Hearthpwn

Interview & Preview of our Adventure Competition Winner - Pursuit to the Lost Isles

Our Adventure Creation Competition recently came to an end and with your help, we were able to name a winner! We got a chance to speak with Sneaky_Raptor about their winning entry into the competition, Pursuit to the Lost Isles, and have the results of our curiosities below.

A huge congratulations to Sneaky_Raptor for winning our first ever Adventure Creation Competition! Congratulations is also in order for all of those who made it to the finals and a thank you to everyone who entered and voted during our many competition phases.

You can find Sneaky_Raptor's adventure in full in the Pursuit to the Lost Isles thread.

The Interview

Sneaky_Raptor answers our questions about Pursuit to the Lost Isles, adventure design, and Pirates.

What was your favourite boss fight to design?

My favorite boss fight was the last one against the main villain Tortug because it is an unexpected 2 part fight that I hope would feel epic to play.

It sets it somewhat apart from the others and even boss fights from existing adventures where only the boss had a hero swap, but against Tortug, it is the player who swaps heroes. I also felt a relief to be given the chance to conclude my story and tell the villain's origin story.

What areas do you think Blizzard could improve on with adventures that you've tried to approach with your own

I think Blizzard already does a great job with adventures; I prefer them over pack expansions and actually think there is little room for improvement. Very consistent quality. I took existing adventures, especially my favorite "The League of Explorers", as the gold standard for designing my own adventure.

I even think that some contestants deviated too much from existing adventures with both atmosphere and format. The only significant difference is that I gave more cards away in the prologue to give players with little gold more than the usual percentage of this adventure. These cards later get stolen from the card collection as part of the pirate plunder, but I can imagine Blizzard doing something similar to spice it up a bit.

Piracy being such a staple of fantasy nowadays, are there any particular stories or games that served as particular inspiration for your adventure or its characters?

Some aspects of Davy Jone's cursed crew from Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean" were used as inspiration for the cursed crew of my adventure. They both get cursed in a way that alter their appearance. Tortug even uses a few quotes from the movie, for example the call for the kraken is a direct quote from the movie. I really liked Davy Jones both in appearance and character and the movies he appear in, whatever people say about those, so I wanted to make a villain inspired by him.

Blizzard makes lots of pop-culture references in their games so I think this would fit in. Since there are lots of generic pirates already in Hearthstone, instead of making more generic pirates, I really wanted to make my pirates different in some way so people immediately recognize which pirates are from "that pirate adventure". Other inspiration were generic pirate tropes that I wanted to implement in one way or another.

A few of the collectible reward cards from your adventure, like Melting Golem and Fish Bait, were ones you'd submitted before to some of our Weekly Card Design Competitions. The latter, in fact, is what won you your Card Design Champion avatar border! You have a lot of successful Design Competition experience under your belt, so what advice would you give to those who're curious to start joining in the competition?

Yeah, I think 5 cards from previous competitions were used in my adventure, if I didn't miss any.

Melting Golem was my first finalist card, Fish Bait won me first place, Ghost Ship was 2nd and Salvage Squad was I think 3rd in their respective competitions and North Sea Penguin didn't make it to the finals of the winter veil competition. I chose those that fit the water based theme, some of them got slightly altered to better fit.

I see lots of new competitors making several basic mistakes.

Try to upload your card on another site instead of making it an attachment to your post so it can appear in full size and grab attention immediately.

• Use wording from Hearthstone. Many times people use wrong words for something that was already mentioned in existing cards (board instead of battlefield, spell power instead of spell damage, creature instead of minion and so on), take a minute and check the correct wording on existing cards. 
• Keep card text short, if you have more than 4 lines of text try to shorten it or make another card. Its an unwritten rule in Hearthstone and the simplicity is what makes the game great. Keeping it short also addressees the problem of short attention span.
• Don't make token heavy cards to fit in more effects. I prefer simplicity and it got me so far so others probably do too.
• Make effects that people can imagine using in the game. If your card can make someone think what strategy would that card fit in and with what existing cards it has synergy that makes it more interesting.
• Balance cards around existing cards, the card poll is large so this is most of the time possible. If your card has a completely unique effect then others will have difficulty to criticize it anyway and no one should blame you.

Also, while reviewing cards, always compare it with existing cards. Never judge a card by the "dream scenario", that's how we get some of those terrible predictions before every expansion. And last, if possible, use art that fits the text. The art is what people see first and if they read the text and think "of course a card with that art does that" you did it right.

Fun fact: lots of my card text is just copy-paste from the hearthstone wiki. I make card effects put together from two or more existing cards. Melting Golem is a great example since the first half of its text is taken from Grim Patron and the second half is altered from Crazed Alchemist.

Pirate decks have always been a bit of a joke, but your adventure takes overt strides to remedy that.
What do you think your adventure offers that the game is currently missing to create effective, cohesive effects for Pirate decks?

One problem with Pirates in Hearthstone is that few cards have synergy with them. The exception are pirates that have weapon synergy, and those are exactly the ones that see play. For example, Southsea Deckhand in Rogue and more of them in some Pirate Warrior decks. However, these pirates buff weapons and benefit little from their minion type. I think we need more cards that have "Pirate" in their text.

Another problem is that even those cards that buff Pirates do it weaker compared to other minion types. For example, Murloc Warleader buffs Murlocs stronger than Southsea Captain buffs Pirates. That makes you better off making a Murloc deck over a Pirate deck. Ship's Cannon was a good step in the right direction, and I hope they bring that card back to Standard in some way. With that said, one card is not enough and we didn't see much stronger Pirate synergies afterwards.

It took lots of discard effects through several expansions to push the Discard Warlock archetype into viability so I think pirates would need a similar approach even if the first expansion doesn't give us viable Pirate decks. I tried to add more cards with "Pirate" in their text to address this. I also tried some cross-type synergy so I have a Mech with Pirate synergy, a Murloc with Beast synergy, a Pirate with Beast synergy and a pirate with Totem synergy.

Did you try to create cards you felt were missing or needed for each class, or did you prefer to just create whatever cards you wanted?

I did try to reach certain goals with class cards.

• I wanted to have at least one class card for each class to be a Pirate or have "Pirate" in its text.
• Since existing pirates have lots of weapon synergy, I wanted to introduce a fair amount of weapons. So I made a weapon for all the weapon classes, except Rogue, and even a neutral minion that generates a weapon.
• If one desires to make a pirate deck, I wanted to give them options for most mana costs.
  • I tried to distribute mana costs evenly.
  • There are no 1-cost neutral minions in my adventure, but plenty of existing pirates are 1-cost cards so I didn't want to saturate it and maybe even push pirates a bit to the heavier side of the curve.
  • Class cards are mostly low cost to counter this effect. Beyond that, I didn't restrict myself too much.

What are your personal favourite cards from the set, and why?

My personal favorite cards would probably be: Pirate Recruiter, Anchor Hammer, Ghost Ship, Message in a Bottle, Teenage Mutant Pirate and Hammerhead Loot Sorter.

Yeah, its lots of cards, hard to decide. Anchor Hammer, Ghost Ship, Message in a Bottle fit fantasy tropes, I wanted to include as much classic pirate-themed tropes as I could think of. I also think the effects are flavorful and those cards could probably have cool animations.

• Pirate Recruiter because its the "paladin goes pirate" card with even his Silver Hand Recruits putting Pirate robes on.
• Anchor Hammer drooping an anchor to the battlefield with a pirate card holding on to the chain.
• Ghost Ship showing a transparent ship diving out of nowhere. It also gives pirates some late game punch.

• Message in a Bottle throwing a bottle into the unknown. I also like Message in a Bottle because it helps in fatigue wars which are my guilty pleasure in hearthstone. Guilty because I know lots of people hate long games, but for me the best hearthstone games are those where both players deplete are their cards and exchange a "Well played" to each other while counting who will succumb to fatigue first.
• Teenage Mutant Pirate I like because we don't have anti-stealth options in the game and the whole card is a reference to the pirates vs. ninjas trope.
• I think Hammerhead Loot Sorter is interesting because it has an unusual effect and he helps in those situations where none cards in your hand address anything your opponent threw at you, so you have an option to get a completely new hand.

Did you create ahead for the competition, or did you create each wing and its reward set after you knew you'd made it to the next round?

With the exception of cards from previous competitions, and a notebook in which I write down my ideas as they come, little was created ahead of time. I made the adventure wing by wing as the competition advanced with only the general story vaguely in mind by the start, and fully in mind by wing 2. This felt as a disadvantage because there are benefits of at least rearranging some stuff.

Looking back at it I would maybe assign a few rewards to different wings. I also had to alter the rarity of two neutral minions for the final phase because its hard to get that right if you don't know what effects the rest of the cards will have. I tried to assign rarities based on how unusual the effect is on neutral minions or how good each card would be as standalone in arena for class cards.

What first made you want to create an entire adventure around a Pirates theme?
Were there any unexpected obstacles in doing so (difficulty in finding art, card balance, boss and story design)?

I like Pirate related stuff, so there is that.

As with "The League of Explorers" I wanted an adventure with a setting that I like, and I really love the explorer setting that Blizzard addressed in that expansion. I think a Pirate expansion in Hearthstone is a matter of time. I'm also not a World of Warcraft player, but I do know some lore from Warcraft III, the Warcraft movie, and reading Warcraft wikis. For most lore heavy stuff you need to play WoW to get a good feeling of it.

Doing a pirate adventure gave me more "artistic freedom" because pirates are a broad theme so I could make up new characters like Blizzard did with "The League of Explorers" without knowing too much about the lore. I did get to some unexpected obstacles, for example the technical stuff like finding out that there is a character restriction per post while I was about to submit my final thread. Then I had to prepare each wing in separate tabs to post them quickly before anyone reads the thread. That's the secret about how I "wrote" 5 long posts in several seconds.

Not being a WoW player or a native speaker also posed some problems along the way. Other than that, it was a smooth ride. The story was built around several frequent pirate tropes. A large portion of the art was collected at the start of the design process so I knew in advance I will have enough art for those strange looking cursed Pirates, however, I had to edit some art myself because it had only white or mono color background so I added sandy beaches and oceans in the background (for example Hammerhead Loot Sorter) or I just could not find good art for it (for example Fishing Spear).

I had some minor problems while searching for specific artwork like the one used in Navigation and Spike's hero power Submerge. Finding a shark fin peek out of the water that will neither be a photo nor too cartoonish was way harder than I expected. Most cards where balanced around cards with similar effects, previous experience in competitions helped me there, but I would play-test some of the unusual ones before giving a final judgment.

Is there anything else you'd like to let everyone know?

While almost finishing these answers, I saw that Blizzard added a new pirate quest to the game, I got it myself. This is a strange coincidence.

Another fun fact regarding the art used, Swamp Creature has nothing to do with Murlocs; It's some random monster I came across while searching for art and thought it looks like a Murloc on steroids.

Blackfur's art is also not meant to be a Worgen, I think, but just some wolf pirate. Close enough.