Dean “Iksar” Ayala’s Twitter Q&A – February 3, 2021 – Roundup of All Answers – Classic Rework, Hero Portrait Crafting, Alternate Artworks, Expansion Release Date, 2v2 Mode

And so, weekly Dean “Iksar” Ayala’s Q&A session on Twitter became a thing. He started them on January 13 and promised to do them every Wednesday (on afternoon pacific time). People have been asking lots of questions about the game’s balance, design, specific cards, mechanics and so on. Sadly, Twitter is kind of a mess when it comes to such things. Messages are short, you have to create long threads if you want to talk about something in detail, lots of comments get hidden, and it just doesn’t flow right. To make it a bit easier for all of you, just like during the previous weeks, I went through all of his replies and decided to make a quick summary of the most important talking points.

Check out his last Q&A from January 27 here.

That said, if you want to read the full Q&A – all the questions and answers – here’s the Tweet you should go to:

Ask me a question about Hearthstone and I will try my best to answer. More likely I can answer your question if it relates to game design in some way, but can give other questions a shot.

5:30PM – 6:30PST pic.twitter.com/QlTSgwM4ue

— August Dean Ayala (@IksarHS) February 4, 2021

Just like always, my summary is pretty long for a “summary”, but Dean always answers a lot of questions. Of course, I didn’t cover everything – instead, I tried to focus on the more interesting / important stuff. I also try to not repeat points that have been already discussed in his recent Q&A’s, so if you want to learn more, go back to them. And if you want to read his full replies on all topics, check out the Tweet above. Stuff in parentheses are my own notes and not Dean’s words. Let’s start:

• He might move to bi-weekly Q&As instead of weekly because doing it every week is a bit too much – many questions / answers will repeat.
• Classic rework will be “some new cards, some old cards, some rebalanced cards”. Neither Barnes, nor Naga Sea Witch are coming back.
• They’ve been brainstorming some UI changes / engineering to make crafting Hero portraits possible. There would be an exclusivity window before a portrait would become craftable. It’s nothing official yet, but he thinks that players would like it.
• There’s no release date for the next expansion yet – if they’re ready to release it in March, then it will be out in March. If not, it might be delayed to April or even later. Working from home has been tough.
• We might get alternate card artwork in the future (like the ones for Coin), but in a limited capacity and they’ll be releasing them very slowly. Players mostly remember cards by their artwork, so they would hate having to read text to see what card opponent played if everything had many visuals.
• 2v2 mode has been brainstormed at least 3 times, but there were issues with UI and flow of the game. But he could still see it happening.
• Iksar was surprised by the initial reaction of players when it comes to the new rewards system. According to him, even in its initial state, most players would earn slightly more gold, just not 100% of all theoretical cases. They also planned to give extra rewards through events and such, giving them extra flexibility, but players obviously didn’t know that. He agrees that it’s on them (Iksar was responsible for a lot of decision-making when it comes to new rewards track) and learned that clarity matters a lot. He says that the system had some issues in execution and some in communication. Now he’s not sure if XP replacing straight up Gold gain is better because it makes the system more complicated. They’re still going to improve the system but now will try to make any change 100% clear with no room for misinterpretation.
• We’ll have more Hero cards in the future, devs just don’t like to have too many of them in Standard at the same time.
• Team will try to move away from single cards that generate too much resources. He believes that Control matchups are more fun if they have multiple bomb cards, not 29 removals and one infinite resource generator (looking at you, Priest).
• They’ve considered giving Warlock a new Hero Power around Karazhan, because they were worried about making more powerful, low cost Neutral minions (because Zoo Warlock could abuse them). But Dean thinks that the ship has sailed now.
• XP rewards from the current expansion will go away when a new one releases because there’s only a certain amount of rewards they target to give out. They’d rather give out those rewards in other places than through old achievements that players need to go back to in order to progress more quickly.
• 0 mana 1/1 Pirate is “only a matter of time”.
• Class strengths and weaknesses are hard to stick to, because they restrict card design. But if you get rid of them completely, then the classes blend together too much. He feels like Hunter & Rogue have the best class fantasy because they have the clearest restrictions.
• Evergreen keywords need to have a lot of design space and low complexity. Dean thinks that we’re already close to the limit of possible evergreen keywords in Standard – having too many of them defeats the purpose. If they release another one, they might need to axe one of the current ones.
• Players are sometimes wrong when it comes to calling for card nerfs (who would have thought). Some examples include the recent Glide and earlier Juicy Psychmelon, which were relatively weak (he most likely means Standard, because Psychmelon was strong in Wild). Jade Druid was also much weaker than players’ outcry would suggest (it was mostly a T2-T3 deck during its time in Standard).
• It’s intuitive for Coin to be a spell since it looks like a spell and plays as a spell (so it triggers all spell synergies like Spellburst). The argument to make it a non-spell is balance, but going second is already a disadvantage.
• They don’t usually change new cards with Wild in mind, but the format impacts what cards are designed in the first place. They don’t want new cards to simply break the game in combination with some old card.
• It’s difficult but necessary to design both for casual and competitive playerbase. They want to create more options and add incentives to try them, like Quests for different game modes, instead of trying to force players down a certain path.
• Dean initially applied for WoW designer job, but then got hired for Hearthstone simply because he was a #1 ranked NA player at the time and Mike Donais needed a playtest partner, because he was the only person on the game’s final design team.
• They’ve received a letter from a young fan saying that he loves dogs and asking for a dog expansion, which sort of became a meme among devs for many years.