Nathan Lyons-Smith, Executive Producer for ‘Hearthstone,’ Dishes on Its 10th Anniversary, How It Stays Fresh, and More (Interview)

Hearthstone has been one of my more recent obsessions. While I may have joined the party late, I’m still excited to log in and see what battles await me. If I’m not collecting cards, I’m fighting against randoms and CPU opponents to try and wage the ultimate victory. I’ve been loving every second of it. I recently had the opportunity to chat with the Executive Producer for Hearthstone, Nathan Lyons-Smith, to learn more about what goes into making this a card game for every type of player. No matter if you’re a cozy gamer or the most hardcore card collector? Hearthstone is a game for everybody.

‘Hearthstone’ recently celebrated its 10-year anniversary. How does it feel knowing you’ve made something that resonates well with the player base? 

It feels pretty incredible. You know, I’ve been playing this game since beta. To be a part of it and watch it evolve over the last decade into what it is today, and delighting over 100 million players over that time, is just truly at a scale that I never imagined.

The team, like me, has played a lot of Hearthstone. We have a lot of members of the team that are just really passionate players. They’re active in the community, and they’re all so thankful and appreciative of being able to continue to bring that surprise and delight to the millions of players that we have playing today.

I’ve loved watching the evolution of Hearthstone from the early days to the multi-mode experience we have today with Arena and Battlegrounds and our constructed mode. And then all the different characters we’ve been able to bring in across different Warcraft expansions leading up to our first cross-IP expansion here: with “Heroes of StarCraft” coming in the middle of January. 

As a long-time strategy fan, I feel so excited to play as those characters in this game that I know and love and just really see the delight that can bring — both to me and to our players.

What goes into the process of creating new cards for ‘Hearthstone’? It seems like it has to be quite fun thinking of wild new ideas to implement. 

A lot goes into this! We have a few work streams to figure out what the new cards will be, and what the new settings and themes will be. We’ve been doing player surveys of which kinds of themes, settings, or locations within Azeroth and beyond might players be interested in and what the hook might be for each of those.

It’s really helpful to be able to get those out into the hands of players to get their feedback and help us navigate what they actually want, so we can build that and deliver that fun to them.

On the card side, we have a team called Initial Design, and their responsibility is to come up with all the wild, wacky, and fun ideas that’ll fit in with that theme and bring those smiles to players’ faces. We think about the different types of players, the different types of decks.

Making The Perfect Deck in ‘Hearthstone’ Requires a lot of thought

What does an aggressive player look for? Or what does a more control-style player look for? What different mechanics or types of cards within that set might deliver based on those different player experiences? All the while, we’re blending it into the idea of this all being just a tall tale told in the Tavern of Warcraft and something that maybe could have happened at one point in the history of Warcraft. 

We started exploring Warcraft’s version of space most recently with The Great Dark Beyond. The team thought, “What would be cooler than building your own Starship as the mechanic for this expansion?”

And so, for The Great Dark Beyond, many of our cards allow you to start to build your Starship throughout the game. And there’s a very impactful moment that happens when you launch the Starship. It’s a very swingy turn, allowing you to retake control of the board or survive for another turn so you can pull off your combo.

It fits in so well thematically. The team pulled off just an amazingly fun mechanic of building power up over the game with that kind of big payoff. So, I can’t do anything less than give kudos to the team for their passion, love for the game, and willingness to work with and riff off each other to come up with the cards and mechanics that really are bringing new gameplay to the game in a very fun way.

Are there any plans to bring ‘Hearthstone’ to more systems in the future? I would love a chance to jump in against my friends on consoles. 

We don’t have any plans to bring Hearthstone to other platforms at this time.
We’re really happy with the ability to have crossplay on PC and mobile, but it’s not a ‘never’. We’re always doing R&D to figure out what the future of Hearthstone might be. And certainly, this gets brought up from time to time as something maybe we should explore. So, nothing to announce. Nothing that we’ve got in development. But, definitely not “never.”

‘Hearthstone’, in a way, is a surprisingly cozy game to play with friends and random players. How difficult was it to find an expert balance of casual and hardcore play with a digital TCG such as this? 

We definitely think of Hearthstone as a cozy game and something to play with friends — or to make new ones. And over the 11 years I’ve been playing, many of my friends on Battle.Net are people I have met while playing Hearthstone. As a result of that, every now and then, we’re playing matches against each other to complete quests that require you to play with a friend.
And so, I do appreciate that.

The nature of the competitive card game does allow players to make friends through it by, you know, appreciating the competition or having respect for somebody’s ability to play or pilot a deck and wanting to follow up by saying, “Hey, let me have that deck code!” or “That was really well played. Good job!”

On the other hand, I’ve been on the team for six years now. I have to give credit to the original designers and developers of Hearthstone for that great balance between the casual and the hardcore. Hearthstone started from the perspective of “let’s make a great digital online card game,” and they knocked it out of the park. I love this game.

The Community makes it much cozier than expected

They did a fantastic job. And I’ve been trying to enhance it and build upon that foundation they laid — easy to learn, hard to master — while making it easy for players to jump in, play some cards, learn, have fun, explore different areas of the game, get a better understanding of strategy, and then try to climb the ranked ladder on your way to legend.

One of the things that the team held sacred as part of that is trying to not overload the card text and have that be a really long, burdensome thing you need to read. Those principles of simplicity like that, and the readability of what’s going on in the game, allowed us to be more approachable. It served us really well to honestly have so many players over the years. It’s all about Hearthstone being that warm and welcoming place of playing this game in a tavern inside World of Warcraft. Everyone is welcome here.

Even with the sheer number of TCGs on the market, ‘Hearthstone’ stands out in many ways. What do you think makes ‘Hearthstone’ as popular as it is? 

Hearthstone launched in 2014 and made a huge splash as a wildly successful digital collectible card game. As a card game player, it’s been great to see the market expand and have a bunch more opportunities to bring more players into the genre.

Hearthstone stands out because of its ability to be approachable in theme. Everyone is welcome in the Tavern. It stands out with its simplicity, approachability, and ease of getting started. There isn’t a lot of complexity early on. In fact, we try to limit complexity so that new players or returning players aren’t overwhelmed. That’s, of course, a constant battle.

‘Hearthstone’ Is Always Pushing Boundaries

The new things we want to create tend to push against that desire for simplicity and approachability. Something the team spends a lot of energy on is finding that right balance of easy-to-understand with strategic depth for players who are long-time card game or long-time Hearthstone players to continue to have fun and engage with the game. So, a lot of energy actually goes into maintaining that approachability and accessibility.

We’ve done a lot of work over the last few years to give new players more cards, more decks, more types of packs, new player experiences, and returning player experiences helping them get back into the flow of having fun. There’s more we could do there. But, I really want to stress that it is the whole game that is meant to try to welcome new players in to have fun with us in the Tavern.

While ‘Hearthstone’ has crossed over with other Blizzard properties, do you think there will ever be additional crossovers with non-Blizzard IPs?

Yeah! On the 21st of January, we had “Heroes of StarCraft,” our first big crossover IP, come out. It was a long time ago, but I think StarCraft was either my first or second Blizzard game. I’ve been so excited to bring those characters into Hearthstone. The minions, the spells that you would have expected to see from that universe represented in our cards. It’s been a lot of fun for all of us.

We don’t have any other plans to bring other Blizzard IP or other external IP into Hearthstone right now. We’re really excited to see player response to “Heroes of StarCraft.” And, like with everything we do, we’re going to measure player response and make another decision on what we want to do in the future based on that. So, nothing to announce at the moment. But, please tell us what you think about “Heroes of StarCraft”!

Digital TCGs are fun. But I would love a chance to play and use an official ‘Hearthstone’ deck in real life. Do you think there will ever be a physical edition of the game?

That sounds really cool! I would love to be able to play next to my friends in that format. That said, Hearthstone was created and designed from the perspective of ‘what can we do to make a digital trading card game that could not be done in paper?’

There are a lot of mechanics that just would be pretty cumbersome to try to recreate in the physical space. For example, in my first year on the game, we made this card called Zephyrs The Great. Zephyrs does a bunch of analysis of the current board states and offers you a choice between three cards that it thinks might help you either win, stabilize, or gain life. It’s looking across hundreds of cards to figure out the right thing to give you.

Physical Would Be Awesome, But There Are Some Catches

That would be really difficult to pull off in the physical space. In fact, I think if you were to do that, you’d probably ban that card. People would go, “That’s a cheat card! Why does that thing exist?”

But being digital allows us to do it because we can control what some of those parameters are. It isn’t feasible, I think, to have the same Hearthstone experience in a physical game. I do recommend getting together with friends and playing the digital game together. It does allow you to have some more of that live voice, banter, and interaction you experience with in-person card games.

There have been a fair number of expansions in ‘Hearthstone’, but what are some of your favorites? Any standout cards that you just can’t get enough of? 

It’s been a lot of years of expansions! My favorite card is Leroy Jenkins, but today, that’s part of our core set — it’s in the legacy set. It’s a very powerful card. You get to charge and do damage to the opponent immediately. Also, that character is really fun, and he has even been moved into our Hall of Fame! Yeah, we have a Hall of Fame for Hearthstone.

In terms of expansions, I think probably two stick out for me. The League of Explorers was a lot of fun. It was many years ago now, but it brought totally unique mechanics with some new-to-Warcraft characters that started in Hearthstone. Brann Bronzebeard doubling all your battle cries! Oh my gosh, that seems broken. And you know what? Sometimes it was. And we brought Brann back sometimes and had to have him go away again because double battle cries, it turns out, are pretty powerful.

There Have Been Some Legendary Cards in ‘Hearthstone’

The first version of Reno Jackson is another one. If your deck doesn’t have duplicates of any card, he’ll heal your health to full. Holy cow! I want to play that! There were a lot of decks built around that, and that was probably an early moment of me realizing just how much is possible in our game. And League of Explorers was actually one of the smaller adventure expansions, and it still hit really hard.

For me personally, when we launched Hearthstone‘s 10th class, the Demon Hunter in Ashes of Outland, that was a tremendous amount of fun. The Demon Hunter class in particular is a very aggressive class. Basically, every turn, you can attack as the hero. And with me being a really aggressive player type, I really loved being able to hit the hero power to attack and use a lot of different weapons or minions as needed. It was such a fun experience.

And I I think I’ll close lastly with Heroes of StarCraft again. I’ve loved that IP for two decades. I’m so tickled that this is coming into this other game that I love so much. So, yeah, go play Heroes of StarCraft!

What are some of your favorite memories of working on the game and making it what it is today? It seems to have a long and exciting history, and I’d love to know some more personal stories that helped shape it into what it is now. 

Today, Hearthstone has three predominant modes. One of them is the constructed mode, where you make a deck using cards you have and then you play. The second one is Arena, where you draft a deck with random cards. The third one is Battlegrounds, which is an auto-battler mode.

Battlegrounds started as an event originally; we wanted to build the biggest Tavern Brawl ever. Tavern Brawl is a weekly format you can play. It turns on for five days, and then it’s off. So, the leader of Hearthstone at the time said, “Build the biggest Tavern Brawl ever and it’s this auto battler thing.” And we’re like, what does that even mean?

We went and did prototyping and R&D, and we found a lot of fun in the gameplay. In fact, it was so much fun that we came back to leadership at that point and said, “Hey, so this is a lot of fun, and you can playtest it. But we’re going to need more time. Instead of making just an event, we’re going to make a whole new mode — a whole new way to play Hearthstone.”

It’s Not A Job If You Love Your Role

And it was so much fun! We decided to fund it and gave them more resources, and it had to be ready in time for BlizzCon that year. This was in May. They basically had four months to finish everything. The team was so energized and excited because of how much fun they were having playing this mode. But the team made it, and at BlizzCon that year, we announced Battlegrounds to our players.

Initially, many of them thought, “Huh? That’s so unlike the rest of Hearthstone!” But we also had a demo that they could play. It was so satisfying to see the line for the demo grow during BlizzCon. That’s typically not what happens. Normally, you play the demo, and then you feel done, and you go and do something else. But with Battlegrounds, the line just kept growing longer and longer every day. By the end of the fourth day, the concert was playing, and the show was about to close. But, the line was still longer than ever! 

And so we knew at that time, this was something special. We released it to players two or three days later, and since then, it’s just taken off. It’s a huge part of what Hearthstone is, and we’re excited for the future of what we can bring to that mode.

With 10 years behind you, what’s next for ‘Hearthstone’?

We’ve been focusing this last year on three primary modes: the Battlegrounds mode, the constructed mode, and the Arena mode. And we’re going to keep doubling down on those because that’s where we see players having fun and engaging. You’re going to see more Battlegrounds content and more systems.

We’ve also got a big Arena revamp coming that we talked about a little bit back in the Warcraft Direct in November. I’m super excited about that and delivering a pretty big update to that audience, where we have not done a lot of Arena for quite some time. I love the limited format it gives me, like a different form of the meta. I see cards that I don’t typically see all the time. I’m excited to see how players respond to that and then gather their feedback and figure out what else we should add.

More Expansions Are On The Way, Too

Then, of course, you can expect the three expansions that we teased back in November. I’m really excited for us to explore those locations — again bringing more of those awesome Warcraft characters to life and representing them in Hearthstone. 

So, our focus is on those three modes and listening intently to players on what they want to see in each of them as we continue.

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I would like to thank Nathan Lyons-Smith for taking time out of their day to answer these questions. Hearthstone is available now on Mobile devices and PC.