Descent Of Dragons: What Happened? – December 16, 2019 at 02:23PM

Obligatory I am not a game designer, yada yada yada, this is my opinion.

It’s no doubt among anyone that Descent of Dragons is the strongest expansion ever released. End of year expansions are known for being big game-changers, notably Gadgetzan and Kobolds being the best previous examples (and Rumble just sobbing in the corner, I suppose.) I think, however, that DoD’s power level was no mistake – the developers knew they were creating a strong set.

To talk about good cards, we first have to talk about bad cards.

MTG is (afaik) the longest running card game to date. They’ve consistently created their own world, lore, and cards within it year after year for decades, and people keep coming back to them, As this pioneer of card games, they learned a lot of lessons about game design firsthand – or at least, their experience with them. I bring this up to talk about one of their most famous (or infamous) articles on card design – When cards go bad. It’s oft been considered a “fact” that in every expansion, there are bad cards – and I’m not debating this. It’s a frankly ridiculous fever dream to imagine a meta where every card is top tier. The problem, I think, is the conclusion designers drew from this.

Legends of Runeterra recently launched their open beta, and one of the things that stood out to me is that they didn’t design any purposely “packfiller/garbage” type cards. Sure, you had your purposeful jank, like the 9 mana 30/30 kitty that could only be summoned under specific circumstances (remind anyone of anything) or their fun off meta archetypes like mushrooms (an archetype revolving around filling the enemies deck with tiny 1 damage mines) but no card seemed to exist to take up space. All the parts of discovery, of appealing to different players and such were present, but nothing that was designed explicitly to not be playable. And it hit me, and I think it hit the Hearthstone devs too.

See, that fact about that there’s always bad cards was taken to mean that you need to make bad cards, that the expansion won’t function without purposely designed bad cards. I believe Descent of Dragons was the dev team attempting to forgo that philosophy of “there must always be pack filler” and print only cards meant to see at least some play.

And, for the most part, I don’t think that was a bad decision.

There are many cards that are just plain decent. Troll Batrider, Big Ol’ Whelp, and Emerald Explorer to name a few. All of these see play, and none of them do anything absurd or crazy- they’re just designed to be able to compete with the crazy synergy cards. I think the design team made a mistake in that they didn’t design the cards that would normally be their “strong cards” keeping this in mind – Faceless Corruptor was meant to be a pushed card to push midrange, but they pushed it above the already strong powerlevel of the set. Dragon’s Pack was meant to be a defensive tool to help Galakrond Shaman be a decent defensive deck that countered pure aggro, but ended up being just too much pressure for too simple a requirement.

I think going forward that continuing this design philosophy isn’t a bad thing. While for now it’s creating a sort of system shock, because Hearthstone has effectively gotten 2-3 previous expansions in one in terms of “power cards,” it should be able to stabilize in the future (though hopefully at a lower average power level.) Wild is notably going to need a lot more care and attention given to it going forward to make sure it isn’t overwhelmed, but I think this change is a good thing for everyone – notably F2P or lower budget players, given you no longer have to worry about opening a pack and getting only garbage.

TL;DR: the new expansion was a conscious design decision to stop releasing shitty cards and this is overall a good thing, even if some mistakes were made in the process cough assimilate or die cough