This is the second part of a two-part Q&A. To check out the first part, click here.

With Hearthstone's newest expansion, Journey to Un'Goro, set to come out in April, theScore esports spoke with Hearthstone Game Director Ben Brode about format balance, the community response to Mean Streets of Gadgetzan and why it's so difficult to create new cards for Shaman.

RELATED: Journey to Un'Goro card tracker

When creating a set, how do you guys balance between Standard, Wild and Arena?

Well, some of those tasks are easier than others. So, for example, some of the rarities make a bigger difference in Arena than in Standard or Wild. So, we just have to focus more on the types of cards that are gonna have fun play experiences in Arena. We have to look at for the most part the Commons and the Rares, but the Epics and Legendaries show up more infrequently and so their impact on balance in the Arena is a little bit smaller. There's kind of a couple big drivers on what rarity a card ends up. One of them is Arena, probably the biggest is Arena. And also we tend to make cards that are a little bit weirder, a little bit more complex, with higher rarities. Also, if there's cards that only work when you're gonna put one in your deck, example is Patches, we just don't want two of those in your deck. So we make those Legendaries and that's another pressure we have on rarity. So that's how we look at Arena.

For Wild and Standard, Wild has a different threshold of power, right? With so many cards available there, the expectation is that the decks will be better. They will be more powerful because you just have more cards competing for spots in your deck. And so, often, there's a card or an archetype or combination of cards that would be too good for Standard that actually doesn't even get above water in Wild. An example is Dr. Boom. Was very powerful in Standard, but when you have cards that are just good on rate, which is a strong, powerful card, in a world where you have incredible synergies between the massive number of cards that exist, those cards tend not to be exponential in their power growth in that kind of format, right?

Because they don't combine with other cards the same way that other cards might. So anyway, we look at Standard most because if things are hopefully balanced for Standard — that's a little bit more challenging a task 'cause that bar is lower there for basically a Wild power level — but we're also looking for combos that would just completely break Wild, right? We don't want players winning on Turn 1 in Wild consistently or anything like that, so that's the kind of thing that we just want to make sure we're not breaking something. If we did for some reason, we would feel comfortable going in and nerfing Wild cards. I think that's also a reasonable option.

When creating cards, how much do you think about how they affect the lengths of games?

It is definitely a consideration and we've had some designs that we felt like were ... here's a good way of putting it, we want cards to kind of push the game towards a conclusion. That doesn't mean necessarily that everybody should have the Hunter Hero Power, but it means that cards like a 15/15 un-targetable Taunt Can't Attack that the game is just gonna end, right? Like, it doesn't help push the game forward, it stalls it out. So that's the kind of design that we tend not to explore too frequently, but we are kind of curious about, "Okay, is this game gonna just recycle Renos for eternity and just not be that interesting." On the bright side, the turn length and game minute length has been consistent throughout Hearthstone's history. It's a little bit slower now than it has been in previous metas, but it's essentially been about the same across — it's been about eight minutes — forever.

How did community feedback on Mean Streets of Gadgetzan affect Journey to Un'Goro?

We are consistently iterating based on feedback. I don't know if this is based off feedback, but one of the things we did pretty late in the process was add Golakka Crawler to the card pool because we were just seeing a lot of Pirates. We knew [we wanted to] nerf Small-Time Buccaneer. But we felt like having that pressure valve would be helpful, so that's an example of a case where we — it's not like we just kind of heads-down, bury your heads in the sand and say, "Okay, these are the cards" irrelevant to how things are going. I mean, another example of this is Mean Streets of Gadgetzan. We went into that expansion knowing that Priest was the weakest class, and we wanted to — in general, we want to make exciting cards for all classes, but it's a little bit of a harder problem when you're looking at Shaman. You're like, "Okay, how do I make exciting cards for this class?" Our goal is not to make Shaman better here, that could make it more stale, right? And I think we made that mistake with One Night in Karazhan. So we're not eager to repeat that. And making powerful, exciting Priest cards, that's a lot easier because there's just a lot more cap room for that class. So, we always are looking at the balance of classes and trying to figure out where we have room to make exciting, meta-changing cards, and the answer is we have a little more room in the classes that are struggling the most going into an expansion.

As the first set of the new Standard year, how was Un'Goro designed to be new player friendly?

We're thinking about the new players consistently. I'm not sure that new expansions are specifically targeted towards new players. We try to push them towards Classic packs. We have a designer who is almost exclusively focused on thinking about new players and making that experience better. Casual win-rates are up by something like 20 percent. Actually a little bit of a problem because new players win so much more in Casual now, that they enter Ranked something like three or four days sooner than they were before because their win-rates were so much higher in Casual. And Ranked, we have a lot of problems there for match-making new players. It's not the right place, Casual is a much better place for players to be matched and get fair matches. But we've been trying to improve the casual match-making experience and other areas of new player focus.

We have, like I said, work to do on the Ranked experience. But for Un'Goro, one of the things we do try to take into account is what are players experiences gonna be when they see these cards for the first time.

We do this kind of test. We try and make sure all the cards are parseable, which means you read the card and know what it does. You may not know what all the Dream cards are for Ysera, but you know that that seems like a good effect and you'd want an extra card in your hand. And we kind of do this test where we just sit people down in a room and we say, "Okay, we're gonna show you all the cards, just let us know how many times it takes you to read it to understand."

And if you read it once and you get it immediately, great. Even if it's a complicated effect, like Shifter Zerus is a pretty complicated card but I think you read it once, maybe twice, and you get it. And if it takes you five times and you still don't know what it does, that's not good for any player. But specifically new players who are trying to decide, you know, a lot of other card games can feel very complicated and that's kind of a stigma we had coming into Hearthstone. So just making sure that players say, "Okay, this is a graspable game." Especially my favorite designs are ones where we get very interesting mechanics or gameplay, it ends up playing very complex, but it's a graspable construct that you can just read and say, "Oh I get it, that's crazy."

What's your personal favorite aspect of Un'Goro?

For me, honestly, I respond very well to the settings that we create. The flavor and vibe of Un'Goro Crater, the primordial landscape, the dinosaurs, the Elementals, the Quests with crazy payoffs, the whole package to me feels ... it sets an expectation for wonder that pays off throughout the card set. So that in general has been my favorite thing about all our expansions.

Today [March 22] is actually the four-year anniversary of when Hearthstone was first revealed to the public. How do you feel about that?

It's pretty insane. Let's see, this is 2017. I started working on Hearthstone in 2008, so it's been almost 9 years for me working on the game. And at the time, four years ago, it had been like five years, almost five years of working on the game and so finally sharing what to me, just felt, "Okay, I think we cracked it. I think we created a card game" — like, we all knew card games were super fun, but it's just always hidden behind this ... y'know, there just hadn't been an online version that had captured players' excitement, so getting to share that finally, was just so exciting for the team and yeah, I can't believe it's been four years. That is shocking.

This is an extremely pedantic question, but why are dinosaurs considered "Beasts" when they're technically reptiles?

I think that's a good question for the World of Warcraft team [laughs]. I mean, you're right, it's kind of a funny thing. It's just kind of when you think about Hunter pets in World of Warcraft, raptors, especially for [the] troll race, are just what you think about. Maybe it's the beasts of burden kind of version of that. These are animals that hunters use to execute their nefarious plans of going Face.

Considering your burgeoning rap career, I have to ask: Biggie or Tupac?

Oh, that's tough man! Both? I guess if I had to choose, maybe Tupac?

Sasha Erfanian is in Chrrrge now. Follow him on Twitter.