By Cam Shea

Welcome to the second part of my interview with Hearthstone senior designer Mike Donais. In this part of the conversation he discusses designing the Jade mechanic, the thinking behind the Grimy Goons’ hand-buffing and why the idea of red mana – yes it was a thing! – didn’t work. We go through designing each of the new Reno-style cards and Mike reveals that there are unlikely to be any more “no duplicates” cards any time soon. Oh, and we also discuss some cards that didn’t make the cut or that evolved significantly – complete with placeholder art! Enjoy!

(Click here to read the first part, which covers Mike’s thoughts on the meta, the evolution of Small-Time Buccaneer and the possibility of ladder changes.)

IGN: Let’s discuss the new mechanics introduced in Mean Streets. You guys really came to the table with some cool ideas for this set of cards. Let’s do Jade first. How did this mechanic come about and how much did it change over the course of design?

Mike Donais: Jade actually came about pretty early on from initial design. It was always the idea that this group of people would be trying to summon Jade statues. Flavour-wise, it made sense. Mechanically, they were always getting bigger as you played them. The thing that changed the most was how to show it to the users. We had to do a lot of new tech to get the numbers to change as they were growing. A lot of people don’t notice, but the tech, and the way the card reads in your account manager, your collection manager, is different than how it reads in your hand. It’s different when it’s in your play, in the history bar. A lot of tech was added so that the number that it shows off is what you would expect and want it to show.

IGN: Was that mechanic always exactly as it is now?

Mike Donais: Yeah, the mechanic was the same. A lot of the cards changed in various ways. We wanted the decks to feel a little bit different. For example, the Druid has a very interesting Gadgetzan Auctioneer infinite late-game deck, with this dream of having all these Jade Golems in the end. I think that’s a really cool and scary mechanic. Whenever we come up with a really scary mechanic, I’m like, “Wow, uh, that scares me a lot.” We can ship it because people are going to be excited about it, but let’s just make sure we can first, because those are dangerous cards.

IGN: Jade Idol is definitely a card I’d love to discuss with you and find out just how nervous you guys were shipping that out?

Mike Donais: Yeah, Jade Idol is a perfect card for this, “Oh my God, I’m worried about this card, but I’m also excited.” Everyone who reads it goes, “You can’t possibly print that,” and that made me want to print it if I can, because I know that everybody in the real world will also be excited about it.

IGN: How difficult was it to anticipate how it might play out? On one hand, it’s the hard counter to control. It just stops fatigue strategies completely. It’s infinite value. It’s all this stuff, but it’s something that takes time to ramp up. Has it played out how you thought it might?

Mike Donais: In the case of Jade Idol, yeah, pretty much exactly how we expected, which is nice. It means we got lucky. It is a cool card. It’s very exciting for people to use and it created a whole new deck… Basically all three of the Jade classes have people experimenting with the Jade cards in their decks, the Druid being the most played and the most successful so far, but it’s really cool to see.

It’s going to change control for the next two years. I think it’s good for a control to change, so it’s not always like, “Well, Control Warrior’s the best control deck.” Now it’s like Control Warrior’s getting played, but also, there’s this Druid deck.

IGN: Control Warrior was kind of killed outright for a few weeks there, and now it’s coming back. For me, Jade Idol is… I don’t know if it’s a very fun card to play against if you are playing control, because there’s this looming sense of inevitability… If you’re a Reno Priest, say, you have to generate so much tempo to try and get the game before the Jade gets out of control. I guess that’s the strategy of it, but it can feel a little bit futile sometimes.

Mike Donais: Yeah, one of the things that we like in decks is for when you do your thing, the game actually ends. Druid does that. Jade Druid ends the game because it’s playing an 8/8 and 9/9 and 10/10. It’s not going to be messing around killing you slowly over the period of a thousand turns. Control Warrior certainly does that. Control Warrior just tanks up, end turn, tank up, end turn, and honestly, I think that’s less fun than the Druid deck, which either overwhelms you or say if you’re playing Reno Dragon Priest, you might actually just play some dragons and kill them, while they’re playing their small Jade creatures.

IGN: I guess the argument is about the skill cap with Jade Druid against Control Warrior being a bit more straightforward to play, because you’re just ramping up your minions.

Mike Donais: Before you played it too much, I think it feels kind of simple, but once you add Auctioneer to pretty much any deck, the deck suddenly becomes a lot more skill testing. Whether you play your Auctioneer on like turn six, or seven, or eight – this is true in Rogue or Druid – it’s really, really significantly different, and whether you use your idols to create more idols in your deck or to actually summon minions is really important. How you save your other spells to combo with your Auctioneer, and your Innervates and so on… All that is a really important part of the match-up, and if you get a little bit behind against a mid-range control deck, they might just kill you with creatures, or your hand might just be empty because you didn’t use your Auctioneer properly and you didn’t draw enough cards off of it. Either one of those, I think, makes the matchup a little more skill testing…

IGN: True, and it gives the build the potential for really explosive turns. You might think you’re doing well against Jade Druid, but really, they’ve just been biding their time for some crazy Fandral [Staghelm] combo or going off with Auctioneer. It’s a fun deck to play, don’t get me wrong. Just sometimes facing it, you’re like, “Aww man. I know what’s gonna happen here. I’ve got to hope I get the cards in the right order to take this one.”

How much juggling was there in terms of deciding how many Jade cards should be printed per class and tri-class? How difficult was that to work out? Was it a bit like the old C’Thun kind of gamble?

Mike Donais: Yeah, it was a lot like C’Thun, where we were trying a lot of different experiments. One of the things we talked a lot about is once you put one Jade card in your deck, it increases the value of the next Jade card. For Shaman, you want to put Jade Lightning in your deck. It’s just a good card. That means the next card, like Jade Claws is good. Once you have Jade Claws and Jade Lightning in your deck, what’s the next? You’re going to put in the Legendary, because it’s good, even though it wouldn’t have been good by itself. Once you have all those, you’re tempted to put more and more Jade because each one is better. That’s been a really interesting, tough thing to balance.

I think it played out pretty good. We’ve seen a wide variety of Jade decks, even in Shaman. A lot of people are playing the aggressive versions with Pirates right now, but a lot of people are also experimenting with like, “Well, how good is it if I have one or two more Jade cards?”

IGN: Will there ever be any more Jade cards printed for the game?

Mike Donais: Don’t expect any more Jade because it’s very much a theme in the Mean Streets of Gadgetzan, but there might be something that works with Battle Cry or Death Rattle, like Shadow Step or something like that, that suddenly makes the Jade decks better. Brann is really good with Jade Claws. You get two golems that way. I hope to see more stuff like that happening.

IGN: In terms of that network synergy concept, how much testing went into the Arena side of things with Jade and getting the find bonus for Mean Streets cards right? The Jade mechanic could have been pretty oppressive in Arena if the bonus was too high.

Mike Donais: Yeah, it’s a tough balance because if the bonus is too high, then it’s overwhelming and you’d want to always pick a Jade class. If the bonus is too low, then you’d just want to avoid all the Jade cards completely because you don’t get enough of them. It’s somewhere in between now. If you get lucky, Jade can be good. If you don’t get lucky, Jade’s average to below average. The whole challenge of Arena is something that we need to address and as we go forward, we’re talking more about other solutions for Arena to make it more fun.

IGN: Is that something that you will likely do soon, make changes?

Mike Donais: It’s the kind of thing where we’ll take steps, small steps over time. We’ll do a little step in some number of months, and then later, we’ll do another step, and another step as more tech comes online.

IGN: Right, got it. Let’s talk about the Grimy Goons and the hand-buffing mechanic, and the evolution of that concept. How did that come about?

Mike Donais: A while ago, we did a Shaman Legendary [- The Mistcaller]. When you played it, it buffs your hand and deck. That was really cool. A lot of people were excited about the idea of it. We’ve always wanted to do more of it, so this was a good time. The theme for the Grimy Goons was the weapons smuggling, where you’re getting weapons, which buffs the guys because you’re handing them to them. We liked that idea.

[But] how can Paladins and Warriors and Hunters be different? That was important to us, so we decided Paladins would get the ability to buff their whole hand, and with that, synergize differently with their minions. Warriors would buff taunt minions and they’d have bigger buffs. Hunters would buff beasts and they would have bigger buffs, but only single target.

Then we realised we needed to have at least one card that’s an obvious combo with the hand-buffing, so each class had at least one guy who was like, “Oh, if you buff up this guy’s attack, he’s gonna be even better.” I think that made it a little bit more understandable why you would want to do this and why it would be good.

IGN: Particularly for Paladin, it seemed like potentially an insanely strong mechanic. Right now, though, Paladin and Hunter are the least-played classes. Do you think that’s just a factor of the current meta and the fact that there’s quite a lot of very fast decks at the moment?

Mike Donais: Yeah, part of the hand-buffing design is you give up a little bit of power on the board this turn so that you get a bunch of power in your hand, which will eventually hit the board. The total number of stats is a very good deal. Often you’re getting +4/+4 for 2 mana or something like that, but you have to wait and get that all out on the board later. That kind of trade off isn’t something you want to make right now when you’re fighting against the Aggro Pirate decks.

IGN: Do you think that Grimy Goons will come into their own after the next rotation?

Mike Donais: It’s possible they do. It’s also possible maybe they get, like, a small taunt minion so when they buff that suddenly it’s – oh wow, I buffed the perfect minion to stop Pirates with. I can totally see a bunch of different ways that they could come in.

IGN: How difficult was the internal testing for that mechanic, particularly since there’s three different iterations of it?

Mike Donais: It was pretty tough. I would say at the end of the testing, we pretty much knew how strong it was. We knew that Paladin was probably the most interesting to play with, when you buff your whole hand. There’s a certain amount of reliability there. There’s also more potential, because it’s more build around. You want to fill your hand with minions and play very few spells and stuff like that.

I think I’ve seen that reflected on ladder. I’ve seen a lot of people experimenting with that in different types of decks – aggro decks, with 1-cost minions and control decks with Acolyte of Pain is very good with hand-buffing, of course. I think there’s still some more experimentation that’s going to happen there. I wouldn’t be surprised if some version of Paladin gets played more.

IGN: How about Hunter? What do you think Hunter needs to succeed right now?

Mike Donais: I think they just need some more cool themes. They’ve got some, individually, really good cards in the set. Their build-arounds for hand-buffs were very good, but it just doesn’t seem to be the day for them. Normally, they’re good in aggressive metas, but they’re just a little bit slower than the Pirates and they don’t have a 2-cost weapon to support Pirates of their own.

IGN: That’s true. Let’s move on to the Kabal. Were potions always a key thing for them or did you experiment with some other ideas?

Mike Donais: Actually, yeah, Kabal was completely different for a very long time. We had the idea of if you spend all of your mana in a turn – they were always about mana – if you spend all of your mana in a turn, you get a bonus. We didn’t really like that, because if you’re already spending all your mana in a turn, that’s already a good thing. You’re already winning and doing well. We changed it to if you don’t spend all your mana in a turn, you get a bonus, and that’s very unintuitive. Leaving mana up just didn’t feel good.

We also experimented with red mana crystals, this new mechanic that somehow turned your mana crystals red. We tried a few things there we didn’t really like and then finally, I was thinking, I really enjoy Reno decks. A lot of our players on Ladder really enjoy Reno decks. They want it to be tier one, but right now, it’s not tier one. Let’s boost it up a little bit to tier one or tier two so that instead of just playing it for fun, they can play it and do reasonably well. We decided that one of the Kabal mechanics would be Reno cards for all four of the Legendaries.

IGN: That was a fantastic idea and we’ll come back to that. Tell me more about red mana because a lot of people were speculating about that as a concept [in the pre-release phase]. What was the idea?

Mike Donais: One of the ideas was there would be various cards in the set that turned your mana crystals red, down in your display, and then there’d be other cards that said that if you have three red mana crystals, then Battle Cry deals 3 damage or something like that, or this guy gets +1/+1 for each red mana crystal you have.

IGN: Was it purely just too complicated a concept? Was that why you didn’t go ahead with it?

Mike Donais: I would say it wasn’t elegant enough. One of the issues we had was it didn’t display well on the phone. On the phone, you don’t really see your mana crystals half the time. But that wasn’t the show-stopper, I don’t think. I think it was just like – why would you have a minion that Battle Cry turns one of your mana crystals red? Is that cool enough?

IGN: It’s kind of a delayed payoff like the Grimy Goons hand-buffing, I guess.

Mike Donais: Yes, but at least you understood when you played it what the payoff was, but the ones that were just turning your mana crystals red didn’t immediately get anything. We’re going to think about that some more. Maybe there’s a space for it, somehow. We’ll keep experimenting in the future. Maybe someday we’ll come up with a great plan for it.

IGN: It’s an interesting idea because some of the other CCGs out there have bespoke resources for classes and more swing counterplay potential, which might be something that Hearthstone could look into?

Mike Donais: Like back and forth swing, like who’s winning kind of thing?

IGN: In Shadowverse, for instance, you evolve your minions. You can play a minion and evolve it to boosts its stats and it can trade with an enemy minion instantaneously. Then there’s also a mechanic [Enhance] where you can pay additional mana costs for an additional effect of a card.

Mike Donais: Yeah. I think that’s sort of like charge a minion, which is fine, for Shadowverse. I think that’s an okay mechanic, and I like a kicker-type mechanic, too. I think those are cool. The general idea of games swinging back and forth I think is really fun and I think that we should make more cards in that space. We’ve been doing so. Board wipes do that. Big taunt minions can sometimes do that. Big heals can do that. I think there’s always room for that. We should just make sure we don’t overdo it. Reno healing you for 29 is actually a great feeling for you…

IGN: There’s certainly a lot of board clears in this set, which I think was really important to include. Let’s come back to the Kabal as the Reno class and chat through designing each of those cards. Kazakus is, I think, pretty much everybody’s favourite card from the set. It’s just an incredibly exciting card. I’m fascinated to hear about how you guys came up with that one.

Mike Donais: We actually didn’t have a design for what is currently called Inkmaster Solia. We had designs for the other cards and we were trying to figure out one for her. Because she was a tattoo artist, it occurred to me that she might be also good at writing magical scrolls, so I pitched the idea that her ability would be “Battle Cry: Create Your Own Spell.” She would do the scroll as part of the effect. I was like, “This is what it’s gonna be. It sounds really cool. What does that mean?” And Peter [Whalen]’s like, “Oh, here’s what it means. You choose a mana cost, you choose an effect.” I’m like, “Yeah, of course, that’s what it means.”

That was her ability for a short time and it was fantastic. We all loved it. We loved it so much that it got promoted to be the leader of the Kabal’s ability because it was the coolest thing. At a similar time, we decided that the “no duplicates” mechanic isn’t quite enough for the Kabal. It only goes on the Legendaries. We need another mechanic for the rest of the Kabal. And something that they were doing a lot was they were mixing potions in the flavour, so we decided that potions would be their sub-theme. The leader of the Kabal, instead of writing a scroll with tattoo ink, he would be crafting a potion. We renamed all of their spells to be potions, except for one, and we made their common tri-class card “Add a Random Potion to Your Hand.”

IGN: With Kazakus, how difficult was it to settle on that 1, 5, 10 mana cost idea?

Mike Donais: That actually came about pretty easily. What happened was within about five minutes of Peter and I having the conversation of “This guy’s gonna let you create a custom spell,” I basically sat down in my design doc and I just typed out exactly what all the potions are going to be. They changed about 5% after that, a few numbers changed. The Polymorph one changed significantly, but other than that, it mostly just all happened in the same day.

IGN: Wow. You didn’t whittle it down from a really long list?

Mike Donais: No. We had two other potion effects that we were play-testing. One was a Thoughtsteal thing, where you take cards from your opponent, then there was one more. I forget what it is now, but one more effect. We wanted to capture here’s some things that Mages do, here’s some things that Priests do, and here’s some things that Warlocks do.

So we had you can summon a demon, you can do AOE damage, you can buff the health of your minions, you can resurrect – all things that these three classes could do and shared with a bunch of different classes. The last one that felt a bit weird was the armour one. We thought it was important because it brought a really good angle if you were desperate, you could have this thing.

IGN: The armour option’s definitely helped me a few times. I also love resurrecting my Doomsayers, too. That’s lots of fun. You mention the sheeping mechanic changed – what was the initial idea for that?

Mike Donais: Originally, it was sheep 1 minion, sheep 2 minions, sheep all the minions. Then we changed it to 1 mana, sheep a random minion. It could be yours or your opponent’s. Then for 5 mana, sheep a random enemy minion. Then 10 mana, sheep all minions. But in the end, 1 mana to sheep a minion was super-good if you got it, but only if there was only one enemy minion and it was Ragnaros, and super-bad if you hit your own minion. It felt really bad. Eventually, we just took away the 1 mana ability on that potion. That’s the one effect that has no 1 mana effect. It’s just 5 and you sheep an enemy minion and then a 10, you sheep all minions.

IGN: Sure. Before we move on to the other Reno cards, how happy are you with the potion concept and the range of potions that you guys came up with? Why wasn’t it more explicitly keyworded, just so it’s clear that they’re in a pool together?

Mike Donais: I was pretty happy with it. I think that it’s a fun concept. It really is a lore-driven design – it’s about the flavour. Mechanically, they didn’t have to be potions. We could’ve just done anything there for names and flavour, but I think it felt right. It felt like – yeah, these guys are creating potions. I understand what they’re doing with their time during the day. They’ve got a big bathtub full of liquids. They’re drinking from it. They’re doing weird stuff with it. They’re selling it. It felt very good, lore-wise.

Mechanically, I think it worked great. These things could’ve been whatever. They could’ve been non-potions. Each of the individual designs was good, I think. Each of them filled the roles we were going for. Did you have a second part to the question?

IGN: Just about the keywording of potions.

Mike Donais: Oh yeah. Often, when we make mechanics for cycles of cards, we have to decide whether we’re going to put it in the name, if we’re going to do a keyword, or we’re just going to write the same words but not keyword it. The Joust mechanic was a great example of that. The Joust mechanic was not keyworded. They just all had similar words on the cards, right?

Then we put Jouster in some of the card names to get people to call it Joust. We used the word Lance a few times to get people to call it Joust. Then with the Forbidden cycle, it’s a good example where we, again, didn’t use a keyword but we used Forbidden in all of the card names so that people would think of it as a cycle, sort of a keyword. It’s good to think about all those things and not put a keyword unless you actually think you benefit from using a keyword.

IGN: Gotcha. Just a slight side question, in an interview with you a few months ago, we were talking about Priest and upcoming sets for Priest, and you were saying that you really wanted Priest to be able to do tricky Priest things. We saw some of those cards in this set, like, Pint-Size Potion and Potion of Madness. They’re really fun and very Priest-like in terms of class identity, but ultimately, the more OP cards in Mean Streets were the Dragon synergy cards.

What are your plans for pushing Priest in the future? Dragon Priest, right now, is a very viable deck. I’d love to see Priest have more of those tricky options that you spoke about back in that interview.

Mike Donais: Now that we’ve embraced that design philosophy, you’ll see it more and more throughout sets, right from an early design phase and as it goes on. It’s a similar thing that we’ve done with Rogue. It’s also one of the tricky classes, we’ve decided – those two classes. Even though this set was a little bit light on it, it was where kind of a philosophy solidification happened. I think, as we go on, you’ll see more and more of that.

IGN: Yeah, cool. Dragon Priest has really come together as a strong archetype.

Mike Donais: Yeah… People really wanted to play Dragons… and they’re going to rotate out soon, so let’s deliver on that fantasy, make it strong, make it very strong. Make it a high-tier deck that people can win matches with. It’s going to rotate out in a few months anyway, or at least half of it will, so let’s make it a great deck and let people live the dream.

Continues