Rise of Shadows Q&A - April 22, 2019

Mirror of Doom from Arch-Thief Rafaam hasn’t a animation too.

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Greetings, fellow Explosive Villain In League(of EVIL)!

Sometimes we can write exactly what will happen on a card, sometimes it’s better to write the gist of it as most people will get it. Or at least think they get it enough to matter. This is similar to how we wrote Gral’s eat mechanic, it’s mostly for flavor, but there’s some benefit to save space on a card.

That said, we don’t have plans on teaching spells to more things yet, but I don’t see why not. :smiley:

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Will you be doing more shorts like you did for the build-up before the reveal of Rise of Shadows? I really liked the shorts rather than just to drop the one trailer revealing the expansion like before

We’re working on delivering it before the end of the year.

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A solid deadline! Thank you very much!

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We’ve got replacements for the Hall of Famed basic and classic cards internally and we’re looking for the right patch to introduce them. Won’t be in the next one (that has the mission content), but we’re hoping to get them out before the next expansion.

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What’s the design team’s thoughts on recent OTK decks surrounding malygos? Was the intentional design for malygos in classic for this exact purpose? Will there be some balances to this card?

Oh yay! All we needed to hear :smiley:

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Are the two legendaries that we’re HOFed also being replaced?

Anything you can tell us about the upcoming solo content? Perhaps… a hint? :slight_smile:

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Yes, that’s the plan

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Are there any plans to introduce more cosmetic heros to the in-game store (a la Medivh, etc) or do you prefer bundling them with limited events and special sales?

Now THIS has me curious!

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This is a super interesting topic, but hard to give concrete examples of, because we often iterate on problematic designs to find good designs, and I don’t want to spoil future cards.

In general terms though, I’ve personally been quite interested in finding a way to fulfill the Beast Mastery Hunter fantasy of “Just me and my one life-time partner pet”. We’ve worked on finding something fun (for both sides) like that a few times now. No idea when or even if we’ll find a fun way to deliver that, but I hope to someday. That’s one of the blessings/curses of Hearthstone; we can often feel like there’s a kernel of a fun idea, but not quite find the right version of it, and so save it for a later set where we can iterate on it further, and keep trying to find the fun.

I’ll give you one concrete example in Rise of Shadows development though. Crystalsong Portal previously checked your whole deck for minions; it tried to form the basis of a no-minions Druid deck, to embrace the Balance Druid fantasy. However it proved to be too weak of an archetype with cards available so far, so would require putting so much power in that one card to try to carry the deck, that it was inconsistent and not fun. Instead, we swapped it to just check your hand, so that it could be used in an aggro/tempo deck that at least played a significant number of spells.

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Will there be any updates coming up?

Are there any plans to introduce more Highlander/Singleton cards in the future?

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Hearthstone doesn’t have a lot of ways to interact with other players. Emotes are one of the few ways to actually have some sort of communication. I’d say as far as toxic behaviors go, emotes are among the least harmful.

I can put in a bug report for this, I can understand why this would be frustrating.

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I’m actually further down the pipe than card art (usually by the time I see card art it’s usually getting pretty close to done so I can riff on it for the FX:)), so I’m honestly less involved in the 2D side than most of the Designers here (and our awesome 2D artists, of course :P). We do like making new art for tokens to fit the theme of the set, as it helps fulfill the fantasy and flavor of the set. There are a few cases where a token may re-use old art. For instance, if it’s a minor part of the set, the old art is particularly fitting for some reason, the card changes late in the design process, or some other reasons.

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Has there ever been a combo/synergy/archetype that players have found and was never even thought of in development?

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I personally find the concept of an adventure based set, like those of the past, where you can get all the cards from the set by buy each or all wings with gold or cash interesting and appealing and I was wondering if there were any plans for future sets with such a concept.

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