1) The Initial Sketch

Not a bad first pass.

2) Centred and Carved

Five wins to get a prize, eh?

3) Pub Poster and Boxing Bell

No specified number of wins needed on this one.

4) The Chalkboard

Parties ARE rad. This concept even included losses, Arena-style.

Chalk and Cork II: Electric Boogaloo

This Brawl concept was used in a reworked format. Now bring on Murlocs!

His comments are below each image...This was [drawn by] Derek Sakamoto, our user interface designer… We have a user interface in Hearthstone that is very realistic and very physical, it’s not a window through which you view the world, like WoW or a lot of other games, the user interface is the whole game, so because of that, Derek gets involved at a much earlier stage and throughout more of the process than maybe he would on another game.Derek and I worked very closely together on a lot of the initial stuff with the box, the trays, how all the user interface works together and the rest of the art team has grown into working with Derek just as much on stuff.When we were getting to Tavern Brawl, we knew it was going to be a different way to play the game and we felt the user interface should represent that. It should really carry the feeling that you’re in a different mode now, you’re going to have to think a little differently about this game. It hasn’t changed so much that you shouldn’t know what you’re doing, but you should definitely shift gears to come into here.As we started talking about it, we immediately wanted to lay things out in a way that’s different, that feels a little bit more down the line if you will, from what it is in the normal game. We started to think about the idea of being fun, more charming - even more than normal Hearthstone - which is where this Murloc one comes in. Maybe it’s just really silly?It might be. There are people that adore this piece. I know Becca Abel on our team would give money to see this get in because she adores this character, but you can see already how the user interface is starting to lay out and look, and even how the set of colour palettes is very different than the rest of the game. As we started looking at it though, it felt like it’s kind of toy-like, it’s almost starting to become a little bit Fischer Price-y, very chubby, very irreverent in terms of all the carvings and things.Here you can start to see we’re saying – what if we split it out again and put a lot of visual information to get your interest on the left side and then more numeric-based information on the right? Maybe brawl is a boxing bell, instead of a button? Maybe the wins are changing so often that, in this case they’re like pull cards that you’re pulling off a calendar? We knew we wanted to count the wins but we also knew that at the same time we didn’t want to tie it to something like Ranked Play. It’s meant to be taken in a light-hearted way. We don’t want to attach so many valuable levels to it that ‘oh my god I have to win every game!’ – no, you don’t! Just have fun playing it. So that’s where win streak came in. You’ll see ultimately where we ended up… it ends up being ‘number of wins this time around’.No, I think the idea was that maybe you could see what the last one was. I think that’s what it was. You could go back and see what last week’s was and maybe vaguely there was a chance you could see what the next one was. But at the end of the day what we felt – the reason that you can only see the one that’s current – is it doesn’t help you, it doesn’t help you feel great if you missed last week’s Tavern Brawl and it was a really cool one, and we’re like ‘oh, by the way, you missed it.’So this was the first version where we started hitting on going back to our initial idea of – we’re in a pub. We’re playing this game in a tavern, what’s one of the visual accoutrements that show up in taverns all the time? Dart boards, chalkboards for specials of the day. As we started talking about it, it was like – chalkboard! That’s awesome, because it immediately starts to lend to the idea that it’s not permanent. Your average tavern brawl can go away in five days, so it’s easily erasable.The right side we started saying – maybe that’s cork? Maybe it’s like a tack board, and you can take things off and tack up new things, daily or weekly as the case may be. Everything gets written up there in a very non-permanent manner and we get to be sketchy and loose and fun about it, because of the media – chalk and cork.This is basically where we are today, so you’ve got your cork for your dartboard/pub specials, you’ve got the chalk at top, and we play to that – the animations at the beginning of every [brawl] erases and a new one comes drawing in really quickly, like ‘hey, this is what it is for now – it’s temporary.’ Wins stayed at number of wins and win streak, and then you’ve got your deck on the right hand side when it’s appropriate to show it. Sometimes, when there’s no deck involved – if you think of the Nefarian versus Ragnaros battle - then there’s nothing over there and it’s just like ‘let’s go play’.

Cam Shea is senior editor in IGN's Australian office.