SDCC 2017: We Discuss “Knights of the Frozen Throne” Hearthstone Expansion At Blizzard’s Ice Cream Citadel with Jason Chayse

Josh and I were fortunate enough to get a chance to sit down with Hearthstone’s Production Director Jason Chayse at Blizzard’s Ice Cream Citadel during San Diego Comic Con last week. Josh is a newcomer to the popular digital card game, while Courtney is an avid Hearthstone fan and former World of Warcraft addict.

Courtney: I was confused about the new update when I first saw it, because it seemed like you could only get the expansion if you paid for it. But you can actually get the packs by playing like in the past?

Jason: Yeah so we’re actually changing the single player content. We’ve taken the best aspects of adventures and expansions and fused them into this sort of uber Hearthstone release.

So you’ll have a pack you can open, and on top of that there are going to be eight free missions, and there will be an introductory prologue, and once you defeat the introductory prologue everyone will be given a free Death Knight hero card, which will be a new card type we’ll be releasing.

There will be two more wings of missions after that, which will be free, and you’ll earn card packs by defeating those. At the very end you’ll fight the Lich King. This is also something new , he’ll play slightly differently depending on what class you play against him with. “Ok, so this is Rexxar, the hunter, so we’ll play this way against you, or Jaina the mage, so we’ll play this against you, and that’s the first time we’ve tried that too.

Courtney: That’s been the way I’ve defeated previous heroes in the past, realising that the would be weaker against a certain class.

Jason: Yeah! It should give you a run for your money.

Courtney: With Hearthstone, it’s obviously based on World of Warcraft, are you going to be introducing any of the other Blizzard franchises like Blizzard like Overwatch or Diablo?

Jason: You know, we feel like we have a lot of room still within the Warcraft universe to keep expanding with Hearthstone. There are no shortage of amazing characters or locations or stories we have left to tell. Every once in awhile you’ll see one of the other franchises bleed in, like there’s the Overwatch cardback, there are some Starcraft flavored card backs, but we want to do in it a way that will still feel like they can be part of the Warcraft universe.

Courtney: And there are going to be new boards? My favourite part is to click on the different little things while I’m waiting.

Jason: Our art team does an amazing job with those each time. They come up with amazing things you can trigger and discover. There will be a brand new Ice Rend flavored board that would be appropriate for the next release.

Josh: I literally just downloaded the game, so I don’t have as much time to play yet. Learning a new card game is overwhelming at the start, but everything seems so accessible, so easy to get into so, it’s easy to see why it’s resonated with so many people. You can either spend a lot of time with it and build huge card libraries or just play with friends for fun. And having that tie to Warcraft is great as well, because if you’re not ready to jump into a totally new card game but you have that familiarity with Warcraft, it helps ease the transition.

Jason: If there are particular characters you remember from your Warcraft days, you can go “Oh here’s Ragnaros doing his stuff, or here is a classic character, the heroes you know, like Thrall  Uther. But what you said about making it accessible to new players to get in, that was a big priority for us when we were first designing Hearthstone. We were always huge believers in collectable card games, and we play a ton of them going way  back when, and we felt the fun was  buried too deep for people who had never played them before, so that was our main goal. How do we take the fun parts that people love about collectable card games and make them a little easier to access so people could get in and start having fun in the first five minutes.

Josh: Now that you mention other card games, what other sources did you draw inspiration from?

Jason: From all of them. We had people who played Magic the Gathering and the other classic games but we  had people who played some digital ones that have been around , so we drew a lot of inspiration from all of them. So we thought about what we loved from the genre as a whole, and how we could hold onto that, and what we could improve on.

Josh: With the new inclusion of the Lich King, if you could chose any character from Warcraft that isn’t in the game yet, which would be the big addition you would want to make to Hearthstone?

Jason: That’s a good question. I think we’re always looking for ways to stay current with the new expansions that the World of Warcraft team is coming out with, and how that could be introduced in a meaningful way. We’ve added a lot of them, a good example is with the Whispers of the Old Gods expansion, there were some classic old gods, these beings from outer space, and we were really inspired by that, and had to figure out who these gods were and did a lot of design with the original World of Warcraft team to realise what these gods look like because they hadn’t been fully sketched out before. So who’s to say in the months to come who might show up.

Courtney: You just released the new Quest cards, are you looking to add new cards like that to help revamp old decks and make the game feel fun and new to those of us who have been playing for a while?

Jason: That’s always our goal. With each new set we want to introduce new cards, new mechanics that mix up the meta, and leads to new types of decks that you may not have seen before. One example with the new Knights of the Frozen Throne set, is a card called Prince Keleseth, it’s a 2 mana card for 2/2. But it has an interesting battlecry: if you have no cards in your deck that cost 2 mana, then all your minion cards are buffed by +1/+1. SO it’s an example of a build around card type.

Courtney:  THAT SOUNDS GREAT! I WANT THAT CARD!

Jason: Yeah we’ve excited for it. So you look at it like, “Huh can I make a deck that doesn’t require any 2 mana cost cards? What if I try this? Or I try this combinations of cards?” The benefit can be pretty powerful to get +1 for everybody. The design team is always thinking of different build around ideas like that that push the meta and deck creation in new ways that haven’t been done before.

Courtney: You guys also came up with the potion creation cards, and I love those.

Jason: There’s another example that we’re going  to be introducing into the new set, the first time we’re introducing a new type of card called the Hero Card. You’ve been playing for a while so you know about Ragnaros, and Jaraxxus, which can replace your hero –

Courtney : A great death saving card!

Jason: Exactly. So this time, we;re going to introduce them for all classes. SO you can play Deathstalker Rexxar, and as soon as you play him from your hand he’ll fly up onto the board and corrupt and replace the  base Rexxar, and he’s an unholy , death knight version of rexxar. He’ll give you 5 additional armor, he’ll do 2 damage to all your opponents minions when he comes into play,  but his real power to play with him, which is like the potion thing you were talking about, his hero power replaces the bow which does 2 damage to the enemy hero, and instead becomes something called “build a beast”. So what it will do, is you choose it, and it will present it with 3 different beasts from the game, you select one, and it brings up the next set of cards (another 3 beasts) and it will stitch those two beasts into an uber beast, sort of Frankenstein style, sort of like with the potions only now you’re making a beast that can go on the board and fight on your behalf.

Courtney: Which is so cool because that’s something I remember seeing when  I played the Lich King expansion in World of Warcraft when it came out, all the corrupted constructs wandering around.

Jason: So you’ll get that with playing the heroes in the new set. There will be a ton of references, so in addition to the cards we have the missions we talked about. So the bosses will be Professor Putricide that people fought in IceCrown Citadel in the raid, Blood Queen Lana’thel which is a well known boss, they’ll all make their appearances in Hearthstone with similar types of mechanics and ideas translated into Hearthstone as well.

Courtney: I’m way excited for this now as well.

Jason: We’re really excited for it as well.

Courtney: One last thing I wanted to confirm. You said all the side adventures are free, so we don’t even have to pay in game gold this time?

Jason: Not even gold. You will have all the missions unlocked. But sort of like in the past on launch day you’ll have access to the prologue and then you have access to the first wing with a pack prize. Then the next week you’ll have access to another wing, then the final wing with the Lich King waiting at the end.

Courtney: I’m really excited for this new set now. I think I’m going to really start getting into the game again, since I took a break from it.

Jason: I think you’re going to love it. We’re also making some changes with Fireside Gatherings that we’re really excited about. We have this idea that the best way to experience Hearthstone is to play in person with other people who also love Hearthstone and play around a kitchen table or cafe bar, and play collectively as a group. We launched the program about 3 years about when Hearthstone itself came out, and it’s been growing dramatically since then have had about 10 thousand Fireside Gatherings across the world. But we’re about to do something within the game itself where it can detect if you’re playing within a Fireside Gathering,you’ll basically register that you’re playing in a real location, and it will recognise that you’re playing with your friends and you can customise your own tavern and name it, and it unlocks a new game mode called a fireside brawl that you can only access if you’re at a Fireside Gathering.

What do you guys think about the changes coming in the newest expansion? What are you most excited for? Let us know in the comments below!