Frostmourne Will Be A Collectable Card in Hearthstone’s March of the Lich King Set [IGN]

On December 6 (December 7 in ANZ/Asia Pacific), Hearthstone is going to change forever, with the release of the game’s 11th playable class – Death Knight, and the March of the Lich King expansion. The new class brings with it some super interesting gameplay, with a Blood, Frost and Unholy rune system for deckbuilding that allows players to specialise in one, two or all three of those areas. Alongside that is a new hero power called Ghoul Rush, which summons a 1/1 ghoul with charge that dies at end of turn. It’s a ping that also guarantees you a corpse – which is another new Death Knight mechanic. (Any friendly minions that die add to your corpse counter, then you can spend those corpses for a bonus effect through a host of different Death Knight cards.)We have all the news covered in detail here, as well as some fascinating insights into the development of Death Knight here. For now, though, we’re debuting some absolutely iconic Lich King cards (from the Knights of the Frozen Throne set) that are returning to the game as collectable Death Knight class cards.“When we were starting to develop Death Knight,” says Hearthstone Features Lead Chadd Nervig, “we were looking back at the cards that we had made for the Lich King back in Knights of the Frozen Throne and seeing which of those could be potential ideas for Death Knight cards. I think it was a cool idea to just start from – hey, there’s an existing base there, can we try making those collectable cards? And maybe we’ll have to do some number tuning on them since they were more of treasure type things before, but as we tried them out, we found several of them do fit.” The prime example of this is Frostmourne, the Lich King’s weapon, which is back without any changes.“We knew we had to get Frostmourne in somehow,” says Nervig. “So we started from the actual token from the Lich King… [and] we were questioning – is the power level on this fine? Yeah. Turns out it is. So we’ve got Frostmourne as a collectable card. Exactly – no changes at all – from how it was.” The reason for this is interesting and only partly to do with Hearthstone cards simply being more powerful across the board in 2022 than they were in 2017. “Some of it is power levels,” Nervig explains, “but I think it’s more [about] being in a specific class. With Death Knight, we can tune Death Knight overall with the knowledge that Frostmourne is part of their set. Whereas before, Lich King was a neutral card – maybe we could have done it in a specific class, but it felt more appropriate to come directly from the Lich King back in Knights of the Frozen Throne.”In terms of the broader pool of eight Lich King cards, “some of them are sort of duplicated by other ideas or… weren’t really appropriate for regular play,” Nervig explains. “Something like stealing your opponent’s minion out of your deck and playing it – for Death Grip – didn’t have the sort of thing we wanted Death Knight to regularly do, but something like Army of the Dead? We changed the design a bit, but summoning a swarm of minions? Absolutely what we would want them to do.”Deciding what to do with Death and Decay, meanwhile, which ultimately didn’t make it back in, was more about the flavour for each rune than anything else. “We had a few different forms of AOE for them,” says Nervig, “but aligning with the different runes was important for us, and we wanted the AOEs to… [be] some small ones in Frost, some larger ones in Blood. Death and Decay was… Unholy, [so it] didn’t didn’t end up fitting great there…”“Another one that fit really closely was Obliterate,” he continues. “Obliterate we wanted to add a rune requirement to it, so it requires one Blood rune and we ended up tweaking the art a little bit for gameplay reasons – we wanted it to be no spell school in the Blood type instead of a shadow spell school. So we tweaked the art to be more red than more purple. So that fit.”The original Anti-Magic Shell, meanwhile gave your minions +2/+2. “That was a little sharp, a little extreme of an effect,” Nervig comments. “So we toned that down to only +1/+1 and adjusted the mana cost appropriately so that one fit too. Overall it was just a [process of] – use these as a starting point because it was really cool to be able to bring back those cards. And some of them worked out great and we’re really happy with that.”Now that The Lich King is back in the Standard format – along with the rest of the Knights of the Frozen Throne set – as part of the Knights of the Hallow’s End event, you may have noticed some minor changes to those old cards. “The cards are functionally still the same,” says Nervig, “but we tweaked the wording on the old Lich King card to say ‘add Lich King cards to your hand’ instead of saying ‘add Death Knight cards to your hand,’ so there’s no confusion about like – okay, is it now pulling from all 68 Death Knight cards? No… Lich King and Arfus still give you those Lich King cards.“Army of the Dead we also felt like the design change on that was thematically very similar, but functionally different enough that we changed the name of the old one. So the old one is now ‘Army of the Frozen Throne’ – it still does exactly what it did [before], but just so there’s no confusion. We thought having the new Death Knight class having a spell named Army of the Dead was too important and we had to have that.”Death Knight and March of the Lich King are hitting Hearthstone on December 6 (December 7 in ANZ/Asia Pacific), and to see the pre-order bundles as well as all the cards as they’re revealed, be sure to visit the official March of the Lich King site.Cam Shea has played Hearthstone since beta and his favourite class is Priest… which tells you everything, really. When he’s not playing games he’s mixing rave era breakbeat.