Introduction
Greetings, dear readers, and welcome to the test run of ”Mulligan Phase”, a hopefully upcoming series of articles dedicated to the design philosophy in Hearthstone, from my point of view, which sometimes uses other card games as examples. The first time that I’ve written about this was in my article titled ”Running Wild: Understanding Eternal Formats” and if you’ve missed that article and what to see what it is all about you can find it here. Please note that this article won’t be containing deck guides and/or deck lists. If this is not the type of article that you would be interested in that is completely fine and let me just thank you for at least checking it out. Hopefully the next article will be more to your liking 🙂
As I’ve just mentioned, I’ve written about the philosophy behind the eternal formats in card games. Today I’m going to write about the deck archetype enforcement. The latest card reveal for the upcoming expansion, Journey to Un’Goro, had inspired me to write about this because I’ve noticed something quite interesting about the two known quest cards but I’ll reveal that a bit later in the article because I don’t want to spoil the surprise.
Sit back, relax, and let’s dive right into this! 🙂
Understanding the term ”deck archetype”
What is a deck archetype? The most basic and well rounded answer is that deck archetypes are just decks that utilize a certain structure and that they can be put into four categories: aggro, control, midrange and combo. Going by this definition you have your aggro shamans, aggro hunters, control warriors, combo rogues and various other deck archetypes. There is no arguing that the mentioned definition is not correct, as I’ve shown you with a few deck examples, but it doesn’t mean that it can’t be expanded and improved upon. One of the best definition that I’ve found states that ”A deck archetype is a deck, built by players of the Trading Card Game, that utilizes one set structure, although various players may have slight differences between their own decks of the same archetype.” (source). Going by this definition we no longer have only aggro shamans, aggro hunters, control warriors and combo rogues but we now have pirate aggro shamans, beast aggro hunters, fatigue control warriors, miracle rogues and malygos rogues. Because the second definition is much more expanded I’m going to use it as the basis of this article.
The reasoning behind archetypes
Deck archetypes go way back to the earliest days of trading card games. They are, in fact, one of the core aspects of various card games and identifying what deck archetypes do you wish to have in your game is one of the first steps in designing a card game and one that many card designers pay most attention to when comping up with ideas and the rules of their card games. I’ve had the pleasure of being called for consulting on a very few amateur card game projects where I’ve observed, first hand, how these designers approach the aspect of deck archetypes and how many of them do this with the set idea of creating a deck archetypes and how many are creating them without even fully realizing what are they doing. In order for you to gain a better understanding of what I’m talking about, I’m going to present you with two examples:
Example 1:
Jim and Tom are amateur card game designers who have are in the process of coming up with their own card game called ”Supergood Card Game”. So far they haven’t done much regarding the rules of the game and the types of cards that they want to have but they did agreed upon having the game take place in a fantasy setting and it being a 2 player game like most other card games. Today they are meeting to discuss the rules of their game and brainstorm different ideas.
Jim: It would be a good idea to have both players start with a certain life total and the first player who’s life total reaches 0 loses the game.
Tom: Agreed. We could do a lot of things with that. We could have tribes in our game…like…different creatures and classes?
Jim: What do you mean?
Tom: We have life totals, right? We could make something like…a cleric deck and have the deck being centered around healing! You could play creatures that restore your life total.
Jim: Then we could also have creatures like goblins who are small, fast and aim to defeat their opponent as quickly as possible.
Tom: Yea, but we could also add things like spells that deal damage or heal to help both decks achieve their goals.
What I’ve shown you here is an example of creating deck archetypes on the fly without fully realizing what you’re doing and, trust me, this is the way that most amateur card game designers think and design deck archetypes for their first card game. Most of the time it happens by accident. One designer comes up with an idea, like the cleric deck, and then ideas just start to pile on. There is nothing wrong with this kind of approach for your first card game and even beyond that. As a matter of fact, even far more experienced card game designers are guilty of this. There was a very old Magic: The Gathering worldbuilding article where the set designers have talked about how do certain tribes interact with each other and the world around them and how should that translate to actual cards. If I recall correctly, and don’t quote me on this one, I think that the set in mind was Ravnica: The City of Guilds and that when designing the plane of Ravnica the designers came up with the idea of having 10 guilds with each of them having 2 colors. Ten different deck archetypes were spawned from that idea alone before even a single card was created. My example is similar to that. Two game designers have set down and came up with an idea to have a cleric deck that heals you and a goblin deck that is for all purposes and aggo deck. Note that these designers have just agreed on having life totals in their game and now they already have two different deck archetypes: a heal deck and an aggro deck. We can’t say for sure that these imaginary designers will stick to their ideas of a healing and an aggro deck but we can be certain that those ideas will be expanded upon as the brainstorming session continues.
In summary: Various deck archetypes are accidentally created during various game design brainstorm sessions. This way of designing deck archetypes is common even among seasoned game designers. Deck archetypes that are created this way are incomplete, require a lot of improvement and are prone to changing over the course of designing the game or even being completely excluded from the game in their entirety.
Example 2:
Jim and Tom are amateur card game designers who have are in the process of coming up with their own card game called ”Supergood Card Game”. So far they haven’t done much regarding the rules of the game and the types of cards that they want to have but they did agreed upon having the game take place in a fantasy setting and it being a 2 player game like most other card games. Today they are meeting to discuss the rules of their game and brainstorm different ideas.
Jim: Ok, so we’ve agreed upon having life totals?
Tom: Yes, what else do we need?
Jim: Ok, we’re going to have different types of decks. How about the basics triad? Control, aggro and midrange. Control clerics, aggro goblins and midrange elves.
Tom: Sounds good. We also need some spell cards as well.
Jim: Spells that interact with creatures, players, graveyards and decks?
Tom: Sure. We’re better at this than we should be…
What I’ve shown you here is purposeful creation of deck archetypes. In example 1 you’ve had the same people but they had no idea of what they want in their game until they’ve begun brainstorming. In this scenario those people know exactly what are do they want in their game. There aren’t any surprises when they’re coming up with deck archetype ideas. This is a result of two things (sometimes one, sometimes both combined): experience and planning ahead.
Experienced card game veterans all well versed in different types of decks, different rules and terminology. When you sit them at a table and ask them to come up with a card game similar to Hearthstone and Magic: The Gathering they already know, ahead of time, what deck archetypes should they cover, how spells should interact and, most of the time, the minimum number of cards in a deck. This is all a result of years of experience. Veterans known and understand the foundations of card games and should be well versed in implementing them in their own game. I’ve mentioned only the basic triad of deck archetypes but the approach to new deck archetypes differs as well in both example. Jim and Tom from example 2 can much more quickly decide what deck archetypes should be implemented in their game and begin analyzing them because they’ve most likely encountered similar deck archetypes in their years of experience. Jim and Tom from example 1 come up with archetypes on accident and even when they don’t they need to spend a lot more time agreeing upon the direction a archetype should take, reworking it and analyzing it. Here is another example:
Last year, a friend of mine had called me to come over and offer my consultation on a idea for a card game. The idea itself was interesting but things took a bit of a sudden turn when we’ve reached the topic of deck archetypes. One of the designers had told us that they will have the standard triad and some other types of decks that I won’t discuss here. He then went into detail how their archetypes should play. Aggro, for example, was very much like zoo warlock in a sense that it had played a lot of small minions but these ones had ”charge”. The problem had arrived when a friend had asked him ”How does each other type of deck counter them? What tools can they use to make sure that aggro doesn’t grow out of control? What is the weakness of this aggro deck in comparison to the other deck archetypes?” and the designer had no answer to give us.
This shows the difference in experience when it comes to archetype design. The designer had claimed that he had worked on the game for over two weeks and that he had most of it done but then he couldn’t answer a basic question when it came to archetype design. Experienced designers plan ahead a lot and have answers for basic questions. However, this doesn’t mean that even experienced designers don’t use the same method from example 1. Purposeful creation of deck archetypes is not a constant in card design. You can rely on it for the first couple of sets when you’re doing a large amount of planning ahead but eventually we all reach the point from which we just return back to example 1 because of one reason or the other. Sometimes it is just refreshing to sit down and brainstorm for new ideas.
Archetype Empowerment
After an extremely long introduction to basics of archetype creation it is finally time to turn our heads towards archetype empowerment in Hearthstone.
When you’re designing a card game and you have your current archetypes completely planned out you have certain expectations for them. For example, Hearthstone design team had high hopes for the hand buffing mechanic and the jade golem mechanic, but in the end it turned out that the hand buffing mechanic isn’t even used while jade golem mechanic is extremely powerful. Regardless of internal testing it is often quite hard to predict will the archetype achieved the goals that you’ve set for it to achieve. I have no doubt in my mind that the Hearthstone development team thought that the hand buffing mechanic is going to work great because they wouldn’t make a bad mechanic on purpose. So, how do you empower certain archetypes and what is the best pacing for doing so?
The most obvious answer to this is simply creating more powerful cards that interact with a certain archetype. If you’re having trouble making a hand buff midrange deck work then just create more powerful hand buffing cards and hope for the best. Unfortunately, things aren’t that simple. Believe it or not it is far more easier to weaken and completely ruin an archetype then to empower it to match your goals. Empowering archetypes shouldn’t be done in haste because the end result could just grow out of control. Most of the time this is done by implementing simple additions to the archetype and using them to test the grounds before a huge power up is dropped. As an example I’m going to use discard warlock.
Discarding your own cards was a part of warlock’s kit since the very beginning. soulfire, succubus and doomguard are all part of either basic or classic set but they were nowhere near enough to make one want to create a discard warlock deck. I’m 100% certain that at that point of the game’s life the developers have implemented this discard mechanic not as a potential archetype but to stick with the flavor of warlock which is power at any cost. It was only after the release of The Grand Tournament that the developers came out with the idea of making a discard warlock deck so they’ve implemented some more discard cards like tiny-knight-of-evil and fist-of-jaraxxus. Could have they created malchezaars-imp back then to make the archetype far more viable? They could have but chose not to because they wanted to see how will the current cards impact the archetype and the impact was nonexistent. It was only after the introduction of the standard format that we’ve been slowly getting more and more cards for a discard warlock but we were still getting them in a reasonable pace until it was determined what kind of deck should it be. Should it be midrange, control or aggro? I think that the pinnacle of empowerment had happen with the newest quest card, lakkari-sacrifice. Imagine having that card along with malchezaars-imp and the new lakkari-felhound back in The Grand Tournament. The deck would have been insanely powerful for that era. The point is that deck empowerment requires a lot of testing with slow implementation of archetype boosting cards before you decide to go all in with it.
Timing is also a factor that plays a huge part in deck empowerment. The development team, Team 5, have for the longest time tried to make totem shaman work. Now, for those of you who are newer to the game and haven’t played much before the first standard rotation, totem shaman and shaman in general were at a very awful spot. Shaman was the worst class in the entire game despite it having the two cards that players nowadays call the real reason why shaman is overpowered, tunnel-trogg and totem-golem. Yes, believe it or not, shaman was completely unplayable despite having these two cards available to it for the longest time before the standard rotation. The class only became powerful because of the rotation. As someone who plays a lot of wild I can assure you that the old midrange shaman which had dominated the standard ladder was nowhere near as dangerous on the wild ladder. By this logic we can safely assume that if the developers have introduced a buff to the totem deck archetype, thing-from-below, that the archetype empowerment would once again result in a failure. Sure, shaman would have been far more playable, but I’m quite positive that the end result would not be what they have set out to achieve.
Timing and knowing which cards to introduce to empower an archetype go hand in hand with one another. As another example I would like to turn your attention to a deck archetype that I thought would be completely busted and amazing when the some cards got revealed last December for the Mean Streets of Gadgetzan expansion and that deck is secret mage. If you check some of my older articles where I’ve tried to predict what decks will be played I was 100% sure that secret mage is going to be a thing. Look how that turned out. Secret mage isn’t anywhere in the meta despite it getting a lot of support in the Mean Streets of Gadgetzan. Why is this? Well, to be perfectly honest, there is another factor besides timing which is the card quality. We can argue that the secret mage deck never saw any real play because other decks in the meta were just too fast for it but if you take a look at the wild format,  a format where mad-scientist is a thing, you can see that despite the format having better neutral cards to offer to help the deck archetype, secret mage was nowhere to be seen. Since wild is an eternal format I don’t think that it is ok to use it too often to justify my opinions so I will focus on the standard format not only because of that but also because the cards are balanced and designed around the standard format. The things that didn’t allow secret mage to become a competitive deck are both timing and card quality. This is a case where we have some drastic empowerment regarding card quality (secret mage wasn’t on anyone’s mind as a competitive deck until medhivs-valet came out in One Night In Karazhan) but poor timing which results in the drastic empowerment being nullified by the drastic power of all other metagame cards and decks.
The Future
What does the future hold regarding deck archetype empowerment? There is always a lot of room for archetype empowerment and there will always be archetype empowerment as long as new sets come out and as long as there is a rotating format which requires some archetypes that were weakened by the rotation to be empowered again while they remain in the format. This, however, might not be something that is set in stone. The developers at Blizzard had already confirmed that they have nothing against some deck archetypes moving to the wild format and remaining there for undisclosed amount of time. We can see this with Reno decks becoming a wild exclusive deck archetype because their main card, reno-jackson, is rotating into the wild format. The same can be said about dragon decks. I have no doubt that we will see at least one dragon in the upcoming set but the whole archetype is becoming a wild exclusive thing because in order for it to remain viable in the standard format, despite the card losses, the developers would have to introduce an insane amount of dragons and dragon synergy cards which I something that I don’t think will happen. However, some archetypes, like the formerly mentioned secret mage and discard warlock, are receiving a huge power up in the upcoming set.
This finally brings me to the formerly mentioned quest cards. Quest cards are epitome of archetype empowerment and I don’t think that it gets any more powerful than that. So far we have two quest cards, awaken-the-makers and lakkari-sacrifice, and what do those two have in common? Regardless of what type of reward do you get from them, the one thing that awaken-the-makers and lakkari-sacrifice have in common is that they fit a specific deck archetype and from what we’ve seen now they function best exclusively in that specific deck archetype. Unlike lakkari-sacrifice, awaken-the-makers offers you a lot more freedom in deckbuilding when you’re making a deck centered around it. Wild N’zoth Reno priest decks should run the required amount of deathrattle minions for awaken-the-makers to trigger but even outside that deck, at least when it comes to wild, I think that any priest deck can fit the required amount of deathrattle minions. Even as a ”not deathrattle priest” you’re most likely going to run two copies of museum-curator because its effect is quite good, two copies of dark-cultist because of great stats and an amazing ability, two copies of sludge-belcher because it is the best taunt minion in the game and even if you don’t run piloted-shredder you will at least run sylvanas-windrunner because it is an amazing card. There you have it, 7 deathrattle minions required to complete the quest and they fit in just about any priest deck without the deck having to be completely build around the deathrattle mechanic.
lakkari-sacrifice, on the other hand, is a quest that requires a deck to be built around it. Because discard mechanic is quite harmful in a deck that isn’t centered around it, it isn’t the best idea to try to force discard cards into a deck just in an attempt to make lakkari-sacrifice work. That way you would only handicap your deck and you will do more harm than good. This, unlike awaken-the-makers, is a extremely specific, heavy empowering card. It is made to make one specific deck archetype work and it won’t function as well outside of it. Fortunately we get to keep some good cards for a discard themed deck but fist-of-jaraxxus is rotating out and while it is not the best card to have in a discard deck it certainly is decent as dealing 4 damage just by discarding a card is never a bad thing. I’m glad that lakkari-sacrifice exists and I’m extremely excited to give it a go. Discard warlock will be the first deck that I will craft! 🙂
Now it is time for me to make a bold, but educated, guess. Based only on the two quest cards that we’ve seen so far and everything that I’ve written in this article, I will say that every secret card will be made to fit one specific deck archetype. lakkari-sacrifice is for discard warlock, awaken-the-makers is for deathrattle priest (in standard and any regular priest in wild) so there is no doubt that the other quest cards will be promoting a certain deck archetype. I think that hunter will revolve around beasts. It was either that or secrets but because cloaked-huntress exists it might be too easy to complete a secrets quest. No, hunter’s quest will revolve around beasts, shaman’s quest will revolve around elementals, mage’s quest will revolve around secrets and warrior, HOPEFULLY, won’t revolve around taunt minions. That is my guess and I’m hope that I’ve got at least something right 😛 If hunter’s quest revolves around secrets than druid’s will revolve around beasts.
Conclusion
We’ve reached the end of the test run for ”Mulligan Phase” articles. I hope that you didn’t find this type of article too boring to read. It was fun to write although it is not something that I would write about as often as I write ”Running Wild” or as I’ve used to write ”The Definitive Guide To” (which will come back in April when we get more new deck to write about) but I wouldn’t mind sharing with you the philosophy of card game design. If anything it might help some of you who wish to design their own card game (in which case I’m free for counseling). Tell me, which deck archetypes do you wish to see empowered in the future? Are you happy with the idea of quest cards being potentially strongly connected to a certain deck archetype or do you think that this limits decks design option and forces players to play specific decks in order to stay competitive? Leave your feedback in the comments below.
As always  if you’ve liked this article do consider following me on twitter https://twitter.com/Eternal_HS. There you can ask me all sorts of Hearthstone questions (unrelated to this article) and I’ll gladly answer them as best as I can!
Published: Mar 21, 2017 06:49 am