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.
If you are speaking about Kazakus Priest, he gets totally destroyed by strong aggro.
If you are speaking about running him in Big Priest then it's mostly RNG (Barnes by turn 4-6 = win, no Barnes by turn 4-6 = lose).
Current version is pretty good but definitely not broken.
Thrall the Frost King also looks quite interesting. Even though the Freeze Shaman deck doesn't have any competetive play nor will it ever have it's kinda fun to pilot and the theme is pretty cool and hits the spot with the elemental vibes. Would have definitely been more interesting than Thrall, Deathseer
There was a great work with design. Some of cards are really awful
Those 2 things might have saved Rexxar... from disappearing from the game...
Also, the final Jenna's artwork seems off to me, like it really looks odd comparing to other DK.
That first Druid DK is broke as fuck
Original Rogue DK artwork....
Garrosh, Weaponguy
ironic, isn't it (9.1. patch)
Sad reacts only.
The palidan ones where so much better........
I think they fixed/changed it, but it did work with Shadowform when the set first released.
Its possible what they were referring to was the ability for Shadowform to upgrade the Priest DK hero power Voidform to deal 3 damage instead of 2.
Consecrate every turn for 2-mana would be absurdly OP and not fun at all. Rexxar is actually quite a playable card and makes aggro Hunter lists capable of playing well past turn 10 by itself. Great DK card imho and probably the most fun.
I would really love for them to show off more original drafts and unused cards. They really give me good ideas on what not to do with my designs.
ALL ! OF ! THESE ! ORIGINAL ! CARDS ! ARE ! SO ! MALFURION ! BAD
You all forgot the class you are talking about is warrior. It's hero power is gain 2 armor. And definitely Bring it on would have seen play with this card.
But this is still bad as it's a very risky play and you need to play bad armor generating cards for just a big minion that can be dealt immediately with Hard Removal like Shadow Word:Death. But sometimes your opponent won't have removal and you would win the game next turn. This card just exponentially increases the effect of card draw RNG. Thank God it's not in the game.
I'm sure Brode came up with the name Garrosh, Weaponguy.
Insight like this is fucking awesome. I loved seeing all the unused artwork especially and I'm glad the deva shared it!