Blizzard's Original Ideas for Hearthstone's Death Knights with Mike Donais & Dean Ayala
IGN's Cam Shea had a chance to talk with Mike Donais and Dean Ayala about Hearthstone's Death Knights. They brought along several early concepts of what Death Knight cards could have been and some in-dev artwork. See our recap of the interview below, along with plenty of awesome concepts.
The only Death Knight info in the following section is information not present on the cards towards the end of this post.
- Lord Jaraxxus is one of their favourite cards. For a long time they wanted to make more cards like him.
- They didn't like the weird interactions with Lord Jaraxxus, so they needed to design a new card type to keep it a clean experience.
- Early on they decided to not change your health total and to give you armor to help make them more playable.
- Sometimes cards don't change much from their early design other than numbers. This was not the case with Death Knights - they all changed.
- An early Valeera the Hollow hero power "Discovered a secret from any class".
- An early Deathstalker Rexxar hero power was "Deal 2 damage to all enemies".
- Zombeasts originally were able to get minions from any class. "Getting some of the warrior taunts was just a bit too weird".
- Deathstalker Rexxar had a Battlecry that was to craft and summon a Zombeast.
- They like how Bloodreaver Gul'dan will grow in strength over time as more Demons are added to the game.
- An early hero power from Shadowreaper Anduin saw him resurrect a random friendly minion that died during the game.
- Shadowform working with Shadowreaper Anduin was a consideration.
- Originally, Frost Lich Jaina gave your Elementals in-deck, on the field, and in your hand +2/+2.
- "It was a bit weird, because sometimes you would summon elementals later and they wouldn't get the +2/+2"
- Another version of Frost Lich Jaina saw her summoning 2 Water Elemental.
- An early hero power from Frost Lich Jaina saw scaling based on killing minions. Each time it killed a minion, it would gain an extra damage. It did not summon the Water Elemental.
Hero Concept Artwork
A few pieces of concept artwork were provided for Death Knights.
Death Knight Card Design Concepts
Sixteen early concepts of Hearthstone's Death Knights can be found below. This was before they had their special hero card backgrounds.
wow valeera both draw 6 cards, I'm so grateful they didn't print it and I hope they never do
Oracle still super cancerous
lol i love this deck, probably the only deck making my friends go mad at me 😂😂 dont ever nerf it, so much fun
Would have preferred this, and would have synergized better with the hero power:
Zombeasts are already obscenely strong. Besides, right now you have to decide between using a cheaper but weaker beast and getting to play additional cards that turn or making a massively strong one and just playing that. With the old setup, you would almost always just pick the most expensive minions.
This is a pretty fun post to read because it shows some of the early ideas where the bugs hadn't really been ironed out yet.
I'm really glad we're not seeing a bunch of "that would have been much cooler!" designs, which wouldn't have been fun at all. I'm really happy with where the DK's ended up... aside from Jaina's final art. :-P
I really want a card called Weaponguy now.
That uther card is sick, destroy all enemy minions for 5 mana?
Oooh that Valeera would be the ultimate mill card.
The current hp of dk rogue is much better for milling.
"Summon a Flesh Shell with attack and health equal to your hero's health. Promptly get pinged by Mage and lose the game"
Don't forget you'd still have your armor....
warrior was originally add 21 patches' to your deck
I'm glad none of those made into the expansion. lol
These initial images are top tier. Especially that one for Thrall, Frost King.
We don't even know what a frost guardian is though.
Being the Frost King, he obviously makes you snowblind. He's there, you just can't see him!
Okay... I thought you meant that the card was really good. now I get what you meant lol
considering how terrible most of these concepts are, I'd say that did a pretty good job on the end result. I mean, this could have been TGT 2.0.
I honestly feel like people aren't giving TEam 5 enough credit for this expansion. So far it's been pretty fun (if you don't get too hung up on Druid dominance or Shadowreaper shenanigans) and I'm still not even halfway through all the decks I want to try in some way (which is already more than I can say for Un'goro which most people praised as the new WotoG)
It's kind of amazing how every Death Knight has actually found some use (some more than others obviously). When compared to the tragedy that was Quests. It turns out decks can be built much more creatively when you aren't being forced to include a bunch of garbage to finish a quest with mediocre rewards (looking at you Lakkari Sacrifice). Meanwhile Frost LIch Jaina is played in control decks that don't even run a single elemental and Garrosh is just being put into control decks without really capitalizing on enrage.
Me personally, I love this expansion and it gives me hope for the future. Maybe, once the old sets that still taint the balance of this game until today (gadgetzan, mainly) have rotated out, the overall balance of the game will finally improve for real. A man can dream