The second expansion for Hearthstone’s Year of the Hydra presents a dark, gloomy, and fun murder mystery to to solve. It’s Murder at Castle Nathria, with suspects, an unassuming detective by the name of Murloc Holmes, and an expansion set that will introduce 135 new cards into the rotation that will include new thematic Legendary minions, a new keyword, and even a brand-new card type in the form of Locations.

With the setting also born from recent World of Warcraft expansion Shadowlands, there’s plenty of nods to that afterlife adventure too - albeit with the same level of silliness that has given Hearthstone its unmistakable identity for close to a decade.

With the Murder at Castle Nathria announcement we had the chance to sit down with Liv Breeden, Lead Designer, and Leo Robles Gonzalez, Associate Game Designer of the Hearthstone team to talk about the setting, the new stuff, and the powerful free Legendary card Prince Renethal that is available for all players who log in right now.

The free Legendary card Prince Renethal is a potentially massive addition to any deck, it increases both the deck size and health to 40. A game changer. What was the idea there?

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Leo Robles Gonzalez: “The beginnings of Prince Renethal, it was Liv that was championing the idea of having a card that will let you build a deck with more than 30 cards. That was the core idea, and it sounds sweet on paper, but having more cards in your deck is actually a downside. Your deck becomes less consistent, you don't draw the one Legendary as often. So we added the upside of starting with 40 health. It definitely reads like an exciting card, and there's an upside to having more cards in your deck in the sense that you just get to play with more stuff.”


Liv Breeden: “If you're a Face Hunter, ten extra cards is not a must have. For Control, where you can sub out different removal options or tech options, Prince Renethal is very exciting. Because if it's one turn before you turn the corner and then you hit all your healing and that sort of thing, it’s pretty exciting.”

With Murder at Castle Nathria, what were some of the touchstones that made it feel like Hearthstone’s take on the classic murder mystery?

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Liv: “Leaning into what Hearthstone does best is one of the things we love. This is about murder, but it's moustache-twirling murder. It's like, ‘Oh, so dastardly!’. If we're doing a horror set, it’s more Halloween horror versus, you know, blood and guts. A lot of the designers on the team have been drawn to Hearthstone because of this sense of fun and silliness. And their ability to just draw that out is really impressive. As far as touchstones go, we of course pulled inspiration from classic murder mysteries and crime dramas. We have suspects, murder weapons, and potential locations.”


“If you look at the Shaman package you've got Baroness Vashj who's a suspect. And you've got the location, which is the Muck Pools. That's where she would've done it. And then the covenant spell, every class gets a covenant spell, is like how they would go about comitting the murder. Primordial Wave is the example there. We cards that are great for putting in a deck together, but it's also like, ‘okay, I get to commit the crime too’.”

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"Leaning into what Hearthstone does best is one of the things we love. This is about murder, but it's moustache-twirling murder."

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Leo: “We've seen Decimator Olgra for Warrior as a Legendary suspect too. You can expect to see other murder suspects in the other classes, some of them are new faces that you'll have seen in Shadowlands as a WoW player, but others might be familiar faces from Hearthstone’s history that are now potential murderers.”

At what point did Murloc Holmes come into the picture?

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Leo: “I can't remember a time where the detective wasn't Merloc Holmes. He’s been there ever since we said, all right, we're doing a murder mystery and we're doing it in Castle Nathria. Merloc Holmes is a card from the Witchwood single-player stuff, the Monster Hunt, so he exists in Hearthstone but now has his very first collectible card.”

Murloc Holmes, the card. The mechanic of being a detective and making guesses on your opponent’s cards, was that a difficult one to work out?

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Liv: “We played around with different Merloc Holmes designs. The suspicious cycle has been one that we've been kind of playing around with in the background since Witchwood and we finally found the right version of it here. We've got more of these cards in this expansion, but with Murloc Holmes we knew we wanted to hit on a few things. Discovering clues, trying to figure out who did it. We kept trying to bring it back to the suspects and trying to figure out who the murderer was. It turns out it's really difficult to make a game within Hearthstone, so then we discovered it was more fun to investigate your opponent.”


“The first choice is what your opponent had in their opening hand. The second choice, or second question, what’s currently in their hand. And then the third is what's currently in their deck. If you play it right away, it's difficult to figure it out because you don't have a whole lot of information. As the game goes on, as you pick up more clues, it becomes a little bit easier. We love that this plays to a different type of player. It's easy to look at like big smashy minions and be excited for those. This is one for the players who like counting cards, who like watching their opponents hand.”

And then there’s the new keyword Infuse which is a little similar in that you want to hold onto it because being activated is based on losing a certain number of minions. Being a detective, playing the long game, did the murder mystery theme inform the design?

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Leo: “With the suspicious cards, like Merloc Holmes, it’s exactly that. The theme is murder mystery and you don't know who commited the crime. There it's up to the player to solve clues about their current game state through Merloc Holmes. With Infuse, the inspiration for that came from the fantasy of the Shadowlands and Revendreth and how Anima is the essence of souls.”

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"Discovering clues, trying to figure out who did it. We kept trying to bring it back to the suspects and trying to figure out who the murderer was. It turns out it's really difficult to make a game within Hearthstone, so then we discovered it was more fun to investigate your opponent."

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Liv: “And if you're not super familiar with WoW it's really easy to think of it like Anima being like the life force and the Venthyr like vampires. We’re in a gothic castle, so it's easy to think of this as a vampire murder mystery, and go from there.”

Did the initial idea for this expansion begin then with seeing the Shadowlands expansion? Of course new expansion sets are planned several months in advance, so I’m curious what the initial idea for Murder at Castle Nathria was.

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Liv: “It was a bit of both. We initially started with wanting to do a murder mystery, and then before we even started on the design, we started asking where could this take place? In the past we did it with Worgen, at least that was one of the pitches. And we didn't want to do another Worgen set, let's try something else. Shadowlands had come out at this point and quite a few of us were playing it and thought it would be super cool. The themes we were going for are really appropriate for what we would expect there. And then it just kind of fell into place, we wanted do both - something with Shadolands and a murder mystery - and this was a great opportunity to do both.”

We're also seeing the introduction of a new card type with Locations. How does that fit in with the existing Hearthstone meta, what do they bring to the table? As a new card type, a permanent addition to the game, will it change anything moving forward?

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Leo: “Playing Locations, they feel very natural. You play them onto the board, they exist on the board, kind of like a minion, except they can't be damaged by your opponent. At least not directly. And once you play it onto the board, you get to do whatever the Location says. For a while, we’ve been trying to figure out how activated effects would work on minions or just things on the board, but also incorporating the fantasy of locations and places. How can we try to translate that into a mechanic in Hearthstone that does it justice. In the past you saw almost the bread-crumbs when we tried. The earliest one I can think of is the quest in Un'Goro. There are all these really scenic shots of different areas. More recently you have like the objective spells from Alterac Valley, the spells that stay on the battlefield for three turns. We've been wanting to tackle what an actual setting, a location, feels like for a while. And what you see now is our final product.”


Liv: “These are things that you can feel good about throwing out onto the field too, they're pretty safe, which is really cool. You can invest the Mana and you can feel good about getting three uses or two, depending on how much durability your Location has. They do have a cooldown so you have to be smart about when you use them, but it's great that you can have cards that are more situational. And you can load up your board with different locations and then pop off the next turn, which is really exciting. And it's not just attacking, it's transforming, it's buffing, it's more than anything we could do before.”

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“Playing Locations, they feel very natural. You play them onto the board, they exist on the board, kind of like a minion, except they can't be damaged by your opponent. At least not directly."

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Leo: “There's a level of security and insurance in playing the locations. With the objective spells from Alterac Valley, they last three turns and their effects trigger for those three turns. Here with Muck Pools you can play it and then wait until you finally have your big minion that you've somehow cost reduced, play it, boom, combo. And then you have two charges left over for some point later in the game.”

Going forward, is this something that we’ll see more of? Locations that draw on Warcraft lore, or an expansion’s location and theme.

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Leo: “Locations are definitely something we're going to keep making more of in the future. In terms of the cadence and how many we make, we don't want to have too many locations at once for every class. You know, so that you can almost like board-lock yourself or you only have three Minion spots until they all break. We're managing how many locations we're going to print and how many will exist in one standard cycle. But they definitely open up a lot of really cool design spaces for us to play in.”

Liv: “I think more frequent than Hero cards, but less frequent than Weapons or Spells. That's a good way to look at it.”

With Legendary suspects, murder spells and potential locations, canonically speaking then who done it? Who committed the Murder at Castle Nathria?

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Liv: Yeah, I’m going to tell you [laughs]. You’ll have to figure it out.