After the release of Hearthstone's first new class, the Demon Hunter, on April 12th 2020, I felt like doing justice to Death Knights. In this solo project I used again the tools of the Custom Hearthstone community that I wish to thank for their great help, and great tools, again.

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For this class, I based myself on the structure used for the Demon Hunter Initiate set. I also used the class design blog posts made by Blizzard some time ago toi structure the class. These blog posts explained the design pillars of each class. There are three categories: Strenghts, Limitations, and Weaknesses. This is how I designed the class:
         - Strengths: Long games, Weapons, Freezing, Deathrattles.
         - Limitations: Flexibility, Draw, Board Clear.
         - Weaknesses: Targetted spells, Fast games.

 

You can browse the finished set from the link on the side of this page.
It is divided in three parts: "Basic" (The evergreen part of the set that will never rotate), "Custom29" (a.k.a. "Initiate set") and "Customphoenix" (this one represents an undefined set from the year of the Phoenix. As I did not think that Ashes of Outland would be a thematic match for DKs).

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In order to make a coherent class set, I started by studying the composition of the other official Hearthstone sets of the past, gathering data on minion/spell/weapons/hero-cards repartition and on mana-cost for the whole Standard Set, like I did for my expansion set, this is what I got:

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For my DK class, I made a custom keyword. It is meant to convey the fantasy of the slow inevitable death that Death Knights represent:

Relentless: Does something more when this is
at least the second time you play this card."

This is a versatile keyword that builds onto the other mechanics of the card it is on. For example, if a card with Battlecry also has Relentless, it will modify the Battlecry. Same for Deathrattles, it will add onto the Deathrattle when it is triggered.

It is meant to make the class stronger when the game lasts, while encouraging a certain form of deck building: Doubles of cards, or cards that go back to your hand. Opposite to the "Highlander" play style that requires 30 unique cards in the deck.

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However, there was a hurdle in my way: The "used names" problem.
With "Death knight cards" already existing in the game since the "Knight of the Frozen Throne" expansion, I had to find a workaround.

I had to think of a way to make this Death Knight set work, while keeping some of its most famous abilities, weapons and characters. I chose to use what I called the "Xavius-Illidan dodge": A smart move that was made when the Demon Hunter was released. The old card named "Illidan Stormrage" was renamed to "Xavius" to make way for the new class.

Using this simple, yet efficient technique, I would simply rename the old mock-keyword "Death knight cards' to "Lich king cards", and would rename the old cards. To make sure that the game keeps its "No repeat names" policy intact.

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I wish to thank the Custom Hearthstone community for their great tools that make it easy to produce Blizzard-like cards. And for their great feedback while i was working on this.

Note: I do not own any of the art, all art is to be considered placeholder.