Hearthstone players will be travelling to World of Warcraft’s city of Stormwind when the game’s next set releases on August 3 (August 4 in ANZ). Across 135 new cards, United in Stormwind riffs on some of the ways in which Alliance players spend their time in the iconic city, from getting their first mount and visiting vendors through to learning tradeskills and following questlines.
All of these things will now have a Hearthstone equivalent, in fact. Mounts are created by casting special Mount spells on minions, but then have the added bonus that when that minion dies, the trusty steed with stats equal to the buff, is summoned on its own. Questlines, meanwhile, are three-part quests that center around Hearthstone’s new mercenary characters – and who can be played as the main reward once completed. Profession Tools, meanwhile, occupy the weapon slot, but have no attack value, instead providing a bonus when a condition is met. And lastly, Tradeable cards can be swapped with a random card from your deck at a cost of one mana. More on all those further down.
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Today’s announcement also revealed that Hearthstone Battlegrounds will be getting a major update soon, including “the largest minion pool shakeup since launch”. A number of cosmetic options are also coming to the mode, including a Battlegrounds Bundle called Beach Party that packs seven new sun-soaked hero portraits… like Grill King Bolvar and Chillin’ Vol’jin. For our money the best part of the pack, however, is the prospect of Tikilord Ragnaros, who is a fully-voiced alternate bartender and promises “scorching attitude”.
Battlegrounds will also be getting the Shadowlands bundle, which has eight reimagined designs that cast Battlegrounds heroes as members of the Covenants from Shadowlands. These include Finley of the Kyrian and Ysera of the Night Fae.
Now, let’s dive into United in Stormwind a little more, and take a look at all the cards that have been revealed so far, with a little help from Chadd Nervig, Senior Game Designer, Card Design and Liv Breeden, Senior Game Designer, Initial Design.
[ignvideo url=”https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/03/15/how-a-tavern-brawl-became-hearthstone-battlegrounds”]
Tradeable Cards
“We’re doing a year-long narrative,” explains Liv Breeden. “The first set being Forged in the Barrens – it’s that low level experience. It’s the Horde experience. It’s the fight for survival, really, as you get your grounding. But levelling up, we’ve gained some skills and we’re going to go to the big city. So on the other side of it is the Alliance set. So that’s where United in Stormwind comes in. It’s less about fighting for survival and it’s about living in the moment. This is a city with castles and walls and people trading back and forth. So we want a lot of buying and selling kind of feels. It’s more like the city set where we’re trading, and less about conflict and fighting. So that’s the gist of it.
“If you look at the new keyword Tradeable, that’s a big piece of that… like, Heavy Plate is gain eight armour. You can just play it like normal, but because it has the Tradeable keyword, you can drag it from your hand to your deck and trade it for a different card for just one mana. So these are cards that can be situational. Like, in a Warrior matchup – a mirror matchup, well, I’d rather have something a little bit more proactive or maybe a board removal tool. I don’t need the armour so I’ll trade that away, try and find something that I can use right now and then go about my day.”
“Tradeable we had at zero mana at one point in time,” says Breeden when I ask about the design process. “Which is really interesting because you’re like, well, it’s simpler if I can just trade this away. It’s super understandable. But from a mathematic perspective, every deck runs these because it makes your deck more consistent. You’re basically running a 28 card deck if you’re including two of them. So we went up in the cost so that this actually does cost something to do. There’s some more factors rather than just, eh, throw it away. You actually have to make that decision. And we think that’s really important.
“The other thing that we tried early on is we had Tradeable decks. The goal of doing Tradeable decks would be you just trade and you have a bunch of things on the board that trigger whenever you trade. So we had tons of Tradeable cards, but we found that the mechanic actually really shines when it’s on a few cards. When it’s really specific that including these in your deck is important, but it’s not so prevalent that I’m spending my entire turn just trading with myself, trying to find the right cards to make my deck super consistent. It’s about – you can make that decision, and it’s an interesting decision, but it’s not so every single turn I’m doing this thing.”
The team tested these support cards for the Tradeable keyword for a while, but found that having Tradeable cards as situational, but flexible, was more fun. In some match-ups, for instance, weapon destruction is a useless effect, so in those games a situational card like Rustrot Viper can simply be traded away. (Unless a Spider Tank will help, of course.) You may also want to utilise the trade functionality based on timing. Fire Sale, the new Mage AOE for instance, may be a valuable tool for the game you’re playing, but in the current situation you may want to dig for something else. That dynamic “brings a whole lot of just moment to moment fun, interesting decisions,” says Nervig.
“It’s actually really important that these cards just feel good on their own,” adds Breeden. “It’s not like I’m giving up something by getting the flexibility. These are cards that are pretty reasonable, like Heavy Plate or Fire Sale. For removal, I’m going to put this in my deck. I don’t feel bad about it. It’s closer to Choose One with Druid, but a little more generic in terms of class identity.”
Questlines
United in Stormwind’s legendary Questline cards are the return of a concept that Hearthstone has played with on several previous occasions. The original Quests debuted with 2017’s Journey to Un’Goro, with one for every class, and while they were hit and miss, the hits shook up the game considerably. Same too with Saviors of Uldum in 2019, which streamlined Quests to have the rewards automatically trigger – as opposed to being cards that had to be played – but was similarly impactful.
This time around, Quests are once again automatically in-hand at the start of the game, and instead of working towards meeting one large condition, have three small, sequential conditions to meet. Each stage that’s passed has a reward, and it all culminates in a big splashy legendary card once the final stage is complete. The team thought about having a passive reward at the end again, but “there is something really nice about the original Quest having that big slam moment of, ‘I’m playing this awesome thing, I have announced that we are entering a new state of the game. I now have spell damage plus three’…” says Breeden, “It’s like, ‘boom, I’m going to destroy you now.’ So I really like that we’ve taken the best of both worlds where it’s like, we get the power along the way, so we can have that big moment at the end. It’s not all or nothing.”
The fact that each of the three parts need to be completed in order adds a significant new wrinkle too. Take the Mage Questline, Sorcerer’s Gambit (above). “There’s a very unique play style here,” says Breeden. “You have to play a Fire, Frost and Arcane [spell] before moving onto the next step. So you can’t just play two Fires and move to the second step and get progress on that second step. No, I have to order which spells do I play? So you do favour putting cheaper spells in[to your deck]. Things like Flurry probably get a little bit more gameplay, which I think is good… the spell damage plus three [reward] is super huge…”
“As much as it sounds like, oh, that could just go in no minion Spell Mage,” says Nervig of what kind of deck will play this Quest, “I think popular versions of Spell Mage right now don’t actually run much Fire. And so it ends up being fairly important that you have an even mix of them, and that they’re cheap enough to mix them in the right orders.”
“That said, Mage gets a lot of Fire stuff this expansion,” adds Breeden.
The other Questline that’s been revealed so far is The Demon Seed for Warlock. This Quest demands that players damage themselves a huge amount over the course of the game, with the incremental rewards being Lifesteal damage to the opponent’s face, and the eventual pay-off being Blightborn Tamsin, who has a battlecry that for the rest of the game, damage you take on your turn damages your opponent instead. It’s a very Warlock-y idea, reliant not only on a lot of cards that damage yourself in addition to the hero power, but a fair amount of heal to ensure you survive to complete the Quest. I ask if this means Warlock will get more heal. “Warlock has a bunch of healing right now, as it stands, with the Soul Shards,” says Liv Breeden. “So I think that’s something we’re actively watching. Because… Warlock has a really good hero power. The downside is, is that you don’t have a lot of ways to heal yourself. And lately we’ve swung the other way where they’ve got a lot of healing. So I think we actually have to watch how much healing we give Warlock.”
The Questline cards also fit in with the team’s ambition to tell a yearlong story, as each features one of the ten mercenaries at the heart of that. “This gives us a way to tell a story of an individual character – their path through the overall Stormwind storyline,” explains Nervig. “[We can] see that, okay, Arcanist Dawngrasp starts out locked up in the stockades, and then they break out and then they escape through a portal room. And then you get the final, legendary minion version of them. Flavour-wise, it was really cool to be able to tell these stories. Normally Hearthstone cards are not the greatest at telling a linear narrative in the collectible cards. It’s more of a just slice of time or a setting. But this gave us that ability and so that was really exciting.”
“These are the breadcrumbs that we can use for single-player to really build off of,” adds Breeden. “So we have these snapshots in time. We can do a little bit more storytelling from the collectible [cards] and… standard play, but we also give these little hints at what’s coming up to players. That way they’re really excited to see how does this actually happen? How does Dawngrasp end up in the stockades? How does Tamsin open up this demonic portal and what happens to Stormwind as a result of that sort of thing?”
[ignvideo url=”https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/03/26/how-the-hearthstone-team-designed-demon-hunter-behind-the-scenes”]
Mounts and Profession Tools
“Mounts are a huge part of World of Warcraft,” says Liv Breeden. “When you hit level 40, you want to get your mount. So these are the mercenaries’ personal mounts. You’ll see Xyrella on her Elekk mount, which operates similarly to a Spikeridge Steed, if you’ve played those cards. But we’ve also got new ones, like Ramming Mount, which give it a little bit of extra juice where it’s like – oh, I’m immune while attacking. And then I can ram it into it. Once you knock the rider off, the ram comes out and you can do it again. And the minion that comes out the back side has the same stats and effect as the buff. So that’s an easy way to remember it.”
Profession Tools, meanwhile, are an analogue to tradeskills in World of Warcraft. “These are cards that go in your weapons slot,” explains Breeden. “They don’t have attack values, but they provide some sort of benefit when you’ve met the requirements, when you’ve got enough crafting reagents. So Runed Mithril Rod is an enchanting rod. If you’ve ever played an enchanter in World of Warcraft, you know that you’re going to need every single green item to break it down to enchant all the other stuff in your hand.”
The Return of Shadowpriest
One of the most intriguing cards that was revealed today would have to be the Priest legendary card Darkbishop Benedictus, as it opens up a whole new (returning) archetype – Shadowpriest. The card has a start of game effect that instantly puts the player into Shadowform (the Priest hero power deals two damage instead of healing two) if all the spells in the player’s deck are Shadow spells.
It’s a significant build-around cost, but an exciting one. “I think it does almost create a new class identity for Priest,” says Liv Breeden, “where it’s like, yeah, I can go face, but at a certain cost. Nearly all of my healing, if it’s not Lifesteal, comes from Holy spells. So there’s a huge cost to going down the Shadow path.” Given Control Priest is quite a polarising deck in the current meta, it’s great to see a whole new direction for the class. “It’s one of their major archetypes [in this set], so they’re going to get a couple of pieces that go along with it,” Breeden says.
In terms of how the new archetype may play, Chadd Nervig comments that “I don’t know if it’s quite as just face-centric as something like Face Hunter. It’s a little more [of a] tempo-y, mid-range-y version of that. You do play some minions, but you’ve got that situational removal. You’ve got these spells that can go face, some limited healing through Lifesteal and two more cards that we haven’t revealed yet, but will fit in that nicely.”
And what of the fact that Priest had been capable of burst damage for many years before key cards like Mind Blast were removed from the Standard format to try and reshape the class’ identity? “There was a while where we were like, okay, Priest, no face damage,” Nervig explains. “But we decided – with making the right restrictions on your play style to go along with it – we think this is a cool thing to do now, to be – okay, if you’re doing the Shadowpriest thing and you’re very upfront about being a Shadowpriest and you have made these concessions to how your deck works, you can do that thing and be good at it. So the Shadowpriest archetype is definitely something I’m really excited for. And it makes you look back at your cards from previous sets and be like, okay, wait, which ones were Shadow? What’s my deck going to look like? What can I use out of those? I love that it re-evaluates or recontextualises the existing cards as well.”
“Shadowform is something that we’ve gone back to quite a few times,” says Breeden. “I think there’s just such a draw for the Priest fantasy of, yeah, there’s the healing part, but also the dark part. There’s just something about Shadowform that we want to keep returning to, and this is a tool that I think we could use in the future as well. We’ve tried cards in the past like ‘if you are in Shadowform, do something.’ And I think that with this sort of base, we can start doing those cards again. And so I’m excited to see what this looks like in the future, too.”
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Darkbishop, incidentally, is one of the two diamond cards coming in the United in Stormwind set.
Flightmaster Dungar
Another interesting card is Flightmaster Dungar, which lets you choose one of three flightpaths, each of which has a different reward… and requires a different wait. “The flight path is how you get in and out of Stormwind most of the time after you’ve been there once, when you’re playing World of Warcraft,” explains Nervig. “And Flightmaster Dungar’s your flightmaster there… [the card text] says, choose a flight path and go Dormant. You get the choice of where do you want to fly to? The three choices are Westfall, Ironforge and Eastern Plaguelands.
“And you get a different reward for that when he wakes up, based on how far away you flew. Westfall is only one turn away and it summons an adventurer, like in Wailing Caverns. Ironforge is a little further away. It takes three turns to get there and it restores 10 health to your hero. It’s a little more of a defensive play. And then if you want to go all the way to the Eastern Plaguelands, after five turns that does 12 damage split between all enemies, including face… So it’s a pretty flexible card, but it also has a lot of strategy around thinking about what you’re going to need X turns from now.”
“If I’m a Hunter and I’m super early in the game,” says Breeden, “maybe I’ll go for that more damage later because I’ll need that last push. But if they need the 2/2 now, then they can just get it next turn. And of course, Hunters are just going to skip that second option because they just don’t need healing,” she laughs. “And if you’ve ever taken those flight paths in World of Warcraft you’ll know that their lengths are appropriate… going to the Plaguelands? I’m going to go take a nap before I come back.”
Coolest of all, Flightmaster Dungar is available now for free as a celebration of the announcement, so log in to ensure you don’t miss out.
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United in Stormwind will be released on August 3 (August 4 in ANZ) and is already looking hugely promising. There are two pre-order bundles available now. The United in Stormwind bundle includes 60 expansion packs, two random Legendary cards and a Lady Katrana Prestor card back. The United in Stormwind Mega Bundle, on the other hand, includes 80 regular United in Stormwind card packs, 5 United in Stormwind golden card packs, two random golden Legendary cards from the set, a Lady Katrana Prestor alternate hero and card back, perks for Battlegrounds that last until the next expansion and the Ve’nari alternate bartender for Battlegrounds.
Cam Shea is an IGN veteran based in Sydney, Australia. He’s determined to keep making content about Breath of the Wild.