Iksar’s Twitter Q&A #20 Summary – Wailing Caverns Design, Return of Hero Cards, Undead Minion Type, Card Generation in Priest, “Hearthstone 2” And More!

Dean “Iksar” Ayala is a Lead Designer on Hearthstone team, and he’s been doing weekly Q&A sessions on Twitter for a while now. (Update: He had a long, 6 weeks break because of a paternal leave – but he should be back to regular weekly posting now). They usually happen on Wednesdays, afternoon-evening 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 summary of his most important talking points.

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

Hearthstone AMA #20

I have returned from a 6-week hiatus. Ask me a question about Hearthstone!

6:30PM – 7:30PM PST pic.twitter.com/mIyVJviA4E

— August Dean Ayala (@IksarHS) July 8, 2021

Below, you will find my summary. It’s still pretty long, but Iksar tends to answer the questions thoroughly and includes a lot of details. I try to ignore “fluff” answers and 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/comments and not Dean’s words. Let’s start:

• A lot of things have changed between the early development of Wailing Caverns mini-set (and Forged in the Barrens in general) and its final release. For example – Fel spell school was originally Chaos school. More classes were supposed to get Dungeoneers (Druid & DH), while some of the existing ones had different effects (Mage’s was tied to Fire spells and Shaman’s to – oh no – Frost). Warlock had a card that was the opposite of Priest’s Against All Odds, which destroyed all even-attack minions. Mage was supposed to get a spell that was kind of a spell version of Pogo-Hopper – 2 mana deal 1 damage, shuffle it back to the deck with +1 damage (so it would deal 2, then 3, then 4 and so on). You can check out some of the other designs in this tweet. He also teased that at least one of those designs has made it into the future set – so we might have an early spoiler!
• If players end up loving Tradeable keyword, it plays well in practice and there’s enough design space to make more similar cards, there’s a chance it becomes evergreen (just like any other keyword).
• The team has toned back on card generation / RNG effects recently. While it is still very much present in Priest right now, it should be much better once the next rotation hits.
• Core Set cards created specifically for Core Set (e.g. Alexstrasza the Life-Binder, Taelan Fordring, Reckoning etc.) will simply rotate out to Wild when removed from the Core Set – they won’t fully disappear from the game.
• Conor Kou (Battlegrounds dev) wanted the new BG tribe to be Totems, but they wanted to tie them to the Constructed story and that’s how Quilboars were added. Also, if not for Battlegrounds, they probably wouldn’t get their own minion type in Constructed. Dean has also teased that Totem tribe might come to BG in the future.
• They might introduce an Undead minion type to the game once there’s a right time to do it – such as the addition of a “graveyard” mechanic (which Dean has already considered a possibility in one of his previous Q&A’s).
• Cosmetics pipeline is basically full now with all the free and paid rewards track cosmetics, Battlegrounds cosmetics + any other bundles.
• In the coming years, the team wants to add “better customization options” for a player, to not feel like “nameless Priest vs nameless Mage” (I’m really not sure what he meant by that).
• There are no plans to add a new Wild support set, which circumvents Standard and goes straight to Wild. The current card design pipeline is also at its limits with expansions and mini-sets.
• The main reason why old adventures aren’t purchasable with gold is shop design / space (not sure if I understand it correctly, since they’re already physically present in the shop, just not purchasable with gold). However, they’re working on (another) shop revamp.
• The game is slowly diversifying its forms of monetization, mostly by introducing lots of cosmetic options. But Dean doesn’t believe that it will ever become fully F2P with cosmetics as the only source of revenue, because those still make up for a small portion of the overall revenue.
• Upgrading regular cards to golden cards feature is “still going”, they haven’t dropped it.
• If they had a much bigger team and budget, Dean would like to create “Hearthstone 2” with a big visual overhaul, rule changes, add guilds etc. He’d also like to make Hearthstone playable within WoW (probably something like Gwent in Witcher).
• Mercenaries (Xyrella, Rokara, Tamsin etc.) will once again return in the third expansion of a year, and “they will be very cool”.
• In another answer, Iksar said that Hero cards will be back (so maybe Mercenaries will be reprinted as Hero cards?)
• Custom HS cards don’t really impact card design in any meaningful way. Designers might get some inspirations, of course, just like they might be inspired by a different game or simply playing Hearthstone (but they never directly copy designs). That said, one of the custom HS community members got hired as an actual card designer in the game!
• Removing Baku & Genn from Standard a year earlier had a positive impact on design. They no longer had to worry about designing too strong odd / even cards that would push those decks too much.