Goblins vs Gnomes – the new(ish) 120+ card expansion for Hearthstone

PLEASE NOTE: This interview was conducted shortly before Christmas, so obviously the meta has changed a fair bit since. Nonetheless, the conversation – and insights into how the new cards were designed – are still absolutely relevant and interesting. Apologies for the delay.

Spare parts can imbue minions with stealth, taunt and other powerful effects.

The player jury is out on Bolvar, but Muster plus Quartermaster is now a Paladin staple.

Mill Druid has seen a resurgence with GvG.

Nothing like recombobulating a borrowed minion. Or using Shrinkmeister to steal them outright with Cabal Shadow Priest.

More vital than ever.

“ Adding a card to the game doesn’t just add one card, it adds an interaction between that card and every other card...

One of two new pirates.

It's no longer just Priest wielding minions from other classes.

“ The very first version of Recombobulator was... a spare part that said ‘transform this minion into another minion of the same cost.' It was pretty crazy...

You down with OP UP?

Lose you cards in one Fel swoop.

Accidental boardclear?

“ We actually had more cards that triggered when you draw them originally, [but were] a little bit worried about overdoing that mechanic, so [decided to] start off with one, see how that works out...

Meet the Troggs.

You want to take this one, Mike?Sure. I also like designing one drops, and it’s very hard. You want to not put too much pressure and you want it to be, like, not just a general use card, but specific to certain decks, or stronger in certain decks. One of the reasons that I love the Clockwork Gnome is because the spare parts are really cool – they give you a different play experience each time, they add skill to the game because if you get a +1 damage spare part you could just throw it out there and use it for +1 damage right away, or you could save it for the perfect time to get an extra kill out of it. So I really like how Clockwork Gnome turned out.Near the end of the set we were trying to decide which cards were most powerful and all the balance designers made a list of how strong each card is, from one to ten. Clockwork Gnome was pretty high up there, and we decided that was good, because he adds the right kinds of elements to the game. When you think about GvG you’ll remember him, and he’s one of the cards we want you to remember, because he’s what GvG is about – the spare parts, the mechs, and the cool gameplay interactions with a little bit of randomness mixed in. So it captured everything we wanted in a one drop.I really like the cards that are a brand new design space for us. So I love Bolvar [Fordragon] - he’s one of my favourite cards in the new set, there’s really nothing like him. And he adds to the fantasy of leading the Silver Hand. I am the head of this army of Paladins. My hero power helps him, as does the whole suite of Muster for Battle and Quartermaster. They all help that fantasy of what we’re trying to set up with Paladin. And he’s just a very unique card. It’s fun to think ‘do I play this guy right now or wait a little bit longer? Maybe he could make an even bigger impact when I play him?’ How you decide to play with that guy is kind of fun.The deck I’m playing right now is a Druid deck running Goblin Sapper and Clockwork Giants. I play Naturalize to fill up my opponent’s hand, try and get some tempo with that. I’ve been having a lot of fun with that.I was playing Priest a lot recently, so the Recombobulator is one of my favourite cards. He’s got lots of combos. If you play good battlecry cards obviously he’s great with those, but also with Shadow Madness – when you’ve borrowed an opponent’s creature you can transmogrify it to keep it. And I love all the little interactions that Priest has, and all the little tricks they do. You feel smart when you pull it off… so he’s one of my favourite cards.A lot of things that trigger off of spellcasting became a lot more interesting with the inclusion of spare parts, so [Archmage] Antonidas is a lot more interesting because you’re able to change a lot of spare parts into fireballs. So I think that’s cool. All of the cards that care about spells. In my particular deck, the Goblin Sapper and Clockwork Giants have unlocked a whole series of old cards. Naturalize is really fun in that deck, King Mukla also.One of the cool things about Goblins vs Gnomes is that adding a card to the game doesn’t just add one card, it adds an interaction between that card and every other card, so as the number of cards increases, the total number of interactions increases at a different rate – a much greater rate. And so there’s a lot of really exciting interactions for old cards and with the new cards themselves.The spell triggers are all really important, like Mana Wyrm, but we also started this new type of deck in Druid where beasts matter. And right now it’s only got its first card [Malorne] – so it’s just starting to go in that direction – just like Warlocks only had one ‘demons matter’ card in the first set for them – in the classic set. But now, suddenly, if you look very closely at neutral beasts, and what beasts Druid has, and think ‘oh wow, I want to build that’ and you start to try it out. It makes you think differently, and makes you look at old cards differently.I kind of like that each minion type feels really different – the way that you play with them. Pirates interact a lot with weapons, you’re really encouraged to play pirates almost as a weapons deck. Murlocs you play as a swarm of murlocs. You put every murloc in a deck and you feel pretty good about it. Mechs feel a little bit different in that they have more cards that care about you having just a single mech in the battlefield, and buffing one mech or triggering off a mech. And having each of those different minion types feel like they play in a unique way is really cool, and pirates are in a unique space, but they’re not, like, swarmy like murlocs. You’re not encouraged to just put every pirate in your deck. You have to be thinking about weapons, and they just take up less of your deck to become a pirate deck, I guess.Yeah, to some extent just making new weapons adds a little bit to the pirate deck, but also, we add very slowly to each deck, and people will explore each time we add new cards and figure out what the best build is. Maybe they haven’t figured out what the best pirate deck is, maybe they have. Probably not yet. And we just keep watching it get a little bit better. We don’t need a deck that’s fully fleshed out, with just one or two sets, then it’s very dangerous to add more cards to it, but if it’s like you try it out and ‘this is pretty good, and if the meta’s not expecting it then it might be great’ and then we can keep adding more pirates or more beasts or more murlocs until it’s exactly where we want it to be.I think it’s awesome! I think that, if you look at the world before Goblins vs Gnomes, one of the classes that was most interesting to look at was Warlock, because you could build it in so many different ways. You could go with an aggro Warlock or handlock or a demon version with Voidcaller, and it really felt like all of those were viable decks. And we want to give more viable deck options to pretty much every class – that was one of the big goals of Goblins vs Gnomes – and giving Shaman murlocs just gives you another way to look at Shaman. You can still build a mech Shaman, you can build a classic Shaman with Doomhammers and Rockbiter Weapons or you could build a murloc Shaman. Hopefully they’re all fun and different, and give you a different look at the class.I think it’s really important for each class to have its flavours, and we have sheets with ‘here’s what Paladin does, here’s what Shaman does’ – and we added murloc to the Shaman one recently. And we do try to stay true to that, but we don’t mind if there’s the occasional ‘this mech broke and the pilot was this awesome guy from another class.' That’s okay because it’s not consistently breaking the barriers, it’s not changing an archetype. For the most part it doesn’t really affect us too much – the randomness involved there keeps it true, I believe.Sure.We want cards that are really fun and cause interesting situations to see a little more play, and you see that with the piloted mechs and the spare part guys and this guy. So it turned out well – he’s gotten a lot of play at two mana, but it feels like he’s in the right place.I love Unstable Portal – you get so many great stories out of it. You end up in these situations, like ‘oh, I got this weird combo card – how can I use it in this deck? I wasn’t expecting to get it.' That enhances the skill of the game while still enhancing the fun, with all these weird cards. And you could end up getting a Wisp or whatever too. Brian Kibler was playing two Unstable Portals in his mage mech deck, and after a while he concluded ‘these are actually wrong – they’re not good enough’. And the reason he explained was, on turn two if you skip playing a creature at all, in a tempo deck like that, it’s actually really bad for you. And often if you play an Unstable Portal on turn two you end up not playing anything at all, because it costs five or something. So he took them out of his deck.I thought that’s a nice balance to show [while some people may say] everything’s overpowered, yet this one guy who actually played them a bunch and is pretty good thinks they’re underpowered, so obviously they’re somewhere in between. And I think it’s at the right place.Yep. Yeah, I think it’s at the right numbers, it’s seeing a lot of play. Like I said earlier, the fun cards that create cool situations are the ones that we wanted to ensure saw play. I think people are slightly over-valuing it right now, but it’s still a good card and correct to play. It’s just not too good.Its name, cost and effect are exactly the same from when I originally designed it.It’s exciting to have that risk. Any card that asks you the question ‘is this worth it? Is it worth the risk?’ is exciting to me. For that card, also, it’s something we don’t really want to do very often is let people get their deck down to nothing quickly, because usually it’s frustrating. Imagine if Fel Reaver was the reverse of what it is now and it let you burn cards off your opponent’s deck. I think you would feel pretty bad about it, but because you opt in to the deal, you say ‘I’m willing to put myself at your mercy here in order to get this huge monster,’ you kind of know what you’re asking for, so when it happens to you, your opponent feels rad, because they get to burn tonnes of cards out of your deck while you’re gritting your teeth and crossing your fingers and watching it happen, hoping it doesn’t go too bad for you. It’s just a great story generator and a fun card.Yeah, when this card started out it was burning two cards at first, and we decided to increase it to three cards to increase the risk, but he’s been really fun. Every time that card gets into play, that game is going to be a story one way or another. Either it’s going to demolish your opponent or you’re going to get wrecked because of it.It’s definitely a new mechanic. It’s something that we’re experimenting with. Donais was reminding me that actually Unstable Portal’s mechanic we kind of experimented with using Webspinner in Naxxramas, and it was really successful – people really liked Webspinner and it was really fun, and so Goblins vs Gnomes kind of amped that whole mechanic up to another level with Piloted Shredders, Unstable Portal and stuff like that.This is our first pass at this mechanic. Is this fun, is this cool? The idea – at least for this implementation – is it’s basically a zero cost ‘deal two damage to everything’ [spell], which is very powerful, but the drawback is that you don’t control when you cast it. It just kind of happens, and so it may not always be in your favour. And that’s a pretty interesting design space I think, it’s a different kind of drawback. Warlocks’ are very straight drawbacks – I lose a card, I lose some life, whatever it is, but for Mages, this drawback of uncertainty and not knowing when it’s going to happen I think is really interesting. Of course, sometimes it’s very powerful, because for zero mana you dealt two damage to everything, and that can be very strong, but it’s a very different thing, and there’s really nothing like it in the game, so it’s very hard to analyse and figure out when you would play this card and when it’s actually good.It’s a tricky card to evaluate, because it’s not good in the Mage heavy creature decks that you’re seeing a lot of with GvG. It’s actually only good in this weird control Mage deck, like a freeze Mage deck, with maybe just giants in it or something. So they’re shying away from it as they try out this heavy creature deck.Also, you want to be careful whenever you’re pushing something that does an effect for zero mana, like Flame Leviathan, and any card that triggers when you draw it. We actually had more cards that triggered when you draw them originally, [but were] a little bit worried about overdoing that mechanic, so [decided to] start off with one, see how that works out - it’ll be cool because it’s the only one that does it, and then maybe in the future if we like it, we’ll try some more. Right now it’s design space though, because there’s not many things you can do for free.We started off at the beginning of this set, outlining some mechanics for the set. Spare parts was one, ogres was one, troggs was one. And we knew that troggs would be the anti-magic creatures. And at first, they increased the cost of spells by one. And we didn’t really like how it felt playing against them. It’s like, you play the two cost trogg, and I have the coin and now I can’t coin because the coin costs one mana, and it felt like I was getting denied too much. So instead, we reversed it, so that the trogg got bigger when your opponent played a spell. And that was a much smaller bonus, because often you just killed the trogg, but it was still a bonus, and that made it interesting.Troggzor, of course, got the biggest bonus, in that he summons a [Rockjaw] trogg whenever you play a spell. And that was very cool because he’s super hard to kill. You can’t just fireball him or polymorph him to get rid of him [completely]. At one point [in development] he couldn’t be targeted by spells or hero powers, and we decided that we could take that off because his effect was good enough. It was already really cool. And it’s working really well. I’ve had a lot of fun playing him and he totally shuts down certain strategies [for decks] that don’t play a lot of minions.