The Lessons Learned in Hearthstone’s Spell Schools

So many changes are coming to Constructed that it’s tough to catalog and predict their cumulative impact in advance. Among all the adjustments, the arrival of spell schools is perhaps the most underappreciated: they will enable new facets of gameplay, relevant spell damage cards without everything sent towards the face as part of an OTK setup.

Damaging Spells

So when have we seen Spell Damage cards played so far in Hearthstone? If you think about it, the answer is quite obvious and one-dimensional: no control deck could get away with running such cards for better board clears and aggro decks had better ways to pile up damage than to add an extra point or two onto an Eviscerate or a Kill Command.

No, spell damage has long been the domain of combo archetypes built around gigantic finishers, either by cycling lots of cheap spells with Spell Damage effects on board or a few big ones alongside one big boost to their damage with a card like Malygos. This rendered the keyword extremely one-dimensional in practice, yet impactful enough that it was extremely risky to package it with other beneficial effects on a minion – the Classic set’s Bloodmage Thalnos was basically as far as the devs dared to venture ever since.

Thalnos remains alongside Kobold Geomancer and a buffed Mini-Mage in the Core set, the only three Neutral minions with the keyword, none of them offering more than just the singular bonus damage. (Aegwynn, the Guardian is the only card to even hit the heady heights of +2.) Malygos in its original form is also gone, ending the era of humongous damage bursts based on buffed spells.

This offers tons of new design possibilities further down the line, potentially featuring school-specific spell damage buffs which are actually worth including in other archetypes. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like an OTK setup – and the spell schools finally solve this problem.

A Brave New World

Now that we reminded ourselves what spell damage cards were used for, it’s easier to chart what they could have been and never were: essentially a tool to augment a removal or AoE spell at the cost of a few more mana and an extra card in control decks, or a way to make mana-efficient removal tools like Shadow Strike potentially even better in an aggressive deck when the situation calls for it.

This is exactly the sort of gameplay element which spell schools can enable in the future. Their introduction allows for a lot of flexibility in card design going forward and also a chance for us to experience spell power as it was meant to be: more than just a tool for OTK plays, to be held in the hand until it’s time to finish out the match.

Imagine printing a card like Bru'kan but without the Nature tag, and tremble at the thoughts of Shaman OTK setups. Having seven different spell schools (plus general spells) enables targeted synergy cards in a way normal options didn’t before, which can potentially expand to effects like Hallazeal the Ascended’s Lifesteal or something like High Abbess Alura as well. The cross-pollination of spell schools across the ten classes also seem to suggest a soft dual-class flavor to this mechanic: Arcane belongs to Mage and Druid, Fel is the domain of Warlocks and Demon Hunters, Paladins and Priests share Holy… the list goes on.

Incidentally, all spell schools with the exception of Fel are based on WoW’s basic Magic schools, arguably one of the more faithful mechanical representations of World of Warcraft in Hearthstone as of late. It’s also worth highlighting that the Freeze spell school is primarily featured on Mage and Shaman cards, which means we may finally see a non-meme version of Freeze Shaman at some unspecified point in the future.

Special Effects

Though it’s the wider range of spell damage-related options which immediately come to mind when one thinks about spell schools, the added specialization will enable new sort of minions and spells with more targeted effects.

Tutors are the most obvious among them, the ability to fish out spells from specific schools can greatly narrow a redraw option on a card similar to Starscryer. You can also imagine the Dragon-style synergies of “if you’re holding a Fel spell” (much like what we’ve seen on Steel Beetle), perhaps “Whenever you cast a Shadow spell”… the possibilities are endless, and these are just some of the ones we’ve already seen in the game before.

One of the reasons behind Hearthstone’s massive success is its relatively low level of core gameplay complexity, and though the devs are clearly willing to slightly crank up the dial as the audience matures, something like spell schools show that there’s a ton of low-hanging fruits left to pick up in the future, expanding on card design space without making the game significantly more difficult to get into for newcomers. Spell schools are a lot like pockets: such a straightforward and helpful idea we soon won’t know how we managed without it for so long.