Hearthstone’s newest adventure - The League of Explorers introduced 45 new cards to the game , but it has been the legendary cards in that set, that have had the biggest impact on how Hearthstone is played. Reno Jackson, in particular, has created all new archetypes and significantly altered the pace of gameplay. I caught up with Hearthstone's Senior Game Designer Ben Brode and Associate Designer Dean Ayala to chat about the process of designing those cards.

“ When you first played Treasure Map it shuffled a clue into your deck, then you played the clue and it led you to the Golden Monkey, which got shuffled into your deck... and it was a little bit convoluted...

The first iteration of the quest!

Intrepid explorers, every one.

Murloc + monocle? Sold!

“ Sir Finley was actually the last card in The League of Explorers to be designed. I forget what the old sign was now, but it was like 'if you control a murloc, give a murloc some sort of buff' but we were all sort of unhappy with it...

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It was a little bit of both... originally the treasure map mechanic was on a card called Treasure Map.We call it the difference between top down and bottom up. Sometimes you start from the top with a cool flavour design and we go down from there, and sometimes you start from the bottom with a cool mechanic and build the flavour on top of that.Like, Brann Bronzebeard doesn’t have an especially specific relationship with battlecries, but we knew we wanted to do a battlecry doubling legendary and so we put it on Brann Bronzebeard. Reno Jackson was similarly built. We knew we wanted to reward decks that played only one copy of every card, and so we ended up with that mechanic. We tried to make the flavour fit as best we could, but it’s kind of how those things generally go. Rafaam was more of a top-down design, in that we really wanted the flavour of this guy who collects these artifacts from all these different worlds, and so he gets to use his crazy artifacts. So it depends on the legendary, but it’s kind of all over the place.Sir Finley was one of the first things that we designed about League of Explorers. We said - okay, we’re going to have a Guardians of the Galaxy-style, ragtag group of misfit explorers, and we have some hallmarks from World of Warcraft, like Brann Bronzebeard, and who else can we build out this group with? I really wanted a character that feels super out of left-field. Like, you have dwarves and elves and humans, what else fills out this crew to make it really feel unique? And a murloc gentleman explorer just felt so different to make this group really pop. So it was basically the first thing – we had an image of a murloc with a monocle. We didn’t have a name for him yet. It kind of sold almost the entire adventure for the team – it was, oh yeah, an explorer murloc, that’s great! And we built the rest of the adventure, basically, around him.There were some ideas for other adventures, but this adventure had an English murloc, so it naturally went up.Sir Finley was actually the last card in The League of Explorers to be designed. I forget what the old sign was now, but it was like “if you control a murloc, give a murloc some sort of buff” but we were all sort of unhappy with it towards the end, and basically at the very last minute, one of our guys came up with this text box “Discover a new basic hero power.” We all just really liked it immediately. It was just a matter of making it work technically, which, fortunately, it worked out. So we playtested it a bunch right after we made it and it certainly fit.There’s a lot of decks out there that you might want to create, but your hero power doesn’t really synergise with that deck type, and you can’t really change your hero power. So, for decks like, say, Aggro Warrior or Aggro Shaman, making a totem and armouring up doesn’t really fit with those kind of archetypes, but Sir Finley allows you to do that and it’s a 1/3 for one mana so it sort of gets you there stat-wise, but it’s really the text box that’s motivating you to say - this class isn’t good at this style of play, but, maybe by using Sir Finley I can make it good for this style of play, so it really motivates you to think about building a deck that you wouldn’t have created otherwise, so that’s why it’s really exciting to me.

Aggro Shaman makes incredible use of Sir Finley.

The two new battlecry-focused League of Explorers cards.

A typical day at the office for Brann.

Famed cartographer and table flipper.

“ Elise allows you to... basically cut all your top end out of your decks completely. You can put in literally 29 cards to beat aggressive decks...

Getting closer...

All praise the Monkey.

“ We’ve had the text 'Replace everything in your hand and deck with something' for a while now. I think we had some minion, a couple of expansions ago, that was 'Replace everything in your hand and deck with Holy Lights'... that ended up being awful...

It’s pretty interesting, because you always have a plan for the hero power you want, but sometimes you don’t get one of those, so you have to make it work with some other class’ hero power, and it puts you in some pretty interesting scenarios. Maybe you had to pick the Paladin hero power and you have a Flametongue Totem or something. Or the Warlock hero power and you run out of cards and it winds up working out. It puts you in these strange situations that wouldn’t occur naturally.I think it was almost just, like, a given. We did [Baron] Rivendare, and we were kind of thinking – when are we going to do a battlecry build around? This seems like a great time to give that a try. We did it both with Brann and the Rumbling Elemental in Shaman. It’s another way to look at your cards. Maybe you go back to your collection, and re-evaluate things that you may have given up on or didn’t quite make the cut before, and Brann makes you do that to a huge portion of your collection.I think so. Sometimes during development we swap different text boxes onto different cards to try and match flavour a little better, but I think Brann was pretty much this for a huge part of development.Yeah, I think he actually was the entire time, because I remember he used to be much higher costed. He was a much bigger fellow. I think he was a 5/5 or something like that, and we ended up lowering the cost down at some point during development just because the exciting part about Brann is that your battlecries trigger twice, not that he’s a big dude, so the lower you have combo cards the easier it is to get off battlecry combos, so that’s why we ended up lowering it down.The battlecry “shuffle a map to the Golden Monkey” – that text box – is really exciting to us and obviously the payoff is really exciting as well. Elise has grown to be, I think, my favourite card from LoE. It’s really really interesting from an extreme high level of play, and it’s really really interesting and exciting if you don’t know that much about Hearthstone.The first time it happens to someone who’s playing at rank 20 and they just want that combo to go off – it’s insanely exciting. And at the super high level of play Elise allows you to do something that no other card really allows you to do, which I think people are realising now, and that is – when you’re building a deck for the ladder, you want to be good against a lot of different things.And Elise allows you to do something where you can basically cut all your top end out of your decks completely. You can put in literally 29 cards to beat aggressive decks and then against control decks, because you’re drawing so many cards in those match-ups you’re eventually going to get to Elise and you’re eventually going to get to the Map and you’re eventually going to get to the Monkey, who’s going to give you more top end than you possibly could have put into your deck in the first place.That’s a thing that I didn’t think players were going to get to for a while… but now, like, Fatigue Warrior - I think one of the biggest reasons that deck works now is because of Elise. Because Fatigue Warrior, just in general, had a tonne of removal and tried to fatigue you, but now they can actually win with top end as well because they only need Elise in their deck. They don’t need Grom, they don’t need Dr. Boom, or Ysera, anything like that, and they can still play the Fatigue Warrior game, but they can beat the super top end decks now. So it’s really really interesting from all sides of play and all types of players, for different reasons. It’s really cool for that reason.[Laughs] Always play The Golden Monkey. That’s the moral of the story.It happened about halfway through development, I think, once we’d changed it from the original treasure map idea to Elise Starseeker. Originally the Golden Monkey was super un-fun. It was, like, you play the Golden Monkey and it destroys all your opponent’s minions, or something, like, kinda rude [laughs]. And we were building decks that shuffled as many Golden Monkeys into your deck as possible. So we changed it to have a minion impact by being a big 6/6 taunt minion, but also just do something that totally blows your mind. We really wanted it to feel like a worthy quest to go on, where you play Elise and then you’re trying to find the map and then you’re trying to find the monkey and it should do something crazy. And this was a line of text that just made you lose your mind – what does it mean? I don’t even know what that means! And this was, once it was pitched, we were really excited about it.Yeah, we’ve had the text “Replace everything in your hand and deck with something” for a while now. I think we had some minion, a couple of expansions ago, that was “Replace everything in your hand and deck with Holy Lights” – it was some light card, and that ended up being awful, but the text was still really exciting. Maybe Holy Light’s not the answer… they summon a taunt totem and you can never clear it. Your deck is Holy Lights now. [Laughs]That text box is really exciting to us, so we’ve always had it out there, and we’ve pitched stuff [before] that was - replace your hand and deck with this thing or that thing or this thing. With Golden Monkey, as soon as – I think it came straight from Brode’s team - but that was just the text box “Replace all your hand and deck with legendaries” and as soon as we saw it we thought that was really cool. And once we started playtesting it we decided it actually works in all kinds of different decks and was really exciting. The first time you play the Golden Monkey it’s such an iconic moment, it really works. So we’ve had that text box for a while.