Hearthstone's game director reveals how the team comes up with new cards after 10 years

The Warcraft universe is setting itself up for some big birthdays next year. Not only do we have World of Warcraft's 20th anniversary coming up, but there's also Hearthstone's 10th anniversary. Apart from making us all feel a bit older, Hearthstone's 10th anniversary shows that the card game has managed to keep itself fresh for a good chunk of time.

Speaking at BlizzCon recently, we sat down with game director Tyler Bielman and executive producer Nathan Lyons-Smith to talk about how Hearthstone manages to come up with new cards and expansions so often.

"The card set design team is incredible," Bielman began. "We have a relatively young team who sort of are like, I think we figured out like the third generation of sort of design teams over the 10 years. And they're native sort of card gamers from birth in a lot of ways. And so they have tons of excitement and passion for the game. They're very in touch with the community. So they're a great barometer of what will work and what won't work. There is a repository of ideas that sort of floats around and exists, but it's never that we mandate, hey, you have to use something off this list or you have to do that."

Something that Hearthstone players new and old will have noticed in the new expansion as well is the addition of catch-up packs. Speaking on their importance, Nathan Lyons-Smith had the following to say:

"It's going to look at your collection completion from each of those past five expansions and give you between one and ten cards to help you get caught up and really fill in your collection in each of those expansions, which is great because that's what players need to combine with the new Showdown in the Badlands content to go have fun right now."

Have you been playing Hearthstone's new expansion or would you return to it for the 10th anniversary? Check out our full interview below: