Hearthstone’s next mini-set represents a major departure from the norm for this long-running digital collectible card game. This month’s Heroes of StarCraft set features 49 new cards based, as its name suggests, on Blizzard’s beloved sci-fi strategy series. While Hearthstone has always represented the wackier side of Azeroth, this is the first expansion since the game launched in 2014 that’s based on characters and stories from outside of the world of Warcraft.
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Last week, I sat down with Hearthstone senior designers Leo Robles Gonzales and Aleco Pors to find out why the team decided to bring StarCraft into the game, and why now.
The Origins Of Heroes Of StarCraft
“It was just the right idea at the right time,” Gonzales explains. The most recent main set, The Great Dark Beyond, explores the story of the Burning Legion chasing the space-faring Draenei across the cosmos. While developing the sci-fi themed set, full of spacemen, starships, and supernovas, it wasn’t long before their minds started wandering towards StarCraft and wondering ‘what if?’
“I remember the game director [Tyler Bielman] pulled me to the side right before we were about to start on them and he said ‘I have a pitch. What if we did StarCraft,’” Gonzales says. “My first reaction was ‘Yes!’, and after thinking about it, I wondered if we could even do that. We’ve never done this before, what are the rules? What’s the procedure? I’m down to figure it out.”
When word got out, the team was ecstatic. “So many people were like, ‘Please, please, please. We have to do this!’” he says. Pors, a lifelong StarCraft fan, couldn’t wait to get started. “I grew up playing so much StarCraft,” Pors explains. “I stayed up until 4 am countless times watching StarCraft tournaments. The minute it got mentioned I was like, ‘What do I need to do to make sure that we do this?’”
Note: Before The Great Dark Beyond, there were some discussions about making a cosmetic set of items inspired by StarCraft. The developers were so excited by the idea that they realized they needed to take the time to figure out the best way to introduce StarCraft to Hearthstone, which eventually led to this mini-set.
Blending Two Games Into One
The team wanted to make sure the set was authentic to StarCraft while also ensuring that it fit well into the style and gameplay of Hearthstone. Finding a balance between the two worlds was pivotal, and something the developers considered often during the concept phase.
Luckily, a lot of the iconic characteristics of StarCraft fit nicely into Hearthstone’s framework. For example, Mean Streets of Gadgetzan’s multi-class faction mechanic served as a great blueprint for StarCraft’s factions.
“Doing the multiclass cards, splitting the set into three factions, I think that was one of the first ideas we tried and the longest standing throughout the development,” Gonzales says. “It just makes sense. When you think of StarCraft, it’s impossible not to think of Zerg, Terran, and Protoss. Being able to divide our cards into those three little buckets just felt nice, and the whole faction thing was a great analog to do so.”
Pors says building mechanics that shaped the theme of each deck was a big priority. “Something that became clear pretty quickly was that we wanted the decks to feel like StarCraft decks when you play them,” he explains. “Like, this is a Zerg Hunter deck, capital Z. We didn’t want it to feel like you were playing a Hearthstone deck that just has a little smattering of Zerg inside of it. We wanted it to be very StarCraft-forward.”
By sharing cards between classes, they found that they could ensure decks felt like StarCraft decks, rather than Magic: the Gathering-style Frankenstein decks with random Lord of the Rings and Fallout cards shoved in.
This also explains why Heroes of StarCraft is Hearthstone’s biggest mini-set to date. Because all of the cards are faction-specific, each of Hearthstone’s 11 classes share one-third of the card pool with three other classes. In a normal 38-card mini-set, this would only leave room for two class-specific cards each.
The team found that this limited the identity of each class’s deck too much, so they decided to add a third card per class, bringing the total up to 49. “It was like night and day when we made that decision,” Gonzales explains. “I remember going into that like “Man, we’re so close and it’s not working.’ We got one more card per class and it was great, it was flowing.”
There is one card in the set that isn’t tied to any faction. Grunty is a Murloc wearing Terran Marine armor who first appeared as a companion in World of Warcraft. “He’s a lone ranger,” Gonzales jokes. When the team realized the mini-set needed four legendaries but only had three factions, they decided Grunty would be the perfect character to fill the gap. “For the entire mini-set, we needed to nail the vibe. This is StarCraft peeking in through Hearthstone. For Grunty, we did the opposite: what if we had Hearthstone peeking in through StarCraft?”
The team toyed with some neutral characters for the fourth Legendary slot, including Amon, the Dark One, but ultimately decided he was too big and powerful to fit.
A Match Made In Bastion
Other aspects of the mini-set fell into place fairly easily. If you know anything about StarCraft you’ve probably heard of the Zerg Rush strategy, which is all about overwhelming the opponent with swarms of cheap units. The Zerg in Hearthstone are well suited for aggressive, go-wide strategies. And yes, many Zerg cards have Rush.
Protoss are almost the opposite of the Zerg, so their cards play into the fantasy of having fewer, but very powerful units. Protoss decks tend to use ramp strategies to get out powerful, high cost mechs, carriers, and board-wiping lasers.
Pors is particularly excited about the Terran Faction because of the way its mechanics tie into the Starship mechanic from The Great Dark Beyond. “The Terrans are all about launching Starships, but in a different way than you do in the main set,” Pors says. “They’re trying to launch as many as possible, so you have cards that reduce the cost of launching Starships, and you have the Legendary, Raynor, who relaunches all of your Starships.”
The Terran classes in the mini-set are classes that didn’t have Starship cards in the main set, meaning Paladins, Shamans, and Warriors will now have access to this mechanic.
While including as many of StarCraft’s themes and iconography was certainly a priority, Pors says he also spent a lot of time making sure playing the set felt like playing StarCraft too. “I thought quite a bit about how to capture the feeling of playing StarCraft as much as possible through the expression of Hearthstone gameplay mechanics,” he says. “My dream was that you’d play a deck and it would feel just like you were playing that exact race and build from StarCraft.”
Pors says after experimenting with lots of different concepts, they ended up going with what felt best for Hearthstone. “We ended up moving away from a lot of ideas that were really complicated. At the end of the day we had to strike a balance between what makes the most sense for Hearthstone and what is the most StarCraftian.” Gonzales adds, “If there was ever a point where it stopped feeling like Hearthstone, that was a red flag.”
Gonzales and Pors shared a couple of their favorite cards from the set. “The mechanic I love most from a designer perspective are the larva,” Pors says. “It feels so StarCraftian, but it’s also really hitting a lot of the best notes of Hearthstone. Larva are created by the Brood Queen, a 3/2/5 common that creates a larva at the end of every turn that then transforms into a random Zerg minion. “I love that mechanic and can’t wait to see where players will take it.”
Gonzales’ favorite is another card that perfectly captures its identity from StarCraft. Mothership is an Epic Priest card with the Battlecry and Deathrattle: Get two random Protoss minions. These minions may even be other class-specific Protoss cards. “There’s no other way to get other classes’ Protoss stuff,” Gonzales explains. “So Priest breaks that rule, letting you use things like the Templars alongside the Colossus. Your opponent is not going to see what’s coming because we don’t know what’s in the mothership, which I think feels very synonymous with what the Mothership is like in StarCraft proper.”
Now that Hearthstone has extended beyond the realm of Warcraft, I wondered if there are plans to keep exploring new worlds within the game. Is this the start of Hearthstone’s Universes Beyond era? “I’ll say that, if the fans love this, we want to do what the fans love,” Pors says. “If we do this and people say ‘Hell yeah, we love this, we want to see more of this,’ then who knows?”
Hearthstone brings Blizzard’s storied Warcraft series to the digital collectible card game space. Free-to-play, it features thousands of cards to collect and several different modes, from Arena to Tavern Brawls.