Hearthpwn

Give this man a cookie,a beer and a place in  team 5 !Instead of filler garbage cards we could have these beauties!Goddammit Blizzard!

Once more splendid work+noble cause!I wish i could upvote you multiple times.

Hey, nice to see you stop in, Jaina. Thanks for the kind words. I'm awake much earlier than I had expected. My eyes had started to burn when I woke up earlier, and I wasn't able to sleep again, so waking to something nice helps my eyes feel much better, so thank you twice.

Ohh. I need to check on this when I have time...

Just wanted to update people here. I realized I could maybe get a response from Ben Brode. Keep in mind, I knew getting employment wasn't really possible, as the post for the job had been down for some time. I sent Ben the following message:

"Hello, and thank you for taking the time to read my quite important message.

Again, I hate how you make it sound like it's a privilage to talk to you. There'r countless card makers just as talented as you and they don't make it sound like they're one of a kind and none can match their skills. It's only decent manners to reply to someone's post on your threads, there's no privilage in it and it doesn't and shouldn't make us feel special. Your work is very good, but you're not the most talented or more important than anyone to us here.

Glad you'll be doing more work, but please work on your modesty, just a little life advice.

CLASS COMPENDIUMS > AZEROTH UNTOLD

JK, JK.  I'm not that great with making cards imo, and I don't even have many released yet despite having at least 100 made already xD

too lazyyyy for dat

Quote from Seagull0 >>

Again, I hate how you make it sound like it's a privilage to talk to you. There'r countless card makers just as talented as you and they don't make it sound like they're one of a kind and none can match their skills. It's only decent manners to reply to someone's post on your threads, there's no privilage in it and it doesn't and shouldn't make us feel special. Your work is very good, but you're not the most talented or more important than anyone to us here.

Glad you'll be doing more work, but please work on your modesty, just a little life advice.

Quote from CypherBenkes >>

 

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

Quote from jainaishot >>

Quote from CypherBenkes >>

 

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

 Wait,what?Shatteris surely simple but how the hell is fun or elegant? Ben stop smoking weed plz.... 

I have to say, I have a lot of appreciation for your criticism of the set, and want to address much of it. Thank you for your kind words.

"This is definitely a lot of effort, and a lot of cards, but I'm not a fan of the wording on these cards— you use the word 'target' too much and there are a lot of cards with tons of conditional effects. For a game like Magic I guess that works, but Hearthstone cards don't do well with too much card text. In this case I think having cards with like 5 lines of text is about the threshold."

I only used the word target on 12 of the 260 playable cards in the set, and some of those cards actually read as "targets". I tried my best from making too much of the set conditional, so I kept from making cards specifically single target versus indirect targeting throughout most of the set. As far as actually seeing so much of the set as conditional, I can't agree or disagree on there being too much, but say that yes, a good portion does in fact have a level of condition. I wanted the cards to be strong and exciting, so in some cases, conditions were set in place. As far as card text is concerned, every card has less than 5 lines of text. This was done purposely, as I wanted the cards to be as clean as I could make them. A number of things like "Affected only by damage", "This card is considered text-less", "Deals its damage before ___", things like that are shared among a number of cards in the set. Because of this, I had figured after these concepts were seen and understood, seeing other cards in the set with these shared mechanics would feel previously understood. Because a lot of these shared abilities are also easy enough to understand, seeing them a number of times wouldn't feel as complicated for people, as it would feel familiar. Some cards, however, I wanted to condense even more, but couldn't really get it to look or feel any better.

"You've also used some of the same art in different cards, and some really not WoW-related art as well. The only cohesive theme I can find in this expansion are your Nightmare cards, but they're so diverse that it's hard to tell what the 'tribe' really gives you apart from just having a tag— there's not much identity to it. Aside from that, every class has a separate mechanic, and those don't really synergize together."

I made a decision from the start that I wasn't going to use strictly Warcraft art. I didn't know where to find much, and I would feel too restricted by the lack of pieces, as a number of the images I found had actually inspired me to write much more diverse a set than I likely would have if I had abstained from using Warcraft related images. I found that the theme of corruption benefited from the use of art that wasn't traditional of the franchise. On top of all this, if I were to be able to send work in at some point, if Blizzard needed artists and liked some of the art used, they'd have a slew of artists they could likely get in contact with, which in turn could help others get some form of employment as an artist, possibly building up more of a resume.

As far as the Nightmare cards go, there are cards that are stronger or deal with the Nightmare cards directly.

The tag itself dilutes the pool, as there are 30 actual Nightmare cards, with 30 cards from the actual set sitting in the pool to keep players from always having access to Nightmare token cards. I wanted to make it worth looking forward even to a card without a tag when using a Nightmare portal, because I wanted to give the player at least a decent result if they had to choose a card without the tag. In this case, picking a card without the Nightmare tag would reduce the cost of that card by 1. Concerning the Nightmare cards having any sort of identity, a lot of the identity can be determined by segments in the story I've written about the Portals themselves. For starters, the Nightmare portals are just that, doorways of pure Insanity, that hurt nearly everyone and everything. They cost 3 health, making the portals gradually wear the user out. You are sacrificing your health for power. Because the set's theme is corruption, the Nightmare portals themselves corrupt the actual user, leading them down a path of madness. They cost health instead of mana because the result is usually very strong. With having to pay 3 health per portal, by default, you can only play 9 of them. Many cards that are part of the 260 card set give portals of all kinds to both players, usually. Cards like N'Zoth, Black Empress are some of the only cards that give portals to just one player instead of two. The reason I have my cards written so that the portals and many other strong effects benefit or affect both players is because I am aware of a major issue with RNG that some players have with the game. My attempt at fixing this comes in the form of splitting the effect between both players, so that both players have closer of an even chance at that sudden power spike. I wanted the strong effects to be fun, and for a number of them to affect both players, so that the game kept both players relevant and not just one player.

In regards to your comment on every class having a separate mechanic, and them not synergizing well, I'm not sure how to comment best. If you could expand on that thought better, I'd appreciate it.

Thank you both C.E.S. and DKP for your comments and presence. When I was developing the set, as I was posting to the original thread where the set was being hosted, there weren't many people stopping in. I had looked to even just light review of the materials I had been posting, but not many were stopping in. I know that the front page of Hearthpwn features the four most recent threads, and I didn't want people constantly seeing my thread when they likely weren't interested in the idea of looking through so much, let alone spend time with customs, so I had started developing my set in private, editing the comment that was being used to feature each individual creation. I also didn't feel like messaging people about the set to ask them for their opinion. I didn't want this to feel like this was their job or project, and I wanted to make sure it was a set that I am responsible for. As much as I want to get this right, I wanted to respect people and not have them feel annoyed.

I tried to fit much of my idea for a card on the card, and a lot of it had looked messy. One of the few things I didn't think on much was keeping it simplistic because of the 1 1/2 minutes given to the player during their turn, so a lot of the time and value put into some of the cards is lost. Many who play Hearthstone come from other card games, myself included. The comparison to M:TG was to be expected, as I had always felt that the two games run parallel in a few ways. Because of this belief, I had unintentionally mixed the design sense that the two games had shared in my mind. The problem is my first game is Yu Gi Oh, so I'm used to large bodies of text. I had been playing around a lot with how Hearthcards moves text around on the card, how messy/uniform the card text looked, cutting down as best I could to condense the spirit of the card so it didn't feel awkward or cumbersome with the first impression. I thought long on Chaos Elemental, pictured below:

Concerning the Enrage mechanic, when I designed the Tri-class cards, I sat Mage, Warrior and Shaman in the same trio, called "The Band of Adventurers". Because Shaman and Warrior were sitting with each other, I designed Chaos Elemental with Enrage. I was thinking, in order to fix this, I'd write "Whenever this minion takes damage, randomly Adapt this minion." Because it is an Elemental made of pure chaos, I'd write it to suit the spirit of chaos as best I could. What do you guys think of this?

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.

 

Hello again, everyone. Today, I was blessed with great news! Blizzard opened up a Game Design position for Hearthstone again. I'm going to be sending them an application, likely tonight.

I want to thank everyone again for the kind words and criticisms. Today's a big day, and I hope you'll wish me well on my attempt at working with the fellas.

I haven't sent anything just yet, and I realized yesterday that I had been meaning to add "Can't Attack" to Ragnaros. That's an honest mistake, one I haven't thought to fix until the other day.

It's still good to hear from people, even if things are sent in. Helps me think on things of this sort more.

EDIT: New/edited version of Ragnaros, Burnt Cinder has been uploaded.