From Azeroth With Love -- Part 1: Premise and Theme

Hello everyone!

In the past I did a video series on my Ahn'Qiraj Adventure, and while the video series was fun to put together, I found that the r/customhearthstone community didn't really take to the format. For my *New* adventure, tentatively titled "From Azeroth With Love: A Hearthstone Adventure", I thought I'd approach it more in a blog style.

As the first entry in the series this will cover the premise of the adventure, which is inspired by the League of Explorers adventure, as well as the themes and mechanics I will be exploring.

Card Design Style Guide

When I look at cards, I'm very critical of grammatical errors. I'm quite the pedant, actually. I thought what I'd do is create a tool that could be referred to when designing cards to help people in /r/customhearthstone create cards that comply with Hearthstone's implied style guide. Of course, Blizzard being Blizzard, there are exceptions to many of these, but hopefully this page can help improve the quality of cards we see posted.

Randomness in Hearthstone - Extra Credits FTW

Last time I mentioned that Ram Wrangler was one of my least favourite cards. The reason that I gave at the time is I didn't like the amount of variance in the card. It can summon anything from a 1 mana to a 9 mana card directly onto the battlefield. To me, as a designer this feels not very good, but I couldn't put my finger on exactly why that was until I watched this new Extra Credits video:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V5eq4IQ6Go

Go watch it. I'll wait...

Design Breakdown - Discover

Hot off the presses from BlizzCon our good friends at Team 5 have a new Hearthstone expansion coming out _this_ Thursday! I'm excited for the design of a bunch of the cards they've released (which have all been revealed), but I thought I'd waste some ink here on the mechanic that they've added with this expansion:

Discover 

According to the powers that be "each time you play a card with the new Discover key word, you'll get to choose between three random cards that can be used by your class."

Card Considerations - What to think about when proposing a card

I thought I'd start this blog off with a bit of a checklist. Ultimately our job as want-to-be designers is to create a polished card that excites our readers with the possibility of the card. We want our readers to look at the cards and say, "Yes, I want this card in Hearthstone!"

When analyzing cards on /r/customhearthstone, I'll refer to this checklist, often linking and citing it on the sub-reddit. The hope with this article is to encourage other designers to review it, and create better cards as a result.