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.

Here's a snippet from our full interview with Liv Breeden, Lead Designer, and Leo Robles Gonzalez, Associate Game Designer of the Hearthstone team.

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

---

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’.”

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.”

Head Here For Out Full Hearthstone Murder at Castle Nathria Interview