Caught! Mike Donais Helped Redesign a Magic Card for Hearthstone
A thread on reddit created by cromatkastar early this morning titled "'Can I copy your homework?' 'Sure'" got itself a response from Hearthstone's Principal Game Designer, Mike Donais. Cromatkastar pointed out that the new Violet Wurm card was exactly like a card from Magic the Gathering - Symbiotic Wurm.
Mike came in and noted that he helped design both Kobolds & Catacombs and the 17-year-old Magic expansion the card came from - Onslaught. That's a pretty impressive history!
Quote from Mike DonaisQuick Question: Is it still copying if I designed Symbiotic Wurm for Onslaught 17 years ago and then designed it again for Hearthstone?
(That isn't exactly how it happened but I helped design both expansions and it makes a much better story.)
Yep... And Hearthstone has become just as much of a bad joke as the Simpsons has, too.
When ..... is put into a graveyard from the battle field = Deathrattle.
put ..... creature token onto the battlefield = Summon.
I see evolution.
I mean... MtG has had plenty of instances of card effects that were once described in full being reduced down to a single keyword. Also, physical cards don't have hover-over tooltips. There certainly hasn't been evolution in mechanics seeing how as Hearthstone seems to shy away from being able to directly access or interact with cards in your Graveyard like so many other card games do, even though there is clearly a button on the game board to do so (the skull icon next to both decks), which has been there since before Hearthstone's beta.
Hex:Shards of fate is waaaaayyyyyyy more guilty of cloning magic mechanics.. as a matter of fact, 98% of hex is ripped off of magic, and WOTC did sue them because of it. They even had black lotus, they had to change the name it was hilariously sad. They even take parts of hearthstone, arena runs? Its really pathetic.
Just like Dimebag Daryl says when it comes to new original music, “we’re all just borrowing riffs man.”
And even Overwatch was heavily inspired by the arena shooters (Quake, UT, etc.) and class-based shooters (Team Fortress, etc.) of the late 90s and early 2000s. Kaplan and other devs have said as much.
I'm pretty sure a lot of stuff isn't a coincidence. They released Blackrock at the same time as the MTG set Dragons of Tarkir. Whispers came out at the same time as Eldritch Horror MTG set Shadows over Innistrad. The most recent MTG set was Pirates vs Dinosaur themed Ixalan *Cough* UnGoro *Cough*. Gadgetzan is comparable to Ravnica where guilds are fighting over a big city.
I'm mostly joking but it is funny how the sets for MTG and Hearthstone line up so well.
recruit hunter
Purple Wurm, Basilisk, Gelatinous Cube, Mimic, Crushing Hand, Deck of Many Things...
This expansion makes me wish there was a free-to-play digital D&D card game.
(A game exists, but is physical and not for free)
Pretty scummy brietbart-esque headline. Nonetheless, I wouldn't mind some MTG style cards to end up in hearthstone in some form or another, especially since some of Team5 used to work on Magic.
They do tend to borrow some other mechanics! This Wurm is a good example, another recent one is the "Can't Attack Unless.." mechanic that we see on the Druid taunt from this set. Plenty of MTG cards have various limiting attack conditions. One of the more famous ones, too, is the new Darkness neutral legendary. This card inherits the style of Dark Depths, a famous land (mana producer), which does nothing on the field until it is fed enough mana (instead of candle cards), or otherwise cheesed into activation, and which summons a 20/20 immediately when activated. As an MTG veteran, I'm more than happy to see them learning from this titan of a card game. :D
That's pretty cool! I've never gotten to experience any MTG but I have a few friends who played and all I hear are good things. All of the cards you mentioned sound really creative and thoughtful. The creativity from MTG and the flexibility & shenanigans of HS sounds like a great combo.
Funny how nobody mentioned Cataclysm and Apocalypse, a red card that does the exact same thing (apart from the fact magic has permanents, and the only permanents in HS are creatures, apart from exactly 3 exceptions, if I'm not mistaken).
If they are doing this (which is not a bad thing at all by the way), they should mimic the more creative and interesting cards as well. Magic has an insane pool of crazy cards that would do a lot of good for hs and open up a lot of new ways to play.
i guess it doesn't count as plagiarism if you designed the card you're plagiarizing?