![]() And we wanted the hero power to go along with that to be pretty tame because that's a pretty extreme effect. And you don't have two copies in your deck. Now you have your hero card, it recasts all your spells, that's pretty cool, it's not a spell, so you don't run into this weird thing of your spell casting your other spell that casts all your spells. So we put that on Zul'jin and it just worked. And one of the problems with that minion was you couldn't put it in the Spell Hunter deck, because the Spell Hunter deck forced you to have no minions. And we had the legendary minion “ten mana: battlecry - cast all the spells you cast this game” already. So we pivoted to try this completely different version of a hero card, where most of the power is in the battlecry. ![]() ![]() That's not the most fun gameplay when everything's just about the hero power instead of the cards you put in your deck and how the rest of the game plays out. All of those were okay, but they were kind of in the space where once you played Zul'jin, the rest of the game was just about, "Does my hero power get up to enough damage to murder my opponent?" And that feels pretty bad. We tried a version where it scaled over time, so each time you used it, it got stronger. We tried a couple versions of that where it was just the next hero power usage got the bonus damage as you took hits. Also, because you were getting a weapon, you could kind of do it yourself, where you're making sure your hero got damaged. Dean's giving me a look - I don't think that ever made it to final design, because that was pretty extreme. So if you were Zul'jin, you were a Berserker, and if your opponent attacked you with seven Silver Hand Recruits, now your hero power is doing eight damage a turn. And whenever your hero took damage, the hero power would go up by one. And then his hero power was deal some number of damage, I think one damage, to any target of your choice. We tried a ton of things for him… One of his battlecries was draw a weapon from your deck because he was this Berserker. IGN: Tell me a little bit about some of the other experiments for what that card could have been. So we wanted the hero card, if we were doing it in Hunter - because we wanted Zul'jin as this cool character - to make sense in that context. This is the last expansion for when all of the Kobolds & Catacombs Spell Hunter cards are legal. But that was where we ended up, and we thought that was a fun thing to add as Spell Hunter has its last hurrah. As for talking about some of the other versions of Zul'jin, that wasn't always where he lived. It’s useful… but we wanted to counteract that insane battle cry with a pretty tame and straightforward hero power. a lot of his power - 80 plus percent of it - is in his battlecry. It lets you target your Hunter Hero power, basically. And so his battlecry is this really powerful, over the top, crazy thing where he's just this flurry of axes and kills all the stuff, summons a bunch of beasts, sets a bunch of traps, and then his hero power is pretty small. Instead of having a lot of the power loaded into the hero power, a lot of his power - 80 plus percent of it - is in his battlecry. Zul'jin is actually a pretty different version of that. Boom as a hero card, with a hero power that's actually five hero powers. Boom, his hero power is random, turn over turn, and the way that he generates value is also random - it's discover a mech.ĭr. ![]() So we've tried to create less of that sort of repetitive long term experience. Cards like Rexxar, or Jaina are really cool to do but they can feel pretty bad if you're losing the game slowly over the course of 15 or 20 turns. On the design side, some of the stuff that we've learned the ones that tend to have infinite late game value with the hero power can be pretty frustrating to play against. that tend to have infinite late game value with the hero power can be pretty frustrating to play against. It doesn't really matter how powerful they are, even the ones that don't see a ton of play, like Death Knight Thrall, people still get really excited about. Boom, and people really liked those cards. We took a set off and then we brought them back with Hagatha and then Dr. When we did the Death Knights in Knights of the Frozen Throne, people really liked them then. Peter Whalen: The biggest lesson I've learned about hero cards is that people love hero cards. ![]()
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