Journey to Un’Goro , has introduced a wealth of new ideas and mechanics to the game, and now – more than a month on from launch – we have one of the healthiest metas in a long time, with plenty of diversity and choices for players. I caught up with Team 5 senior designers Peter Whalen and Mike Donais to dig into the design process for the set. (Please note, Mike joins the conversation a short way in, so it’s just Peter to begin with. Also, you can see all the cards in the set here .)

Hearthstone Adapt Options 10 IMAGES

More Elise please!

“ “It was definitely not our goal to have all nine Quests be tier one or tier two. I think that would make the expansion feel too one note…” – Peter Whalen.

The Hunter Quest chain.

“ "I don’t feel like we’ve really captured the spirit of legendary spells yet, but it’s certainly something we can do in the future. Quests don’t feel like they’re just the legendary version of spells, they feel like their own thing." - Peter Whalen.

Hearthstone Journey to UnGoro Quests 20 IMAGES

Tempo Storm's Meta Snapshot list.

Killer art, too.

The original idea for the Warrior Quest.

So, ‘dinosaur Hearthstone set’ has been around for a long time. People have been suggesting that, basically every time we go into a room and say ‘what set should we do next?’ So that idea has been around for ages, and then, shortly after Whispers of the Old Gods launched, we were at the launch party and we were kind of solidifying what the next set was going to be, and that’s when we said – let’s do dinosaurs, let’s do Un’Goro crater for the next expansion. Well, for the next expansion that we’d work on, which was actually a year out!(Laughs) Well, our job, it doesn’t feel like work sometimes. You’re talking about – what would you like to see in Hearthstone?! We want to see dinosaurs! That’s not really working hard. That’s just fun.Adapt’s pretty early. We were actually looking into some of this when we were writing the articles during the launch period leading up to Un’Goro. Adapt was actually one of the first mechanics we had for it, though it started much more complex. There used to be about 20 adaptations, and some of them were minion buffs and some of them were mini-spells that you would cast, like, heal your hero for five or deal one damage to all enemy minions, that kind of thing. We decided that it was simpler just to do the minion buffs and it was a better vibe fit – it made more sense if ‘adaptation’ meant your minion got better.Yeah, for sure. I think in some ways it’s easier. It’s more of a challenge because there’s a lot of weight on this set. You have to have cool themes for the different classes, you have to have all of these new ideas that are coming out, because there’s a lot of focus on this new set, because it’s a bigger part of the meta game, but on the other hand, you’re not constrained as much, because you don’t have some of the powerful cards from a couple of years ago, at least in the Standard environment, that you have to design around. There’s fewer constraints, which makes it a lot of fun to explore what kind of new things we can do. So you definitely need to do these new themes and one of the ways that we did that was with the Quests. It gives us new opportunities for – here are particular decks you can try out – but also just in each of the classes, we had several different themes that you could explore.Not that much, I think on the collectible side it stays pretty much the same. One of the opportunities that having the adventures bundled in with the expansions gives us is it lets us tell more of a story, and it lets us have some more opportunities to express the vibe and the fantasy for each of our expansions. It would have been fun with Un’Goro to do some stories about Elise and her troop in the crater and meeting Hemet or exploring these dinosaurs for the first time, and we see some of that with the cinematic, but by having adventures bundled in with expansions, we’re going to have more opportunities in the future to tell some of those stories.Oh yeah, absolutely. Mean Streets was fantastic. It would have been great if each of the wings was a different boss and you get to see how they interact with their crime family. It would have been really cool.I’m really happy about it. I wish Mike [Donais] were here, because this is really a huge success story for his team. He leads the final design group and they did a phenomenal job on this expansion, I think. There’s a bunch of different things in each of the classes, the power level on them is pretty good, and there’s a bunch of places – one of the stories that I don’t think has been told much is that there’s so many opportunities for some of the weaker cards to be good in the future. There’s a number of the Quests that aren’t tier one right now, but as time goes on, over the next five expansions or so, while they’re still in Standard, there’s opportunities to print more cards that make those Quests better, and that give interesting archetypes in the future that we can build on. And I think that that’s one of the most exciting parts about Un’Goro to me. Yes, the meta game right now is fantastic, the top 16 at Dreamhack [Austin] had, what, 16, 20 different decks? I think that’s fantastic, but also, going forward we’re going to have these opportunities to see some of the lesser played cards played more.A bit of both. So, the Quests are legendaries, and it’s definitely not one of our goals to have all of the main build-arounds in an expansion be legendary - all of the powerful cards. So it was really important to us that the Quests were only a piece of the set, so I think we hit that pretty well. I think there’s two or three tier one, tier two Quests, and there are a couple of others that people are exploring that are a little bit lower tier, but as time goes on, there’s opportunities for some of these Quests to come to the forefront, as we release more cards. Like, if there’s a powerful discard enabler the Warlock deck can become more powerful. If there’s a way to make a bunch of five attack guys, the Druid Quest can become more powerful. I think that’s one of the opportunities that we have here.Yeah, that’s definitely true. I think there’s a balance here between [what] you want when you open a legendary in a pack - that it’s exciting. You don’t want to have too many legendaries where you get it and you’re like ‘oh, I’m just sad’. So we want our legendaries to be things that you look at and you’re like ‘I’m excited about exploring that’, but yeah, there’s the flipside to that that we definitely don’t want all of the competitive decks to be super legendary heavy and super expensive. And I think that’s true right now. There’s decks like Murloc Warlock that are very powerful. There are decks like Mid-range Hunter that play no legendaries, that are very strong, and y’know, tier one, tier two decks, that you can definitely explore and have fun with and win with, while at the same time lots of these legendaries, lots of these Quests are exciting to open, exciting to explore, but didn’t end up at tier one.(Laughs.) Well, before the expansion released a lot of people were really excited about that one, so I actually think that’s done a lot of good things for us.Yeah, I think that’s one of the Quests that – it has another five expansions in Standard, so if there are easier ways to get one-drops into play, if there’s better one-drops to play, and some ways to get more staying power, it could become a much better deck in the future.Right, exactly. That’s absolutely true.Sure, so before TGT even came out one of our designers had sent around some ideas for littler quests, that, maybe they would go on minions, and you know how there’s a flag for Inspire, or a lightning bolt for triggered abilities and a skull for Deathrattle, there would be an exclamation point under some minions, so when you met their quest condition, like, I don’t know – attack twice with this minion – it would flare and that would mean you’d get +2/+2 or you’d draw two cards. There would be a reward.So when we moved to Un’Goro one of the things we wanted to do was to have exciting build-arounds that you were interested in, and we came back to this quest idea. What if we said ‘meet a very difficult challenge and as a result you’ll get an insane reward’? So instead of being small quest, small reward, we said – okay, build your deck around it and you’re going to get something nuts, like, take an extra turn, or permanently get 3/2s forever, or your minions are free. All of these crazy things, and we can do it because we said you have to build the deck around it. And so that’s where Quests came from, and that was what we were exploring with the quest idea.It’s more that we wanted to do Quests and we wanted to do them at legendary, because they’re a very crazy idea, we only want one of them in each deck, because they only sort of make sense that way, and because we wanted the rewards to also be crazy ridiculous things. And so that fit what we want from legendaries perfectly... It didn’t make any sense that the Quests were epic, because having two of them wasn’t reasonable, so they made a lot of sense at legendary, and then, because they were spells, that gave us our first legendary spell. So it was more that the designs for the Quests made sense at legendary, rather than we said – we want legendary spells and here they are. I think if we just wanted legendary spells we would have done something totally different.I think it’s certainly on the table. Legendary minions are great, we’ve had lots of them, the Quests went really well, but I don’t feel like we’ve really captured the spirit of legendary spells yet, but it’s certainly something we can do in the future. Quests don’t feel like they’re just the legendary version of spells, they feel like their own thing.Uh, yeah. All of the Quests, we want them to feel like they fit within the class. It was a lot less of – well, we just have this idea, let’s see where we can pigeonhole it – but definitely some of the Quests came because we were trying out different things mechanically, and then we tried to figure out where the flavour sense was. And now Mike [Donais] just walked in the room! Hello Mike!Yeah, we spent an enormous amount of time balancing the different Quests and also coming up with build-arounds for each of them that was different and fun to play, and yeah, all the specific numbers. And the trick was, we didn’t even know exactly how Quests were going to work when we started final design. We didn’t know if they would start in your hand, if they would cost zero mana or one mana, if they would start in play. Those were all things we talked about. If they would start shuffled into your deck. So we had to figure that out, and then we also have to figure out what they do and how to balance them.No, not at all. We played a lot of games with that Quest.Yeah, we played a lot. We knew the Rogue Quest was – we were hoping it was around a 50/50 deck, which it turned out to be. The other ones, we knew the Warrior Quest deck was going to be pretty good. The one we weren’t sure about a bit more was the Mage one, because we knew – wow, it’s going to feel terrible if this card is very popular because you just lose from an empty board, so we wanted to be a bit more careful with that one, but it was, like, a bit of a wild card to us. We thought it might be dangerous.One of the other things with the balance for these is that even once you fix the build-around piece and the reward, all the other cards in the set are still changing and they’re a really important component for how good the Quest is. Like, Primal Glyph – the “Discover a Mage spell” – is a super important part of that Quest and how strong that card is makes a big difference. Primalfin Champion, the Murloc guy that gets buffs in Paladin is an important part of that Quest, so how strong he is relates to it. So all of these pieces are an important piece in figuring out the balance for the Quests.There used to be a card in Rogue that was very good with the quest, but we had to change it because the Quest was just a little bit too easy to complete… the additional card that was in the set was ‘add a copy of a minion in play to your hand’.Yeah, I like watching how it’s changed over time. It started off as a 46% [win rate] deck, and then about a week or two in it went to a 48% deck, now I think it’s, like, a 50% deck, which means, okay, people aren’t embarrassed to play it, but what surprised me more is – it’s been the most played deck, regardless of its win rate. People just want to play it, and that’s been surprising.Yeah, for sure. I think that deck’s actually a lot of fun to play. It’s one of the more interesting decks I think, where you have to pick which minion you go in on, which turn do you even play the quest on is pretty interesting. It’s not always right to play it on the first turn. I think that deck is actually quite a bit of fun, but as you mentioned it’s sometimes not that fun to lose to, there’s a lot of Charge damage. Sometimes you can lose from an empty board, so that’s definitely something that we’re watching.Yeah, I think I would like the deck a bit more without the Charge.Yeah, for sure.You can bounce your Charge guys.Vanish is pretty interesting in that deck. It’s kind of good for you and bad for your opponent. You have so many cheap minions, so you can play them afterwards. It’s pretty interesting.I really like how it’s turned out. It’s obviously good against the Rogue Quest. It’s good against the Warrior Quest and it’s just interesting when you play it. Obviously you have to think about what’s in your opponent’s hand, what’s in your hand to deal with what’s in their hand. There’s a lot of risk/reward, odds, so I think it’s really cool, how it’s turned out.I think there’s more design space that’s similar to that. I think about what other cards we could do in that space. If our audience has more ideas in that space I’d love to hear them.The reward is actually exactly the same as from day one, except that it went from costing five to costing three, because we wanted to make it so that for five mana you could play the thing and then hero power, because all the Quest rewards cost five.Outside of that though, what you did to get Sulfuras changed a lot as time went on. The very first version was ‘end the turn with exactly eight armour’. And obviously the direction the Quest went changed a lot as time went on, but it was just like this weird math problem, where you had to exactly get yourself to eight armour to finish it, and then we had gaining armour, equipping weapons, equipping different weapons, attacking with weapons and eventually we ended up on taunt as being something that was more interesting and we could put some cards in the set to make it feel pretty good to play.