Hearthpwn

There are Nine Tri-Class Cards in Mean Streets of Gadgetzan

We got a chance to sit down with Hearthstone Game Designer, Dean Ayala, at BlizzCon this year to talk about the new expansion and get answers to questions the community had about the game. Check out the recap of our interview below!

You can find Dean "Iksar" Ayala over on Twitter, @IksarHS.

Quote from Dean Ayala

• There are nine tri-class cards in the set. Each faction has three.
• The way they decided which class would belong to each faction was done by theme before balance.
• Mechanics were built on the tri-class cards to fit the three classes in each faction.
• A big goal of each new expansion is to play less off existing cards and build new things.
• The no duplicate cards synergy is something that hasn't been explored deeply which is why Kazakus has been added into the mix.
• No duplicates is super interesting, but it's dangerous to make too many of those kinds of cards. The cards that use this mechanic are very powerful and too many could be too strong.
• Kazakus isn't very easy to understand at face value, but is still a very exciting card and makes for interesting gameplay.
• They don't want to add too many cards like Kazakus.
• Dean wasn't sure if there would be any quests at the start of the expansion release that would give out free card packs like Old Gods.
• The freebies in Old Gods were more there to promote Standard, and C'Thun was given to players to make sure if you got C'Thun's worshippers, you could actually play them.
• There will be more pirates in the set.
• There was a Warrior pirate deck they were playtesting.
• They aren't jumping back into Mechs like they did with Goblins vs Gnomes. They're already had a Mech heavy expansion in the past.
• No pre-order card back this time around due to BlizzCon craziness (all the preparation they were doing to get things ready for it).
• Designers do look at community created cards and sometimes fetch inspiration from them.
• There will be some existing World of Warcraft characters appearing in the expansion, but it's mostly brand new characters. We will see Noggenfogger in the expansion.
• More existing lore characters from Warcraft will be done at some point, it's just also fun to create new characters.
• Part of LifeCoach's trip to Blizzard was to play test the new expansion and provide feedback on the current and future expansions. They like getting direct feedback like that from some of their most engaged players. 
• Kazakus took a lot of iterations to get right. They had to figure out exactly how it would work and what all the different spells would be. Communicating to players how it worked was the most difficult; it had to be understandable.
• Patches was another card that took a lot of time to get right. Literal years of play testing to make sure it was right.
• They've discussed AI improvements. One of the gameplay engineers is interested in rebuilding the system but it's not something being works on right now.
• Improved AI could be a great teaching tool.
• Molten Giant was nerfed mainly because Handlock was using too many evergreen cards. They wanted to see that change up.
• It is hard to balance cards which could cost 0 mana, but sometimes you have to take the risk and it can make for some very exciting cards.
• Freeze mage is around 3% of the population.
• It's still important for players to feel like the card they open from a pack will continue to exist in that form. 
• Waiting to see how things evolve when something powerful appears is important as it lets players figure out how to counter it on their own.
• Getting rid of things that are good just because they're good isn't a fun experience for players.
• It's painful sometimes to read threads where people think the team isn't listening to feedback; they are always looking at feedback.

Our BlizzCon 2016 Coverage

Looking for more coverage from BlizzCon 2016? You can find all our BlizzCon 2016 articles right here.