Hearthpwn

Console Patch Being Deployed, Annoying Urshi, Kripp's Thornsader & Season 5 Review
What Your Deck Says About You, Holding Hands - WCDC S3 #4, The Angry Chicken #132
Blue Posts, Replay File Improvements
Subtlety Artifact Intro, Rogue Hall, Creature Models, Jan 29 Raid Testing, Blue Posts

Ben Brode on LOE Legendary Creation

IGN sat down with Ben Brode and Dean Ayala to discuss designing the League of Explorers legendaries among other things. Our recap can be found below.

Quote from Ben Brode and Dean Ayala

• The effect of Elise Starseeker was actually a completely different card at one point.
  • There was a card called Treasure Map. Play it to shuffle a clue into your deck.
  • The clue would lead you to the Golden Monkey.
  • It was changed to feel "less crappy when you didn't get the monkey because you always got a minion".
• Brann Bronzebeard exists simply because they wanted a card that doubled Battlecry effects.
• Reno Jackson exists to reward decks that don't just double up on cards.
• Arch-Thief Rafaam was created to be more in-line with the flavour of the LOE expansion - a dude with artifacts! He's so expensive because he's the big bad guy of the set.
  • At one point, he was like Mogor the Ogre but interacted with spells. 50% chance to hit a random, different target with your spell. "It was a bit weird".
• Sir Finley Mrrgglton was the last card to be designed. He originally gained a buff if you controlled a Murloc - boring.
• Originally there was a pair of genies which gained power if you had no more than 1 copy of any card in your deck. They weren't interesting.
  
  • Minor Djinn - 3 Mana, 3/3 - Costs (1) if your deck contains no more than 1 copy of any card.
  • 4 Mana 4/4 - Costs (2) if your deck contains no more than 1 copy of any card.
• They try to make legendary cards as much "build around" decks as possible.
• Text boxes are sometimes swapped between cards during development to get them to match flavour of the cards better.
• There was a minion a few expansions ago in development that replaced everything in your hand and deck with Holy Light. That was silly.

Dean: 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.

The Makings of a 3D Printed Hearthstone Card

Last month you may have remembered we ran a special Winterveil themed card design competition in which we partnered up with the fantastic folks over at MyMiniFactory.com to bring an awesome grand prize to the table - a custom 3D printed Hearthstone card. Today, we're giving you a look at pictures of this beauty.

Thanks to @salomaoric for designing this awesome card! Give him a follow on Twitter in addition to @MyMiniFactory.

The Beginning

It all started when FlavioRFS won Winter Unveiling with his entry, Exorcism.

1ST PLACE!

by FlavioRFS

Early Modelling

Surely that's too complicated to 3D print, right? Nah, @salomaoric has this handled. The card can be seen below in it's very early stages of creation in ZBrush.

3D Renders

Modelling complete, time to render this beast. The card can be seen from a few different angles and with some of that awesome purple coloring on it.

Printed, Painted, Ready to Ship!

With the 3D model done, all that was left to do was print the card and hand it over to the wonderful artists at MyMiniFactory to hand paint her up. Isn't she a beauty? Congratulations FlavioRFS, your prize is getting sent over!

What's Next?

We're working on something really cool but don't have any details to share just yet - look for some information from us real soon!

Value Town #59

On this week's episode of Value Town, ChanmanV, Reynad, and Noxious discussed the past week in Hearthstone, StarLadder drama, breaking into the scene as a player, netdecking, and some design talk on Entomb & Charge.

Watch Episode #59 of Value Town below! You can find previous episodes over on ChanmanV's YouTube channel.