- Well met. My name is Ben Brode, I'm Hearthstone's game director, and we're going to uncover some of the Unsolved Mysteries of Hearthstone. What's the wackiest card idea that you just couldn't make work? We have a lot of really insane card ideas that we can't make work. One of them was the card called the World Flipper. Literally turned everything upside down, so you had to play the game with your head upside down in order to continue playing correctly. Another was the Auto-Pecker, which was a mechanical chicken, that whenever you moused over the card, it would deal a damage to you, whether it was you or your opponent, and we were worried about hacking the packets so it wouldn't send mouseover packets to the server, so we just said, "Look, let's just not make that card." Another one we tried and was horrible was an ooze that cost three mana and was a one attack, one health minion. Not very good right? But, it had a Battlecry that said, 'Gain +1/+1 for each game you've lost in a row', so, I thought that might be kinda fun, because you would concede a bunch of games, your opponents would win, that would make them happy, and you get to play a 3-mana 600/600, but we decided, "You know, maybe that's too crazy." How many sets are we working on at a time, and at what stages are they at? Well, we just released the Witchwood, so that's out, that's done. Our next set, which I'm not gonna tell you about, is through the final design process, which is the phase where we really focus on the balance and the fun and clarity of the cards. The set after that is currently in the final design process right now, and the one after that, which would kick off the next year of Hearthstone, is in the initial design phase, where we're coming up with the ideas for the cards, and the set theme, and what the mechanics will be. Usually, there are three sets, at least, that we know about, that you guys don't know about yet. What gets designed first, the card text or the card theme? So, we have a lot of cards that are what we call 'Top Down' designs, and a lot of cards that we call 'Bottom Up' designs. The Top Down designs are the flavor-first designs. "Hey, we want a Jaraxxus card. "We must have a card "that's called Lord Jaraxxus in the game." "That sounds awesome. "How should that work?" And sometimes, we have a card design that we really think is going to be awesome. "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if we got you "to build your deck with 30 different cards?" "Here's Echo," right? Let's figure out a card design and a theme that goes with that idea. "Hey, this should have Echo, "it's kind of a ghost, that feels right." So, even cards that feel like Bottom Up, or mechanically designed first, sometimes, those are actually Top Down designs. And, it's really important to do both, right? You have to have a card set that feels thematically tied together, but also, sometimes, you really are pushing a new gameplay type or a new card design, you have to do Bottom Up, and there's real challenge, "What is the fantasy that really sells this card mechanic?" Are there any cool card combos players have found that you never expected from testing? Yes, all the time, yeah. There are a finite number of Hearthstone developers, and a much higher number of Hearthstone players. Things like Freeze Mage, or Miracle Rogue, some of these classic Hearthstone decks, we just never had anything close to that, until we went out to a larger audience, and players started destroying us with cards we never thought would be good. Actually, there's one very recently that happened with the last set, where players could play the Un'Goro card Explore Un'Goro, which turns their deck into cards that cost one mana, they would play King Togwaggle, which swaps decks with your opponent, and then you play Skulking Geist, which destroys every 1-Cost card in players decks and hands, and then your opponent has no deck to play with, which I think is pretty rude. How do you name Hearthstone's minions? Well, some of them are from World of Warcraft, and we just take their names from World of Warcraft, but a lot of them are generic creatures of this world, things like the Goldshire Footman. So, often, we try and come up with names that really marry the mechanics of the card, what that card does, what the card text reads, with the flavor that we're trying to get across in the set or the world or the class. If we can really hit that trio of, "Hey, here's what the mechanic does, "here's what the art is trying to get across, "and here's why this is a Priest card," or Paladin card, or something, and ideally, we also have some variety of names, we don't just want every card to be the something-y something. The adjective-y noun. So, we try and come up with things that are one word sometimes, like Shellshifter, or give guys nicknames, or things like that. We want to be as creative as possible with coming up with names that don't all just sound like the same thing over and over again. Would the optimal state of the game see all nine classes have a Tier 1 deck at the same time? I think, yes, that would be the optimal state of the game. It's also wildly difficult to achieve, perhaps impossible. Players decide what decks and classes they want to play, and then, depending on what the meta is, and which classes and decks are good, then you should actually change what deck you're playing to target those classes, to be better against the field. That, then, changes the meta, because everyone's playing those decks, then, the best decks, now, are being targeted, and aren't quite as good, and so we see this change in the meta over time. Also, there are things that players discover, sometimes late in metas. We saw decks crop up late in cycle sometimes, that were very good, that players weren't playing for months, but then, someone discovered a cool combo, or a weakness in the meta, and they started exploiting that, and creating a new top tier deck. So, things change a lot, and we also want to make opportunities for players to discover things and feel very powerful. It's just really hard to do across nine classes. How big of a deal is hall of faming cards for the team. I think it's a significant deal. This is a thing that happens once a year, this is our opportunity to really deliver on the fantasy and goals of the Standard format, where you get to see new, exciting things every year, and that the meta changes dramatically every time Hearthstone year turns, and the Evergreen sets do significant work for us, right? They make sure that no matter when you come back to Hearthstone, you always have some cards you can play. They really set the base tone and fantasy of the game. They help make sure there's base level of cards that interact with other things, right? We can make one new Mage secret, for example, in an expansion, and it's okay, because you still have to consider the other Mage secrets that exist in the format, so we don't have to make two Mage secrets a set, for example, to make sure there's enough secrets to play with. We have a really fun card idea that we're really excited to print, but there's cards in Standard that would make it way too powerful. Now, Wild has a much higher power level already, because it contains every card ever printed. There's crazy synergies there that are super, super powerful, and so the bar for power is so much higher in that format, that these cards can interact there and not be too powerful, but for Standard, some of these Classic cards could sometimes make it hard for us to design exciting new cards. So, sometimes that's why we move cards to the Hall of Fame, as well. What cards have you been surprised didn't make more of an impact? I think there's a lot of cards that we position to be at a certain power level, and then, we sometimes miss up or down about 10%. A good example of that is from Knights of the Frozen Throne, in Valeera the Hollow. It really has a great defensive ability, in making your hero immune for a turn, gives you some armor, and really gives you an incredible value engine throughout the rest of the game, and we didn't end up seeing decks go in that direction too much. We saw a lot more Tempo Rogue, and aggressive-style Rogue decks. Certainly, that card is very powerful, and we might see it come back in the future, but we definitely thought it would make a bigger impact in the meta that it was in. What is the most elaborate secret you've hidden in the game board? There are a lot in there, let me just say that first, but there's one that I think is just hilarious. Lich King is, of course, known for using the players powers against them, right? Depending on which class you queue up against the Lich King, he's gonna wreck you in a very specific way. For example, the Paladin, when he plays against the Lich King, anytime one of his minions dies, the Lich King with rez it on his side of the battlefield, as a servant of the undead. And, every class is a different deck-building challenge, but the Priest has the most humiliating effect, where if you queue up as Anduin, the Priest, against the Lich King, he silences your hero. And, it doesn't really have any gameplay effect, it just means you literally cannot emote for the rest of the game, and you're playing against an AI, so, presumably, your emotes don't matter all that much, but it just feels bad.

- [Lich King] Silence.

- But, there's a cool thing you can do, which is, there's a one-cost card called Mind Vision, which copies a card out of your opponent's hand. And, if you are playing as Priest, and you always get to go first against the Lich King. If you happen to draw Mind Vision, and play it, and you happen to steal the card that silences your opponent, you can play it against the Lich King, causing your Lich King to be unable to emote for the rest of the game.

- [Lich King] But wait, you can't.

- We recorded an entire series of muffled Lich King sounds as he tries to emote at you for the rest of the game. Very rarely happens. We had a more complicated one on our Journey to Un'Goro board, where if you hit some of the clickables just the right way, in the right order, you can cause the volcano to explode on that board. And, for a long time, players had a suspicion that that could happen. In fact, one person accidentally got it to happen on a Twitch stream, so they knew it was involved with some of the clickables in the bottom right. So, somebody mapped click points to different keys on their keyboard, and just randomly started spamming it. And, he got it to happen, as well. So, they backtracked that, came up with the right sequence. It turns out those clickables make some tones. If you play the cinematic melody from Journey to Un'Goro, that is the melody that causes the volcano to explode on that map. How do you decide which characters to take from World of Warcraft and when to create brand new ones? We love World of Warcraft. We all play World of Warcraft. I've led guilds, and raids, and done a lot of the Heroic Challenge Modes, and things like that. So, we play just a ton of World of Warcraft. A lot of that game really resonates with us, and we're excited about characters, which we try and get those characters into Hearthstone. Most of the characters in Hearthstone are from World of Warcraft in some way. But, sometimes, we create our own characters, and often, that's because we're looking for a specific representation of a class. Let's say we have to make a Rogue Legendary minion, and we want it to have this kind of effect. But, there isn't a great example of a Rogue that does that in World of Warcraft, and so we dip a little deeper and use things that are from the world, but not necessarily explicit in its representation. Hearthstone, we actually painted Rexxar with a bow and arrow in his art, to push him more into that classic, iconic player fantasy, even though he's never appeared with a bow and arrow in World of Warcraft. What happens over time to the Classic set as it continues to lose cards each year? This question's referring to the Hall of Fame rotation that we recently did with the Year of the Raven, where a couple cards from the Classic set get rotated into the Hall of Fame and become exclusive to Wild. And, we do this for a very specific reason. We really want the Standard format to change every year. It needs to feel fresh and different, all the time. That's why the Standard format exists. And, the Wild format is a place where you can play all your cards. It's a place where there's huge diversity in decks, because there's so many cards that you can play with. And, to make sure that the Standard format does succeed in having that fresh, new take every year, if there's cards in the Evergreen sets, which are the Basic and Classic sets that are causing the same decks to appear year after year, those are sometimes a problem for making Standard feel fresh, and we take those cards and we rotate some of them into the Wild exclusive set, the Hall of Fame. As we do that over time, the biggest offenders are now in he Hall of Fame already. Now, that said, there are some fewer number of cards now, and some of them are class cards, so there's a disparity between the number of, for example, Mage class cards in Standard versus, for example, Hunter. And, so that's an opportunity to maybe put a couple of Mage cards back into the Classic set. We have to be very careful, because we don't want to put very powerful cards that have the same problem that we had, where now Standard is not feeling fresh and different each year, 'cause these are Evergreen sets. I think our goal was to make sure that we sell the classic fantasy of Hearthstone and set up the class identity for the classes. So, one of the cards we've talked about is Shatter, right, it's a two mana card. It says 'Destroy a Frozen minion', and it's not very powerful, but it is a card that sets up that Mage class fantasy of freezing minions, and tells you a little bit about their class identity, so I think that actually has, potentially, a space in the Classic set in the future, even though it's not a very powerful card. I don't think we're going to end up in a world where all of the Classic set rotates to the Hall of Fame. I think we did less with the Year of the Raven then we did in the Year of the Mammoth. It's possible to continue to do less over time, and I definitely could see a time where we just stop doing these Hall of Fame rotations, because the Classic and Basic sets are in a really good place. There still very powerful, but they're not stopping the Standard rotation from happening. How did you come up with the fatigue mechanic? I love this story, because this really came down to one moment. We were doing a play test, and we asked Jeff Kaplan, who's the game director on the Overwatch team, to come over and try the game. And, he got really into it. He started playing minions, and attacking, and he was having some fun figuring out what cards to play, and he had never played it before, he was excited to get into it. And, he was very close to winning, and then, the computer he was playing against passed the turn. It said 'Your Turn', 'You Lose'. And, what had happened was, he'd run out of cards. Traditionally, in a lot of these card games, when you run out of cards, you lose, 'cause, what else can you do? And, it was such a stark moment. It made the whole game feel completely useless, because it didn't matter the decisions he made during the game, he was just going to lose as soon as he ran out of cards anyway. And so we said, "Hey, after watching Kaplan have that experience, "we need a different solution for running out of cards." And so, we designed the fatigue mechanic, where it ratchets up the damage every time you try and draw a card but your deck is empty, you starting doing one, then two, then three, then four, it increases over time how much damage you take. And, what that does, is it connects back in with the whole rest of the game that's happened before it. If you were one damage away from killing your opponent, he's going to die to fatigue. So, that whole game where you got him to that point mattered a lot. If you have a huge amount of minions, you have time to attack and deal the damage you need to to kill your opponent. The game matters again. It isn't a huge surprise and moment when you run out of cards. It slowly ramps up to let you know, "Hey, this game will end. "You do need to get it going." But, it isn't breaking you out of that gameplay experience. It's good fun going through the Unsolved Mysteries of Hearthstone with you. This is ARS Technica, thanks.