Talking about the future, celebrations, and keywords with the Hearthstone developers

Ten years have passed since Blizzard fully launched the Warcraft spin-off digital collectible card game Hearthstone on March 11 of this year. Hearthstone has established itself as a market leader in the last ten years by providing a comprehensive CCG experience independent of the limitations imposed by physical TCG tie-in goods like Yu-Gi-Oh! and Magic the Gathering.

Hearthstone has attracted a devoted player base for both its Standard and Wild versions since its launch, and it has expanded into a number of different game types. If you'd rather draft your deck, you may play Arena; alternatively, you can play auto-chess against seven other players in Battlegrounds or explore the game's characters and narrative via solo adventures. Hearthstone continues to provide its players with fresh and intriguing material, events, and surprises to discover, even if some game modes, such as Duels and Mercenaries, weren't designed to endure.

We had the honour of meeting with lead designer Cora Georgiou and executive producer and vice president Nathan Lyons-Smith of Hearthstone to celebrate this significant accomplishment. We talked about everything Hearthstone, including what's coming up in 2024, including Whizbang's Workshop, the Year of the Pegasus, and more.

We were interested in learning how the team intends to continue the festivities for the remainder of 2024 since the anniversary occurs very early in the year. "We're going to tie into each of those moments," Lyons-Smith said, "as this year is Hearthstone's tenth anniversary, World of Warcraft's twentieth anniversary, and the Warcraft franchise's thirtyth anniversary." On the anniversary date and before to the release of the first expansion of the year, the first installment of a three-part Hearthstone OST drops; the other two parts are scheduled to release in tandem with the other expansions.

Events such as these that take place outside of the game itself, in addition to the already announced tie-ins between World of Warcraft and WoW, demonstrate how the team is commemorating the anniversaries of both Warcraft and Hearthstone "across all of Blizzard with different events and fun interactions for players."

The first Hearthstone expansion for the Year of the Pegasus, Whizbang's Workshop, has the new keywords "Miniaturise" and "Mini," which we took to be a reference to Blizzard's most recent mobile game, Warcraft Rumble. Although Georgiou noted that it was really influenced by a variety of tabletop games, the team had a great time adding Rumble's own characters to Hearthstone with the new cards for the core set.

Working with the Rumble team to create those foundational cards and interacting with them to find out, "Hey, if we were going to do a couple of cards, what characters would you want us to use?" was a privilege, the speaker said. In what way do you wish these characters to be portrayed? What are their vocal lines and who are they? For what do they have a reputation? How may their personalities be portrayed in our designs?Naturally, Gnomelia does this by being very erratic and explosive, really getting in your face, and causing a tonne of damage. For the grunt who is being somewhat more protective and defensive. Working inside with another Blizzard property is something I've never been able to do before, so I thought it was very amazing.

Warcraft Rumble is also commemorating its first anniversary this year, but it is not as significant as Hearthstone's, and Lyons-Smith is eager to see how the games in the Warcraft franchise will work together in the future. "Especially this year, there's a lot of encouragement for us to figure out the right ways to partner, help, and celebrate each other."

Keeping with the keyword theme, we were curious in how the card design team determines which keywords should be added to the core set, making them essential to the game, or if they should make a reappearance in future sets. "It depends on player response and what the players want to see," Georgiou said. Although "magnetic" isn't often a timeless keyword, we included it back into the core set since it went particularly well with a few of the themes from the previous year. Having magnetic in the core set made sense since we knew we wanted to include a lot of mechs in that set, especially for Titans, and it was exciting to build with that in mind. I've never been proficient at magnetic design before!

"Tradeable" was added to the evergreen keyword list last year after making its debut in the Stormwind expansion in the United States. According to Georgiou, players responded favourably to the term right away, and its longevity may be greatly attributed to its freedom and flexibility. Players really like it because it gives their decks and turns a more unified feel, and it really simply offers up so many more opportunities for us as designers. It gives the impression that they don't block their drawers.

With the introduction of "elusive," Whizbang's Workshop is the first Hearthstone expansion to officially designate a recurrent effect. Players have been referring to them informally for years as elusive minions—minions that are immune to spells and Hero Powers. The fan community is happy to obtain the elusive term at last, but many are left wondering—including us—what about "cleave"?

Georgiou and Lyons-Smith both chuckled when questioned about the cleave problem, which was a sign that they were both aware of it. Georgiou answered in the role of principal designer. "We were thinking about cleave in conjunction with elusive, and the main question was: how often do we see using this effect in our designs in the next year? When it came to elusive, we considered both the year that had passed and the year that would follow, asking ourselves whether we would use the term often enough to warrant making it an official one.

"Despite being a very lengthy text box, we didn't see ourselves utilising cleave very often. In a vacuum, the impact is so strong that it becomes somewhat more challenging to build cleave cards with a high enough number that makes us feel like we need to keyword it. Though it's conceivable, this time we choose not to, we're extremely willing to go back and keyword things that we had opted not to.

We briefly spoke about what would happen to the assets from the two modes Hearthstone cancelled in 2023—duels and mercenaries—which together brought hundreds of unique cards, heroes, and hero abilities to the game. We pondered where else we may find these assets after seeing Duels riches during the draughting process in the previous Arena season.

Regretfully, Georgiou said that the devoted Arena player base will not be sticking around since they weren't too happy about spending Duels prizes. Although there are no plans for Mercenaries' heroes or cards at this time, Lyons-Smith said, "I imagine the team takes inspiration for some those abilities for future cards and future mechanics."

Naturally, we at SmartRead like mobile games, but we also cover games for the Nintendo Switch, so we enquired as to whether the Hearthstone team intended to bring the game to consoles at some point. Lyons-Smith mentioned Microsoft's recent purchase of Activision-Blizzard and the company's "big aspirations of making it easy for gamers anywhere to play together," even if nothing is formally set in stone.

Given how well-received the introductions of Demon Hunter and Death Knight were, we had to question the interviewer whether Monk will ever be added to Hearthstone as a new character class. The team is very aware of the demand from the community for Monk, but they currently have nothing new to share.

We asked Georgiou and Lyons-Smith, who are not only important members of the Hearthstone team but also ardent players and fans, what they are most looking forward to in 2024. "As a player for ten years, I'm excited to jump into the celebration of Hearthstone imagined here in Whizbang's Workshop," Lyons-Smith said. He mentioned the new, customisable Zilliax Deluxe 3000 and the cute King Plush as two instances of Whizbang's historical reimaginings of Hearthstone.

Regarding Zilliax's rebirth as a completely customisable card, Georgiou elaborated, adding, "It's unbelievable that we were able to pull it out. It seems like I said something like, "Hey, we just had a really cool idea," about a year ago. It is not going to ship, but wow, it would be awesome if it did. There was an enormous amount of work to be done when we first began. It's amazing how hard the UI team, engineering, and art worked to make it happen. It's a lot of fun!

We are eager to commemorate 10 years of amazing fun at the Tavern by coming back. Cheers to the next ten years! On March 19, 2024, make sure you visit Whizbang's Workshop.

See our Warcraft Rumble tier list, Hearthstone decks guide, and Warcraft Rumble interview for additional information about the Warcraft world. You may also read our guide to the top mobile card games, which is available here.