Hearthstone: Kobolds & Catacombs devs on the challenge of following up Un’Goro and Death Knights

GamesBeat: Going through the Year of the Mammoth, every set had these class Legendary cards that weren’t just minions. We had Quests, Death Knights, and now we have Legendary weapons. Was that a conscious thing? Is it something we’ll see going forward?

Whalen: A little bit of both. Giving classes two Legendaries is great for us, because it means that — neutral Legendaries, on the whole, are difficult to design. Previous sets had between 10 and 12 neutral Legendaries. One of the challenges with those is if you make them very powerful, they go in all the decks. If you make them weak, that’s not a great experience. I don’t want to open a lot of weak neutral Legendaries. And so we have to make them narrow. Narrow is great. There’s only so many narrow Legendary designs we can do per set, though. Also, there’s only so many narrow designs that work well in neutral. Some narrow designs work well in classes. If I make a neutral legendary that cares about Secrets, it only goes in three classes. That feels weird. Whereas if I make a Hunter Legendary that cares about Secrets, that’s awesome. It makes total sense. That’s part of it.

The other part is, as soon as you say, let’s make two class Legendaries — because we can make them cool, make them play up different themes in the class. We can give classes multiple things they’re trying to do in the set. Maybe each of the Legendaries push in a direction. Some of the common and rare cards will push in a different direction. That’s pretty cool. How do we differentiate the two legendary cards? We could definitely do two minions. That would be interesting. But for our first forays into doing two Legendaries, we really wanted to make them stand out and say, okay, one of them is your Legendary Quest, one of them is your Legendary Death Knight, one of them is your Legendary weapon, and then the other is your minion. It’s easy to keep them apart and understand which is which and why you’re excited about each of them independently.

GamesBeat: This is the last expansion of this cycle. The card pool is as big as it can get. Do you have to design an expansion differently when you’re thinking about that? Were there any lessons you learned from Mean Streets of Gadgetzan last year in that regard?

Whalen: There’s a danger with the last set in a cycle, making it meaningfully more powerful than the other ones. There are so many expansions out there that you need to stand out. With Kobolds & Catacombs, we hit a good balance of pushing classes in other directions, in new ways than we’ve done in the new past. Recruit is a good example. We see things like the Jasper Spellstone, which plays up an armor theme in Druid. Dragon Soul plays up more of that spell idea. We see Aluneth in that same, let’s have a mage deck that has a really low curve so you can take advantage of the fact that now you’re drawing four cards a turn. You don’t want to burn a whole bunch of cards. You just want to play through that.

By pushing in different directions from where we’ve gone in the past, that’s one of the cool things a third set can do. Okay, I don’t have to be more powerful than everything that came before. I can create new archetypes. I can let players explore in new and different ways. Another thing we try to do in the third set is play up mechanics that are about to go to Wild. It’s cool when cards go to Wild, because then the Wild pool is bigger and Wild feels more different than Standard. But at the same time, some of the cards just aren’t strong enough for Wild. There’s a lot of stuff in Wild. It’s tough to compete. It’s great if we can do something like give hand buffing a last hurrah in Standard.

GamesBeat: I saw a new card gives you three Silver Hand Recruits.

Whalen: Yeah, Drygulch Jailer.

GamesBeat: It made me think that Hand Buff Paladin might be worth another try.

Whalen: Exactly. It’s cool with hand buff cards, cool with Silver Hand Recruit cards. It actually plays interestingly in Wild, because you have things like Quartermaster. If you can hold Silver Hand Recruits in your hand, that’s pretty cool with Quartermaster. You can do some cool stuff. That’s one of the cards I’m excited about. It’s a bit unassuming, but it’s fun to play and it plays well in a bunch of archetypes.

GamesBeat: Talking about the Standard cycle, was there ever any thought of doing it one set at a time, instead of all these expansions going away? Are you more happy with that one big event day where there’s this giant change?

Whalen: We talked about that. We’re excited about the current plan, both because it creates a huge moment, but also because it creates fewer moments where your decks don’t work. On the day of a Standard rotation, if you want to keep playing Standard, it’s pretty likely that your old decks don’t work. You have to build new ones. We wanted to keep the number of times that happens to players at a minimum. At the same time, it’s awesome to create these huge moments of swing. A whole bunch of stuff is different now. The game feels completely different. That happens less if you rotate one set at a time. It feels more gradual, rather than having these big swing moments.

GamesBeat: Coming toward the end of the Frozen Throne expansion, what do you think the team learned coming out of that? What was the reception to the cards like in general?

Whalen: People loved Death Knights.

GamesBeat: Yeah, the Death Knights seemed to be popular. A lot of them saw play but never felt unfairly powerful.

Whalen: Yeah, people love the Death Knights. They’re strong. You can build your deck around them. They create these interesting experiences. It’s also just a great fantasy. I’m playing as Thrall, but now I’m corrupted evil Thrall. That’s cool. I want an evil Thrall. The effects for the cards really play into that. They’re just a super awesome thing. That was one of the cool things where — the mission content for Frozen Throne was fantastic. The Lich King as a character was great. Doing the Lich King fight was a learning experience. We had no idea whether people would actually do that, whether they would try to do it with all nine classes. Turns out the answer is yes. A surprising number of people did it with all nine classes. That’s hard. It was tuned to be pretty difficult.

GamesBeat: Talking about effects, those Death Knight entrances are awesome. But how do you make equipping a Legendary weapon interesting? Weapons haven’t had much visual effects before.

Chamberlin: That was kind of — when Peter said we were doing Legendary weapons — it started out a little bit in Frozen Throne, because we have Frostmourne, Shadowmourne, [Grave Vengeance]. And then this time around we had nine of them, and I’m over there like, all right, this is a thing now. It’s different from minions in some ways, because things like Aluneth excluded, weapons don’t tend to have a lot of personality. There’s a little bit less to play into there. We tried to keep them a bit quicker.

But we did still try to make sure that it was this cool legendary moment when they come into play, like Dragon Soul or Aluneth, this very magical way, like in Frozen Throne, where a lot of the weapons were much less magical and more physical. Really having an impactful, powerful feeling. One of the conscious efforts there has been to make them a bit quicker, so you can start smacking things right away.

Whalen: Not so much with Dragon Soul or Aluneth.

Chamberlin: Right, less so with Dragon Soul. But yeah, it’s been really fun. It’s been a kind of fun challenge, still. Creating these little moments and building the visuals around that for something that’s, tone-wise, quite a bit different from minions.

GamesBeat: Sometimes we suddenly get new effects on older cards, like Deathwing or Bloodmage Thalnos. Is that something we’ll see more of? Is it difficult to find time for that when there’s three expansions a year and you’re always working on the next thing?

Chamberlin: It’s definitely something we want to keep doing. It’s still a bit of a passion project, because as you say, three expansions a year tends to keep us pretty busy. But I love getting to go back and revisit old cards, especially because a lot of these are the old-school lore characters. That’s super fun. It is one of those things where, I never know when the next one’s going to happen. It’s always, oh, I have three free days, and that’s that. But they’re always a blast to work on. It’s definitely something I like.

GamesBeat: If you could do one right now, one new animation, is there a card you have in mind?

Whalen: We were just talking about this.

Chamberlin: We were. With the caveat that I have no idea when this will actually happen, and also the caveat that I have a lot of people trying to bribe me to do Edwin first —

Whalen: The whole Defias Brotherhood. They keep bribing her.

Chamberlin: I’m really excited to eventually have time to do Sylvanas. I think we could do some really cool, different stuff for her.

GamesBeat: She was such a core card, too. You saw her all the time. She has that awesome trumpet fanfare thing.

Whalen: Did you get to see the WoW (World of Warcraft) expansion cinematic?

GamesBeat: Yeah. There’s that point where she turns into a wraith-ey thing, and I was terrified. It was awesome.

Chamberlin: By the time we saw the cinematic for the first time, I’d been musing on Sylvanas anyway, and then I saw that and I was like, ahhh! That was pretty cool to see.

GamesBeat: Speaking of VanCleef, when I think about dark places, that name kind of comes up. Are we done with the VanCleefs in Hearthstone? Will we be seeing them some more? Isn’t there a Vanessa VanCleef out there somewhere?

Whalen: There is a Vanessa VanCleef. I wrote a pitch a long time ago for an expansion that had her in it. Anything is possible.