Peter Whalen talks us through the design of the new Hunter Legendary.
geeksplatform is excited to be joining its sister site Eurogamer in revealing a new card for The Witchwood expansion, due out in a matter of weeks from now.
The card in question is Emeriss, an intimidating Nightmare Dragon which costs 10 Mana to play, has 8 / 8 stats, and features one other intriguing effect.
Once played onto the board, this Hunter Legendary card will double the Attack and Health stats of all the other minions that are currently sitting in your hand.
We had the opportunity to talk to Hearthstone’s Peter Whalen about the design of Emeriss, and what we can expect it to mean for the Hunter hero in The Witchwood meta.
MB: Obviously I’m looking at this from a position of someone who hasn’t seen all the cards, so it’s kind of hard to look at where Emeriss sits in the collection. It seems quite slow for a Hunter card and I wanted to ask in your own words where you think this card is going to fit into the new meta, and what style of deck it enables?
PW: It’s always hard to know where exactly a card’s going to fit in, but this is an enormously powerful, enormously splashy effect. When you play Emeriss, crazy things are going to happen. You’re going to have 12-Attack Leeroys in your hand, or whatever crazy nonsense that you want. You’ve got Ysera who is now 8/24, all of the minions sitting in your hand are just massive. A 16/16 King Krush – that’s crazy, there’s insane stuff you can do with it.
PW: We’ll see exactly where it fits into the competitive side, but if you’re the type of player who likes playing giant dinosaurs and enormous dragons, this is going to fit in pretty well with that kind of deck.
MB: Is it more for a kind of Control Hunter deck?
PW: Yeah if you’re playing the long game this is certainly a powerful effect. It’s very much a ten-Mana effect.
MB: Are any of the other Nightmare Dragons coming with the set or is it just Emeriss?
PW: I guess you’ll have to see!
MB: Why Emeriss for Hunter, what’s the thematic connection you see there?
PW: It’s kind of a swamp Dragon vibe.
PW: We’ve got Emeriss who’s one of these Nightmare Dragons, who’s corrupted by the bad things going on in the Emerald Dream, and so it makes sense to encounter him in this kind of twisted forest where Hagatha‘s changing all of these creatures, hexing all of this stuff, cursing everything.
PW: It makes sense to see these cursed dragons in that space, so we’ve got these cursed green swamp Dragons and so it made sense in the hunter vibe in this expansion.
MB: If you go through the collection I think Paladin and Mage have interactions with Dragons for a couple of spells – the Big Spell Mage being an obvious one – but Priest is the only other class that has a Dragon card as a class-exclusive card in Standard. Does this mean we’re going to see Dragon Hunter coming, is there more that will tie in with that?
PW: [LAUGHS!]
PW: Certainly you’ll see a Dragon in Hunter, whether we’ll see Dragon Hunter decks we’ll have to wait and see. I wouldn’t count on that but certainly having swamp dragons in Hunter is a cool thing.
PW: We talked a lot about which classes get access to which mechanics, and which classes have access to each of the different tribal archetypes. We have Murlcos that show up in Shaman and Paladin, while Dragons have traditionally been more in Priest and Warrior and Paladin decks.
PW: I’m not sure that pushing those tribal mechanics into Hunter is something we’re going to go for, but having Dragon cards? They’re exciting and cool.
MB: So, there won’t be a To My Side / Rhok’delar moment where everything comes together?
PW: I wouldn’t count on it!
