After the release of the Hearthstone Expansion "Rise of Shadows" on April 9th, 2019, I wanted to try designing an entire expansion to follow it.
In this personal project I used the tools of the Custom Hearthstone community that I wish to thank for their great help over this period.

I gave myself two months to do it, so that I'll be finished when the next expansion would be announced (that ended up being "Saviors of Uldum"). I followed that schedule and was done by June 9th.

With hindsight, the set could have used more iteration to refine it. However, I'm satisfied with the set overall, this experience was really interesting, and the lessons I learned doing it did not wait to be useful for me. My main takeaway was that Iteration is crucial on any project.

 

 

For this expansion, I guessed the theme using the sneak peak given at the start of the year. I then set myself on doing a full set following that theme, and the mechanics they developed for Rise of Shadows, as they said they were going to be built-upon in the next expansions.

You can browse the finished set, and even open (free, of course) packs from it by clicking the links on the side of this page.

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In order to make a coherent 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, this is a summary of what I made:

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I also studied the current Standard meta, to know what was considered balanced, fun, and what was not. To be sure that I do not make an overpowered set that "looks cool" but isn't printable in any way, but a printable full set that could be mistaken for a real one. Before finishing any card, I told myself "Would this be okay if it were in the game right now?" and "Is this card cool?" and went back to the drawing board if the answers weren't satisfying.

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To make the set, I chose some themes for each class. On top of the environment and lore they are tied to, and I made cards to reinforce these archetypes and lore elements.

For example, my themes for the Mage set were:

Elementals, Spell Damage, Cheap Spells and Dragons.

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Each class set is constituted of a Quest, a Legendary Minion, and for the "Good" classes (Mage, Hunter, Paladin, Druid) a "Strategy" card.

I designed those to be the opposite of the "Schemes" cards printed for the "E.V.I.L." classes (Rogue, Priest, Warrior, Shaman, Warlock) of the precedent expansion, "Rise of Shadows".

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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.