History of a HEX card – Unleashing the Beast

Corey Burkhart here! Today I’m going to run you through the history, design, and development of one of my favorite cards in Herofall, Unleash the Beast! Each card in HEX can go through many iterations before we finally find the correct one to not only suit the needs of the set we’re making, but also provide that artistic balance of simple, fun, and deep design that players are going to love. Some cards will be put into a set early on and exist in the ecosystem of the set for months without change. Others, like our card today, went through many changes until we finally got to a spot we truly loved. Let’s take a look at that journey.

When design started on Herofall, we knew we were going to focus on the conflict between the Ardent and the Underworld. Since most of the Ardent races touched Diamond as a shard mechanically while most of the Underworld races touched Blood, it was a natural fit to put the two warring parties based in those shards. As more of the set got built out, we were looking for mini themes within the set that would play well. One of the themes we liked was caring about 1 cost cards. Both Valors and Dreadlings were one costs that helped focus on the warring of the factions. With this in mind Ryan Sutherland, lead designer of Herofall, made a number of rares for our early Herofall drafts and sealeds. One of the more exciting rares was named Cycle of Rebirth.

This card was pretty cool for a number of reasons. At the time, we were exploring some design space with gems that gave +1 cost to the cards they were socketed in. This allowed you to build decks with many more cards of the same cost, ensuring that Cycle of Rebirth could get them out of your crypt. Cycle of Rebirth was a rather interesting rare, but it proved to do a ton more than we expected. Herofall introduced a number of keywords that augment your individual cards by granting them additional powers or increasing their attack and defense. Being able to bring those troops back made this card was very deadly in both Valor decks that wanted to build up on one giant troop and with Scrounge cards that add powers to themselves the more times you Scrounged.

The card was fairly fun, but its versatility had us move it to 3+X cost fairly quickly on in the development cycle. The card was much better in Valor decks because the outputs on some Valorous troops would also grant additional powers while continually growing your troops with the Valor trait. On the flip side, Scrounge cards illuminated something we weren’t really pleased with in terms of the design. The fact that Scrounge asked you to void troops from your crypt was in conflict with resurrection strategies like those enabled by Cycle of Rebirth. We weren’t comfortable printing designs that would care about which troops you left in your crypt at low rarity because it made decision points that weren’t the most exciting for players. Your crypt, though ripe for exploration at a later date, wasn’t the highlight for this set. We wanted Herofall to be about the epic war happening right there on the battlefield. As such, we determined games were much less fun if they were decisions about “Which troop should I leave in my crypt for a card like Call the Grave or Rotten Rancor.” Instead, we wanted players interacting with the game from the standpoint of how best to allocate their Valors, summon up their Dreadlings, and by representing the Ardent/Underworld conflict through play. We didn’t want players to feel like they had to micromanage their crypts.

Once we removed all Scrounge cards at low rarity that cared strongly about specific cards in the crypt, we noticed that Cycle of Rebirth was one of the few remaining leftovers with that type of effect. As such, Ryan completely re-designed the Cycle of Rebirth into:

This rare replaced Cycle of Rebirth and, at first, it was a little bit of a head scratcher. We had been playing around with some cards in Herofall that would have multiple bolded numbers of them. As such, most of us quickly were able to identify what was going on with the card. But when we showed it to other people, it soon became clear that there were potential issues with presentation. We quelled most of these presentation problems (like, “What happens when another power with a number gets added to Wildlife”), but in the end determined that we could make this design much more elegant and user friendly.

While the designers and developers noodled through the designs in Herofall for the exact right textboxes they wanted, our thematic team began its post design pass. At the conclusion of that meeting, art was ordered for Herofall! In R&D we needed to find the finishing touches for each card in the set. After more review, we determined simplifying the whole recipe of Wildlife would make the card much more appealing and much more exciting. It got renamed to Unleash the Beast for all the wildlife that Wild magic can contain.

This is an image of the card shortly after engineering and some QA testing. We did a ton of work on the Assault mechanic. We learned from our experiences with the Escalation keyword in Shards of Fate that it wasn’t always clear to players that the numbers on the card were bolded. We wanted to make this clear to players. Plus, there were some cards in Herofall that really wanted multiple numbers to be bolded. If any of them remained in the same random design space of Wildlife, we would really need some UI help to communicate that to our users. Thankfully, our engineering team did a fantastic job of working with us on these problems and the UI on these ended up pretty solid.

At that point, we were pretty happy with Herofall. We’d gotten through QA testing and the R&D + QA teams were playing a ton of matches of constructed, draft, and sealed in the client. But as we played, we found an annoying problem. Random designs like Unleash the Beast would fail to make a troop on some specific outcomes. For example, there aren’t yet any Wild troops that cost 11 or more and it wasn’t completely unreasonable to attack 10 or more times.

Ben Stoll and Ryan Sutherland had been pitching a suggestion for these random designs for a nearly a year now, and oddly enough lead engineer Chris Woods also came and presented to us nearly the exact same solution to the problem. The idea was to create a card in HEX that represents a failed random effect. If you fail to create a random artifact or troop, instead you will create a That Which Does Not Exist.

The idea is that instead of getting nothing, we want players have the best experience. If you’re going to put one of these insanely fun random designs in your deck, you shouldn’t be punished because you made it outside of the range of random creation. Instead we should reward you with a cool card that can make memorable stories.

If you create a That Which Does Not Exist, it gets +cost equal to the cost of the troop or artifact you were looking for. Thus, if we played an Unleash the Beast and the cost of the troop we would create would be 12, we’d get a 12 cost That Which Does Not Exist. Therefore, you’d get a 12 cost 12 attack, 12 defense troop for your 3 resources! This design didn’t happen until very late in the process, but we’re exceptionally pleased with the outcome.

We’re really excited for Herofall, and especially for Assault and Unleash the Beast. Let us know your thoughts about Unleash the Beast in the forums, and I’ll be back soon with another History of a HEX cards for Herofall!

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