Hearthstone 10-Year Anniversary Interview: "Just The Beginning"

11.03.2024 - 17:11 / screenrant.com / Deven McClure

celebrates its tenth anniversary this month, and developer Blizzard has found many different ways to celebrate the deckbuilder's long history. Dubbing it the Year of the Pegasus, over the course of 2024 fans will see several updates, additions, events, and rewards. This year will also have three new card expansions, beginning with the whimsical, toy-themed later this month.

Ever since its release in 2014, has consistently received multiple expansions every year, all of which have introduced over one hundred thematically-unique cards each. Creating new sets that ingratiate well with the overall game is no simple process, with each one taking about a full calendar year from start to finish. From the music-themed to the extremely powerful expansion, these releases have consistently given players engaging mechanics and fresh synergies to work with, while also expanding upon the game's lore through gorgeous art and delightful flavor text.

interviewed senior game designer Cora Georgiou and executive producer Nathan Lyons-Smith to discuss the expansion pack process, how the title has evolved, and what the future holds for the deckbuilder.

Screen Rant: I am very excited to talk about 10 years of . First, I would love to talk about, just from a big picture standpoint, how you guys would describe what the life cycle of an expansion is. How do you decide when it's time for a new one, and how long does it take from conception to completion?

Cora Georgiou: So, after 10 years, we have ironed out a pretty good process, thankfully, for the creation of an expansion. TLDR, it takes about a year from conception to ship for an expansion, and that includes the period of time where we're working with the rest of the team with narrative designers to figure out what expansion we want to make. And then we have usually about four to six weeks of mechanics time where we work on keywords and major mechanics per set.

That's where we make things like Colossal, or Titans, or Excavate. And then from there, we have another several months on initial design where we do first draft of all of the cards in the set. We go through each of the classes and we say, «What text do we want to make this time? What archetypes do we think players are going to like? How do we use the new mechanics in a really interesting way to build these decks and to flesh out what 10 cards in each class are going to look like?»

And when we've done that — usually that's about a 16-week total period — we hand off to final design, they do all of the balance, they do redesign work. If there's any holes at that time, we'll work with them to try to make sure that the set is in a really wonderful state. And then thankfully from there, we still have four more months