid that. But we can be very deliberate, right? Make Mage cards that are good in the Odd deck or what version of the Odd deck exists, or Mage cards that are good in the Even deck or things that play particularly well with that deck’s strengths.Burgle Rogue is super fun. Burgling cards is great. Getting cards from your opponent’s class, generating random stuff, it's a lot of fun and there's a subset of players that think that's basically the most fun you can have in Hearthstone so we like catering to fun decks. When people enjoy something we want to put more cards out there for it. Tess Greymane used to be one of these monster cards that made your deck better. So she was “Battlecry: shuffle every legendary from your opponent’s class into your deck.”That was it. So you got some crazy stuff in there. You were getting a Quest, you were getting a Hero card, you were getting everything.In Wild, you got a lot of cards.In Wild, it was awesome. But it turns out there's not much power in that. Making your deck a little better doesn't actually make the Burgle Rogue super powerful. We wanted to say, “What does the Burgle Rogue actually need?” You're generating a lot of cards. We had Pick Pocket at that point which can generate you tons and tons of card advantage. You've got Blink Fox. So you actually just want tempo for your burgle payout cards and so Tess was this giant tempo generator at the end of the game that does something really powerful and really crazy with your burgle cards.I don't think we thought it was going to be insanely high.Especially for the first set of the year, just because the Burgle deck, there's some potential for frustration since a lot of times the things that you will burgle are - you don't know exactly what's going to happen there. I think that it can feel a little bit like, “Oh, well, my opponent got a bunch of 10 drops and then resummoned them.” I think that we went intentionally a little bit light on power level in The Witchwood just knowing that - I think you'd be surprised - that Burgle is actually a lot of peoples’ favourite deck. [It’s their] favourite archetype to play and they love it so we really wanted to play into that but certainly, in a slightly careful way, at least for the first set in the year, to see if we wanted to build on it a little bit more.I think that there probably is room to build on it a little bit more in future sets. We like to take some time off when we hit one theme really hard and then next set maybe we don't hit it super hard again. But I think that that deck's really cool. A lot of people had a lot of fun playing it. It's certainly not unplayable. A lot of people experimented with it on day one. I just remember watching streams right when The Witchwood came out. There was a lot of people playing Tess!There was a lot of Tess!It was one of the first things that people gravitate towards just because it's really fun. There is some risk with Tess just because we were worried about, when you play Tess there's just a ton of stats on the board. That was something that we were mildly concerned about, but it turns out, you put in a lot of work and we had some similarities to cards like N'Zoth where you try to build around them and then you play it and you get a bunch of stats on the board. N'Zoth is really great, I think that was one of the more positive cards for us in the last [few] years that we've made. So we decided to go with Tess as she is and there's lots of different options - you can play Face Collector and try to get class legendaries. How ham do you want to go, I think is the question and I think for most people the answer is - pretty ham. (Laughs)I mean, sure. That's the question at least from a balance perspective with every card. For this one, the biggest challenge was burgle decks are really fun, they're a lot of people's favourite decks. What's the kind of card that we can make that results in the most fun for those players that works with that? Like Peter was saying, something that's not generating a bunch of resources is probably good because there's enough resource generation in that deck. They need something to get paid for all the work that they're doing along the way. To not only synergise with the deck, and did the thing that we needed to do if you're the Burgle deck, but also was just super fun to play.I don't remember when Cutlass came in. Somewhere around the same time as Tess. Both as - we want payout cards for the Burgle deck. Blink Fox was a little bit later because we needed another card to do some burgling with. Once you have Cutlass and Tess, and we liked both of those, we wanted to get a little bit more burgle in.Blink Fox had a slightly different design along the road. It was something like, for every burgle card that you played, get Lifesteal or Taunt or various different keywords.(Laughs) Yeah I remember that one!We really tried to make it work - the text box was always like five or six lines and it looked pretty ugly and we tried to cut some keywords off of it to make it work but we never really got there. Then we sort of sat in a meeting one day and it was like “what if we just [made it] Battlecry: burgle a card,” and everyone's like “oh wow, we should just do that.”We tried to get a couple of designs to work for Blink Fox but ended up pretty happy with the one that ended up [in the game]. People even play Blink Fox in stuff like Tempo Rogue now so I think it's not only doing some of the Burgle Rogue work, it's doing work outside that deck as well and sort of making an impact in multiple Rogue decks.This is an ancient card. We've had this in sets for a while, just kind of waiting for exactly the right time to do it. Shifter Zerus is fun. We've done a couple of variants on Shifter Zerus over the past few years and so this is another type of Shifter Zerus that we wanted to try out. It was a natural fit for Priest. We put it in the set, I think on day one, literally the first day of initial design and it never moved. Nothing about it except maybe the name, which might also have been Chameleos on day one.It might have been, yeah. We always do these set reviews in various different groups. People that work in other game teams like World of Warcraft and Overwatch and you show them the whole set and they like some stuff, they don't like some stuff, and then we talk about it, and you take the feedback and make some improvements. Chameleos is always one of those cards that you show the whole group and everyone sort of looks at it and they're like, “Oh is that - then I just know everything about their deck! That's so cool! I love that effect. Is that busted?”You have different players from different play levels talking about it and I think a lot of the really high level players thought it was very interesting and I think a lot of the mid-level players thought it was even more powerful than it was. It just generated a lot of excitement no matter what group that we showed it too. It's always nice to have a legendary in a set when you're like, “Okay, this one's done, we don't have to worry about this one anymore.” Chameleos was one of the cards for Witchwood.It's also one of my favourite golden effects of all time. It's really cool.I think it's mostly kind of a fun card. There's not a ton of build-around in Chameleos, right, so there's danger when you make a card that's sort of generically powerful. Something like, “Oh, this goes in the most competitive decks.” There's just danger in that just because it goes in all Priest decks and then it makes all Priest decks less exciting because now they have 29 cards instead of 30, because you have to have a Chameleos or whatever.But that said, it's certainly not weak. I think that in some meta games where things slow down a little bit - I could definitely see a meta game where there's a lot of heavy control archetypes and then you just sit on Chameleos until you get one of your opponent’s win conditions of some kind. Basically we're always talking about Glinda [Crowskin]... doing these super busted things with either cards in Wild or cards in development. So maybe there's some super crazy cards like Glinda and so on, that you really want to hit and you just kind of wait until you get one of those. Or you just wait for your opponent’s N'Zoth or, all these win condition cards that control decks play. And you can just sit on it without feeling like you have to sacrifice and play a bunch of stuff against aggressive decks. There's certainly room for Chameleos to shine in that kind of deck.Yeah, so Toki's awesome. She's a mission character that we came up with that's unique to The Witchwood and so, when we developed her, we started playing her missions, we said, “She needs an amazingly cool design.” We actually have a mailing list for people at Blizzard who want to contribute to Team 5 card design. And so we sent out an email to that list saying, “We've got a time traveller. Send us your coolest time traveling pitches, and we'll think about them and we'll pick one of them and put it in the set.” And so, the one that we actually shipped is from that list and I just wanted to call out a couple of the other ones that we thought about from those pitches. There were some crazy cards.There were some spicy ones, yeah.“Battlecry: un-nerf all of the cards in your hand.”“Battlecry: for the rest of the game, mana crystals go backwards, so every turn, you lose a mana crystal.”That one was probably not that fun. But you know, it's pretty cool. “Battlecry: your next spell costs 0, you pay for it next turn.” It's a cool time traveling vibe to it that I really liked.“Battlecry: discover a card from the future,” and then we would pick cards from future sets in development or future themes we thought we might hit at some point down the line. Or like just one-off crazy keyword mechanics that we would just make up for this and then maybe put in a set someday down the line. And you would just get to pick one of them and put it in your hand.(Laughs)(Laughs) There was so much debate about that. I was like, “Well, if we say a card from the future, we can't ever actually print it because eventually it won't be the future anymore.” So they just have to be made up.There was some crazy stuff with that one. I think that's super exciting and maybe someday when we have another time traveller, maybe we'll print Infinite Toki at some point and she can do that. We’ve got two Tokis out there. And it's just like future version of Toki. It just makes sense. So I think there's a lot of cool stuff that Toki can do. There was just a bunch of crazy stuff and it's fun when we get to use that list because there's a bunch of people who don't design cards every day and they just have these crazy wild ideas that really can inspire you to do amazing things.Oh, there must have been. I think we sent out the werewolf mechanic because there are a bunch of different Worgen-type things that we tried. The one that we ended up settling on was pretty simple because we wanted it to be a small piece of the set - there was a lot of other stuff going on, but people pitched - Witching Hour at one point was “transform all your Worgen in play.” It was Full Moon and… after you played a couple of human-form Worgen, all the rest of your Worgen would transform but Witching Hour could let you do it earlier. That was called Full Moon.There was another Worgen mechanic where you would shuffle the Worgen copy back into your deck. It would be the human version and then it would shuffle into the deck. There was the Worgen version where it would be day and then next turn it'd be night and then day and then night rather than having them transform in your hand. So sometimes you would draw them in day form and sometimes you would draw them in night form. A bunch of different things in that space that got pitched.Nightmare Amalgam we've had in a bunch of different sets. We tried it out in Karazhan when we were doing Curator but it just wasn't exactly right for that time so we got to bring it back here. It was actually a five mana 5/6 for a long time and then changed to a three mana 3/4 basically because of cards like Finja and Murloc Knight in Wild. Having it in the random Murloc pool was just a little bit too swingy. It was just so much bigger than some of the other cards in that space. So it was a much healthier card if it could play nice with the Murloc cards and also just coming out early was interesting for some of the other decks. It was interesting that it's a dragon for dragon decks, and it's a little bit smaller so you can play it on curve.Yeah, that card's really cool. It's one of those things that's interesting and that you come back to every time we release a new expansion.Yeah, that card's pretty cool. At one point it was this chained monster so it would attack automatically whenever you played a rush minion. So whenever you play a rush minion, it would attack a random enemy.Then when we had the mission content, and Darius and his cannon were so cool, we really wanted to get the cannon into the collectible set. So we were trying to figure out - what does it mean to have a cannon or in this case a gunspire which is just a way cooler word. How does that work as a collectible card? And so this is what it was. Whenever somebody woke it up or interacted with it, it would fire out a cannon ball. And so it worked out pretty well. It's very much a top down design so from the flavour we wanted to have a card, and that's the kind of card that's a good example of first set mechanics. We wanted to go a little bit soft on the enraged, damage my own guy stuff with the potential that sometime in the future we could play it up a little bit more. Try out other things that play well with that or with some of the cards from Knights of the Frozen Throne that trigger on hurting your own minions.When you have stuff like C'Thun or Jade, where it's very specific to that set, you have to go a little bit harder on those mechanics just because it's unlikely that we'll bring them back two or three sets later, whereas for Warrior, Whirlwind style effects are so core to that class’ theme that we're certainly going to keep doing them over time. So Gunspire definitely has some potential to get a lot better over the course of its life in Standard.

Cam Shea is Editor in Chief for IGN's Australian content team and - four years on - still isn't very good at Hearthstone. He's on Twitter