Hearthstone designer talks Basic cards and power creep
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Hearthstone needs a stack of low-powered cards, says Blizzard.
Hearthstone contains a bunch of powerful cards that seem to make existing Basic cards redundant. Some players don't like this, and criticise it as power creep.
In the developer diary below, senior game designer Ben Brode explains Blizzard's thinking in keeping these cards in-game: simple cards are necessary for new players, he argues, and having more high-powered cards in the mix later provides the motivation of progression.
"We want some of the Basic cards to be really bad," Brode said - which might feel unfair to some beginners, but that's not why they lose matches, and they have plenty of great cards in their hands, too.
