We tried a ton of things for him… One of his battlecries was draw a weapon from your deck because he was this Berserker. And then his hero power was deal some number of damage, I think one damage, to any target of your choice. And whenever your hero took damage, the hero power would go up by one. So if you were Zul'jin, you were a Berserker, and if your opponent attacked you with seven Silver Hand Recruits, now your hero power is doing eight damage a turn. Dean's giving me a look - I don't think that ever made it to final design, because that was pretty extreme. Also, because you were getting a weapon, you could kind of do it yourself, where you're making sure your hero got damaged. We tried a couple versions of that where it was just the next hero power usage got the bonus damage as you took hits. We tried a version where it scaled over time, so each time you used it, it got stronger. All of those were okay, but they were kind of in the space where once you played Zul'jin, the rest of the game was just about, "Does my hero power get up to enough damage to murder my opponent?" And that feels pretty bad. That's not the most fun gameplay when everything's just about the hero power instead of the cards you put in your deck and how the rest of the game plays out. So we pivoted to try this completely different version of a hero card, where most of the power is in the battlecry. And we had the legendary minion “ten mana: battlecry - cast all the spells you cast this game” already. And one of the problems with that minion was you couldn't put it in the Spell Hunter deck, because the Spell Hunter deck forced you to have no minions. So we put that on Zul'jin and it just worked. Now you have your hero card, it recasts all your spells, that's pretty cool, it's not a spell, so you don't run into this weird thing of your spell casting your other spell that casts all your spells. And you don't have two copies in your deck. And we wanted the hero power to go along with that to be pretty tame because that's a pretty extreme effect. ![]() Let's let you keep your base Hunter hero power, but we'll tweak it a little bit." And so we just did, it's throw an axe and you get to do two damage to anything. IGN: Has it been interesting for you to watch how that card has been integrated into decks, and how they’ve changed over time? There are certain spells that you play that can backfire – like Kill Commanding your own face, and then there are other spells that weren't played before like Crushing Walls that suddenly found a home… Peter Whalen: Yeah. I think it actually mirrors our internal testing with it. Where the original things we did with it were, "What are the really extreme versions where you can do some crazy things if you've played all of the spells in your deck and then you play Zul'jin?" And then me moved into more - a lot like real life - value versions of it where we're just putting it in these Spell Hunter type decks, except we were cutting some of the face damage parts that could backfire in exchange for more Crushing Walls type stuff that was more enemy focused and would give you better Zul'jins. And then - like in real life - we moved to the world where what if you just put Zul'jin in your deck and you put the good Hunter cards in, and sometimes it backfires and that's okay. I'd probably cut the second Crushing Walls and Call to the Wild, too, they seem a bit slow to me.So I think it's been fun to see the real world mirror our testing. Might also want to find room for Kill Commands, having the extra removal/face damage is always useful. ![]() I'd tech in Freezing Traps to the list here, it's really satisfying to deny big priests rez targets from Shadow Essence. If you'd only be using him for face damage to find lethal, it would make way more sense to run Kill Command, anyway. If any of these conditions are not met, Rhok'delar is rarely the right play to make. It's really rare to be in a situation where you've thinned out Barnes+Y'shaarj, are running out of cards with Rhok'delar in hand, and haven't drawn into Rexxar. Once Rexxar is up, you'll almost always rather build and play a big beast than drop a 7-mana weapon that may or may not generate you something good. ![]() Furthermore, with Rexxar and 2x Tracking to fish him out, you've got rather consistent late game already. It's often a massive tempo loss on the turn you play it which makes it difficult to pull off with hunter. You can realistically only play it out after thinning out Barnes+Y'shaarj and having at least 7 mana, preferably 9 so you don't burn a card. Like others have have pointed out, Rhok'delar is not that useful.
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