Hearthpwn

Quote from Samthewam >>

Waste of time. Dk and Monk is not even out yet...

There aren't enough ways to generate Death Knight cards for this to be interesting. The purpose of quests is to be able to build at least a huge chunk of your deck around them, if not the entire deck. There are really only two cards you can put in to complete this quest, plus maybe any card that can revive them? Regardless, there just isn't enough you can do as a player to build around this quest in an interesting way, thus eliminating the purpose of the card. 

Some tips:

• Use the insert/edit image button in the post editor instead of uploading your cards as attachments.
• You don't need to put "Spell" at the bottom of spells, just leave Tribe empty.
• Cards should always have 4 lines or less of text.

Blizzard has confirmed that they do look at custom cards, although I think in many of the cases of similar reveals it's just the players and the company having the same thought process. My two cards matched almost exactly, but one came too close to KoFT for it to be implemented and the other I didn't even publish.

 This has happened to me multiple times before, but I have two specifically from KoFT.

Spirit Whisperer - Corpse Raiser

Pretty much exactly what just got released, with the minor changes of making it a shaman card and giving it +1 health.

 There's also this one:

Ice Sickle - Ice Breaker

This was an early weapon concept for my Death Knight class which I ended up scrapping due to it occupying a niche of a similar card.

The reason it's posted as a discord message instead of an actual card image is because I created this card using the discord bot that I coded, which makes hearthstone cards from the command line in Discord. Since the bot doesn't save the cards it creates, it was deleted from hearthcards many months ago. (If you are truly skeptical that this happened for some reason, you can come to the customhearthstone discord, use search to see that this message from 4 months ago is unedited, and also check that my discord name is harsh criticism bird.)

Quote from Alkoviak >>

The other feeling I got when looking the cards is that some if them don't seems to further a game plan. Interesting effects and mechanics but the aim is not really clear.

First of all, let me start by saying you're taking an excellent attitude towards trying to improve. Instead of giving you the generic pieces of feedback, I'm going to give some critiques oddly specific to your designs.

- Periods. I think this is going to help you more than it might seem like. When you don't put periods on your card, it makes it seem low-effort (regardless of how much time and effort you put into it!). Along a similar vein, making sure you have perfect syntax can also go a long way - whenever you make a card, find a card(s) that does something similar, and base your wording off of that card's wording. For example, on your first card, Obstinate Crusher, if you'd looked at Ancient Watcher to see how the text was handled, you'd have seen the "Can't Attack" Has the "A" capitalized. Furthermore, if you had looked at Wild Growth, you could see the the M and C in Mana Crystals are both capitalized as well. Looking farther down, you use "Creatures" instead of "Minions" on your reno card, which you could have avoided by looking at Volcanic Potion.

- Second, consider toning down the complexity of your cards. First of all, when your card has 5 lines of text, it's usually a sign that you should scrap the idea because it's too complicated. When you create a card with 4 lines of text and the text gets shrunk, that's also a bad sign. Only add complexity where you absolutely need to - Look at a card of yours like Portal Adept. You use about a line and a half to give the summoned minion +1/+1 - is this really necessary? You could have created roughly the same effect by making the original minion a 7 mana 5/5 and not buffing the minion that gets summoned by the portal. Think about how much cleaner "Battlecry: Cast a random Portal (targets chosen randomly)." is than what you have. Now, the card has balance and flavor issues beyond just this, but that's a clear area you can improve on.

That's all I'll say for now. If you want more help or a fast response-time community to run your designs by, come check out /r/customhearthstone's official discord server.

Quote from Cogito_Ergo_Sum >>

@DkPaladinMDL

HEY! You're the creator of that Bard class. I loved it! It was what got me into card designing in the first place! Kudos to you!

Quote from EquinoxHS >>

Quote from DKPaladinMDL >>

The novelty of the Adapt mechanic, as you can tell from its name, is that you choose an effect that's most fitting to the current situation. Removing that choice removes the purpose of the mechanic, and this card becomes "Whenever this takes damage, it gains a random generally good thing." At that point the only purpose that having it be Adapt as opposed to something else serves the card is to improve the flavor of the random elemental, but it's never worth having a bad gameplay mechanic for good flavor. 

Basically, whenever you have an effect that can be reduced to something simpler, you have to ask yourself why you're doing it the way you are, and if the answer is bad then you need to rethink it. Here, randomly Adapt more or less equates to gaining a 1-1.5 mana buff, so you ask yourself "Why adapt instead of +2 Attack or something?"

If you want to improve your design skills and get rapid feedback I'd suggest coming to the customhearthstone discord.

 

 I myself would love to join.  What's the link?

The novelty of the Adapt mechanic, as you can tell from its name, is that you choose an effect that's most fitting to the current situation. Removing that choice removes the purpose of the mechanic, and this card becomes "Whenever this takes damage, it gains a random generally good thing." At that point the only purpose that having it be Adapt as opposed to something else serves the card is to improve the flavor of the random elemental, but it's never worth having a bad gameplay mechanic for good flavor. 

Basically, whenever you have an effect that can be reduced to something simpler, you have to ask yourself why you're doing it the way you are, and if the answer is bad then you need to rethink it. Here, randomly Adapt more or less equates to gaining a 1-1.5 mana buff, so you ask yourself "Why adapt instead of +2 Attack or something?"

If you want to improve your design skills and get rapid feedback I'd suggest coming to the customhearthstone discord.

Quote from Cogito_Ergo_Sum >>

Alright, I've looked at your entire set, so here's my general criticism (I have an overall positive opinion of your expansion though). You seem to be more well suited as a card designer for MTG than Hearthstone though, coming from an avid player of both games.

Quote from CypherBenkes >>

One of the best-ever designs that was sent to us for a Design test was: "Shatter - Destroy a Frozen minion."

I think what Ben Brode was referring to is the most apparent flaw in your set: simplicity.

Most of your cards are either superfluous or too elaborate. For example, let's take a look at one of your COMMON cards.

If you look at the many common cards in Hearthstone, you'll notice that they're usually short and simple. They're treated as units with clear functions in a deck. That's the beauty of Hearthstone: cards that are simple yet sweet.

If we take a look at this Shaman card, we don't exactly know what this fits into or its purpose. The effect is extremely complex for a common, and all we can think of this is "It's a healing Elemental I guess? With a mechanic that's usually for Warriors?". There's no flavour to even support this. Choas? What does Choas have to do with healing?

Some of you cards do WAY too much. Here's another Shaman Common.

Regardless of the fact that this is clearly OP when compared to Street Trickster, this does WAY too much. Spell Damage? Okay that's cool, but it can't gain Attack? Why? It's doesn't synergize in a powerful way with the Spell Damage. AND Summons a minion with Spell Damage? 

Here's a Paladin Common.

Deathrattle Countering and Priest spells? How do those two fit on one card? Besides the flavour, how does that make sense mechanically? How would this be useful in a game? Isn't this a bit powerful when compared to Gnomish Inventor?

Another example. Another Common. This time it's a Hunter.

It's nice that it adds another card to your hand. But it also can't be Poisonous. And it has First Strike. And Might. That's a bit too much on a single card! You can't just avoid broken interactions by writing "Can't have *blank*" as it comes off weird (Hunters have Poisonous now?). You have to realise "Okay this card can't exist" or "How do i provide counters to this card?". Not even MTG goes that far.

---

You have recieved a comment about your cards being "ill-concieved". I think it's not because of the flavour, but rather because it seems like you're going more for quantity instead of quality. There are some cards that don't seem like they recieved much consideration. For example,

One word: Vaporize. Doesn't see any play.

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I'm sorry if I came off as a bit negative, but I really want you to succeed at your desire. Call it Tough love if you will. Here are my recommendations to hone your card making skills.

1. Participate in the discussion thread of the competitions. There's lots of lovely experienced card designers there that'll help you perfect your cards and card making skills. I literally owe all of my card making skills to them. I'm sure they'll love to receive some of your wisdom as well!
2.Try to really focus on creating simple but sweet cards. One of my most well-recieved card in my expansion is a Legendary with only 3 lines of text.

 

3. Here's a EXTREMELY intelligent and awesome video about card design and game design as a whole. It's a GDC (Game Developing Conference) talk that was done by Mark Rosewater, the head designer of MTG (2003-present) and considered to be one of the best CCG developers.

 

On a completely unrelated note, I'd love to hear about what you think of my expansion so far.

Bumping this as Assault on Icecrown was released over here, which makes this thread relevant again: http://www.hearthpwn.com/forums/hearthstone-general/fan-creations/196572-adventure-concept-assault-on-icecrown-v1-0

A lot of balance changes have happened since I last posted here, I'll update them when I get the time (I'm super busy right now).

Please note that this thread is still under construction. There's a lot of formatting and image posting and card writeups and whatnot to be done.

Introduction

Hey guys,

For those who don't know me, I've done a fair bit of hearthstone card design over the course of roughly four years, including four classes that I've published here on Hearthpwn. The most recent of these is my iteration of the Death Knight. In playtesting the class, I realized that decks tended to use a lot of DK's class cards - partially because DK was fairly overpowered, partially because there were simply no neutral cards to synergize with the new mechanics that DK brought to Hearthstone.

My goal with ICC is to provide the game with a decent log of cards that make Death Knight feel welcome in the game as opposed to a class that's just tacked on. I'll go more in-depth into what this means later, but this expansion features things like Undead synergy and Undead tech in the neutral sets, as well as giving the other classes a little taste of what DK has to offer.

This set is designed to be an adventure - however, the boss fights themselves are still under progress. Why am I rushing an unfinished product out the door? Well, with the new expansion's reveal coming up, and the speculation that it could be about the Lich King and related northrend/ICC stuff, it would feel strange to post this concept after the expansion is revealed (if it is indeed LK related). While it is still definitely odd to have a fan-made expansion with potentially the same theme as a Blizzard expansion, I can at least have some justification if there's proof that I submitted it before the expansion was officially announced.

That brings me to the next topic, which is that this thread is under heavy construction. I'm planning to do writeups again on every single card since people seem to like those, but I'm going to be going into much more detail than I usually do, my end goal being to have a paragraph on both the design and flavor processes for each card. Not to mention that the boss fights are going to be added one by one. And not to mention that there are going to be balance changes all over the place once people start giving feedback and once testing starts. 

So yeah, that's all for now. Improved flavor for each card was the main focus of this set, so balance might have suffered as a result - all the more opportunities for feedback!

Neutral Commons

Neutral Rares

Neutral Epics

Neutral Legendaries

Scourge Cards

Death Knight

Warrior

Warlock

Shaman

Rogue

Priest

Paladin

Mage

Hunter

Druid

Changelog

v1.0

 Well, that's all for now. Expect frequent updates with more card writeups. Feel free to come join us on the /r/customhearthstone discord, it's where I spend most of my time designing custom cards and it's a great way to get quick feedback on a concept.

Until next time,

~DKP / HCB

These are really high quality if you're just a newbie, they all seem generally solid so I'll comment on what needs improvement.

I'm not a fan of the "textless" mechanic, I get that it's a buildaround where you have to use cards that aren't commonly used, but since textless minions are inherently less interesting than ones with text it means that the textless decks will be less interesting overall and that there's less strategy and decision behind how you use your cards.

The "Corruptible" and "Living Weapon" mechanics have an extremely small design space. Living Weapon probably has a bigger one but that's really pushing it.

Quote from LittleOgreHearthstone >>

Good to read it, just a quick question if you dont mind: how do you balance your mana - stats? I remembered when I just started playing in 2014 the following rule: if you have a 5 cost minion you multiply the cost by 2 and the outcome is the number of stats to divide. So you have 10 stats to divide, for example a 5/5 or a 4/6 or a 3/7 etc. (so a 6 cost minion gives you 12 stats, a 7 cost minion 14 stats and so) Regular keywords such as taunt - stealth - charge etc. cost about 1 - 2 mana (charge is more expensive than stealth so there is a small difference).

But now with so many cards and expansions I do not know how to calculate it anymore. Is there an exact rule for this now?

• A vanilla minion costing x mana has 2x+1 stats. 
• A 1-cost minion gets 3 stats, and every increment of 1 mana from that point on is worth 2 stats. Therefore, if you're comparing one minion to another, you should look at it as 1 mana is worth +1/+1.
• Taunt and Stealth are both worth between .5 mana and 1 mana, charge's cost is based on the attack of the minion so there's no good rule for it. 
• A spell that costs x mana can deal x+1 damage.
• A 1-cost spell deals 2 damage, and every increment of 1 mana from that point on is worth 2 stats. Therefore, if you're comparing one damaging spell to another, you should look at it as 1 mana is worth +1 damage. (Remember that mage spells are OP since mage's themes include having purely powerful spells, which is why fireball and flamestrike cost (1) less than what they might normally.)
• A spell that costs x mana can deal x/2 damage to all enemies/enemy minions. We see this rule in Arcane Explosion (2/2 = 1), Consecreate (4/2 = 2), Lightning Storm (5/2 = 2.5, hence 2-3), Flamestrike (Should cost 8 = 8/2 = 4). Hence, "Deal 3 damage to all enemies/enemy minions" would cost about 6 mana. Whether or not your spell hits the enemy hero should depend on the flavor of the card, the class, and whether the card you're trying to design should be especially powerful.

I made this card about a year ago.

It always seemed really weak - It felt like there was no statline that was strong enough to make it a good card without it being blatant powercreep. I guess blizzard's solution was just to do exactly that and make it blatant powercreep.