Over the course of hearthstone history we see an interesting phenomenon pop up again and again: Sets where a large part of the set identity and appeal is wrapped up in a cycle of class-specific legendaries. These cards often have a unique keyword or card type. I’d argue the first time this happened was with quests in Journey to Un’goro, and since then we’ve seen it with hero cards in Knights of the Frozen Throne, colossals in Voyage to the Sunken City and Titans in TITANS, just to name a few. We’re about to see it again with tourists in Perils in Paradise, and I am skeptical of the trend as a whole, but I’m particularly concerned about tourists. In this post I will present my main argument and my reasoning:
I believe it would be better for the game if (almost) all cards in Perils in Paradise would be dual-class, rather than using the tourist mechanic.
Accessibility
Don’t get me wrong, I think the free-to-play experience is hearthstone is pretty good, I’ve been doing it since classic. But I do believe it’s at its worst when the new set revolves around a cycle of class legendaries. If you don’t open any of these it feels like you don’t get to participate in the set’s gimmick. This is particularly concerning when there seems to be no other new keyword in Perils in Paradise, unlike for example forge with TITANS or dredge with Sunken City. These issues already arise when a single card per class is off limits, just take a moment to think about the implications with tourists. If a common rogue card is great in paladin, you effectively have to craft a legendary to put a common card into your deck. You can run into a scenario where you have to don’t have access to half the cards you want to put into your deck, just because you are missing one. This is a barrier the likes of which we’ve never seen before.
Creating must-includes
This point is very much intertwined with accessibility, but more from a design standpoint. Whenever you create a set, you want the main gimmick to be successful. This leads to the creation of powerful cards, but how powerful? When the set revolves around neutral legendaries such as the old gods, you cannot make them too powerful or they would be in every single deck. In the end, this often results in interesting build-arounds. But when a build-around legendaries is class-specific, a 25% play rate in a class is only about a 2.3% play rate across the meta. Assuming balanced classes, the highest you can achieve is about 9%, which about is what ended up happening with most colossals and titans (this means these cards are played in basically every deck in the class). The main issue here, however, is that is creates homogeneous decks and a constrained free-to-play experience, where players feel like they can only play the classes (not decks, entire classes!) they have the legendaries for.
Forcing deck-archetypes
From what’s been revealed so far, each tourist card seems to be pushing for a certain deck archetype or direction. Lynessa wants low cost spells and Buttons want spell schools. You may think this would be a good thing to stop them from being too prevalent, but this is not how I think it will play out. We already know from Genn and Baku that players will include individually bad cards into their deck if it helps the deck overall. Buttons will not stop me from creating a no-spell death knight/shaman deck if I have a fun and interesting idea where spells would make no sense, and Lynessa won’t stop people from playing no-spell aggro paladin/rogue if it’s a strong deck. But it will feel bad when you draw the tourist card in these decks, just like Genn and Baku.
Clarity
Every introduction to tourists goes something like this:
“Have you heard about the new set? It has legendaries that allow you to include cards from another class!”
“Wow that’s totally gonna break wild, and standard too probably.”
“No, every class’ legendary ties to another specific class, and it only allows you to put in class cards from the new set, and it doesn’t allow you to put in the tourist card from that class.”
“Okay wait a second, those were a lot of words, just give me a moment to parse them.”
Compare that introduction with: “Have you heard about the next set? All cards are dual class!” “Wow that’s crazy!”
I feels like the complicatedness kinda hinders the potential hype. And beyond just introducing the mechanic, think about how confusing this can be in game. “How did that paladin just draw and play a rogue card from his deck?” Even if the tourist pops up at the start of a game (like Genn/Baku), the player is still going to have to learn what that means. And when the tourists rotate to wild they’re going to be even more obscure and cause even more confusion.
Tl;dr (conclusion)
I think tourists are detrimental to f2p accessibility, create must-includes, unsuccessfully force deck archetypes, and are needlessly confusing. I believe a much better solution would be to make every card in the expansion dual class (e.g. rogue cards are instead paladin/rogue cards). This is effectively how the cards in the set already work, but now you have to jump through the hoop of adding the legendary tourist to the deck first.
I’m not delusional, I’m not going to think the entire expansion is going to be overhauled after this post. (Heck, I would be overjoyed if even a single dev just read this post!) But I did just want to highlight some of my concerns with the design of tourists and with cycles of set-defining class-specific legendaries in general. What do you guys think? Is there some benefit I overlooked of accomplishing dual class through tourists?
P.S the reason I say “almost” all cards in the set would be dual class is because technically the tourists themselves can only go into their own class and therefore would the only single-class cards in the set.