Iksar’s Twitter Q&A #35 Summary – New Card Type, Battlegrounds Battle Pass, Cosmetic Monetization, Arena Bans & Rotations, Death Knights, And More!

Q&As seem to be back after a longer break – Iksar took time off from work to spend more time with his newborn son. He’s still not coming back just yet (if I remember correctly, he should be back in January), but he decided to hold some Q&As again.

Dean “Iksar” Ayala is a Lead Designer on the Hearthstone team, and he’s been doing weekly Q&A sessions on Twitter for a while now. Right now they mostly happen on Fridays, afternoon-evening Pacific Time (but he moves them to a different time slot or day occasionally, such as around big releases). 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.

Check out previous Q&A’s here!

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

Hearthstone AMA #35

5:30PM – 6:30PM PST

Ask me a question about Hearthstone!

Or Design! (or anime…) pic.twitter.com/53nLLzJ5X0

— August Dean Ayala ???? (@IksarHS) December 6, 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. Things in parentheses are my own notes/comments and not Dean’s words. Let’s start:

• There are currently plans to add a new type of card (“type” as in minion, spell, weapon, hero card etc.) – sadly Iksar didn’t share anything more about it.
• A separate “Battle Pass” for Battlegrounds is in the works. Most of the Battlegrounds content will be in there instead of the regular Tavern Pass. But it’s still early in development.
• Heavy cosmetic monetization of late helps them give away more and more gameplay rewards for free, but it’s unlikely that they ever move to cosmetics-only monetization. Gameplay products always sell better, and while some games work while only being monetized with cosmetics, they have a much larger playerbase so the lower % of paying players doesn’t matter. If Hearthstone had the playerbase of League of Legends or Fortnite, they could move to cosmetics-only monetization. Also, 3D cosmetics usually fare better, because it’s easier to make cool things in that space (while cosmetics in Hearthstone are 2D).
• Hero cards are banned from Arena drafts.
• They think about changing the idea behind Arena rotations in the future – instead of basing it on expansions, they might curate a list of cards from different expansions that work well together and then rotate it together. (He probably means that they could have let’s say 1/3 of the cards from one expansion and leave the rest out, because they don’t fit into a given rotation.)
• (Gallon) He thinks that Shadowcrafter Scabbs and Lightforged Cariel are some of the safe crafts this expansion.
• They still plan to un-nerf cards that were changed specifically for Standard when they rotate out to Wild, but they don’t think about buffing old cards in the Wild format. Buffing a single card ouf of thousands has very little upside, but if they overdo it, it can have an actual downside.
• They would love to implement 2v2 or 3v3 mode, but the biggest challenge is UI. Putting four players on the screen when playing on a medium-sized phone would be challenging and require the team to rethink how the UI works in Hearthstone.
• Death Knights will probably come to the game eventually, Lich King is too strong of a character to not use him better. Not anytime soon, though.
• They decide to bring Freeze Shaman back because it fit thematically in Alterac Valley (since it’s a snowy/frost set).
• Team doesn’t think about a year-long-story as something “right” or “wrong”, it’s just a tool they can use from time to time. For example, next year we will have more standalone expansions again.
• They will consider making old Diamond cards or Tavern Pass skins (like Annhylde) that someone missed purchasable again. They optimize the technology for custom, personalized offerings, which will make those things easier (instead of showing the skin to everyone, they will only show it to players who might be interested in it – e.g. don’t have it, but play the class a lot).
• Iksar (and the rest of the team) definitely read feedback from social media, reddit etc. but he doesn’t think that basing his judgment on that is correct (because of a huge bias). They try to base it more on things like internal data or community surveys that reach a wider range of players.
• In-game player reports are on the list of features they want to work on. It’s harder, because currently reports don’t go through the Hearthstone team, but a different one.
• Team 5 is getting restructured next year. Instead of teams like design, engineering, VFX etc. being separate, they will be combined based on feature they work on (e.g. everyone working on BG, no matter what they speciality is, will work together). He’s expecting some growing pains, but he’s excited to see how it affects the work in the long run.
• A design that Dean would like to implement but most likely won’t happen is something reaction-based, like a laser that scrolls through the board that you have to click to “stop” at the right time to pick the target it hits.
• If he could add one non-WoW class to Hearthstone, it would be Bard or Necromancer.