Ben Brode is one of the Senior Designers for Hearthstone, and is very vocal about the balance of the game, recently he sat down for an interview with Tim Clark over at pcgamer.com about the powerful cards and effect of The Grand Tournament expansion. This wide ranged interview hits a lot of popular points, especially on the latest tier one deck Secret Paladin:
PC Gamer: Of the new cards, the biggest breakout success has been Mysterious Challenger, which has given rise to Secret Paladin decks. Did the card seem this powerful in testing?
BB: We tested Mysterious Challenger quite a bit, but the point of that card is to inspire players to build a Paladin secret deck—it’s pretty blunt about the way that it recommends that to you. So, yeah, it wasn’t a wild surprise to us. It’s certainly very powerful. Often we kind of figure out what decks might appear and test them, but there’s a lot more players than there are members of the design team, and they’re very resourceful and really good at tuning decks to perfection. So, I’ve seen a lot of versions of the Paladin Secret deck and I think people are still trying to figure out what the best version is. And I’ve also seen players trying unique decks that counter it too, and it’s pretty fun to see the different ways players are doing that.
PC Gamer: You’ve talked about not wanting to buff cards that were perceived as bad, and Secretkeeper now seems like a good example of that. Is this why you don’t buff the old cards?
BB: Well, certainly that would’ve been a risk of buffing some of these cards that people traditionally considered bad, right? If we had decided to try to get every card into a very narrow balance range, and in doing so buffed some of these cards, well this deck would be much much better, or we wouldn’t have been able to make Mysterious Challenger in the way that we did. So that’s one of the reasons, but there’s tons of reasons why it’s either not a good idea for us, or not even possible to try and get every card into a very thin range of balance.
Really wondering if they tested Mysterious Challenger enough, but Ben makes a good point, the card is doing what its job well. This interview covers a lot more Hearthstone questions and I suggest you check it out here.
