ACROSS THE TIMEWAYS
Blizzard Entertainment | Hearthstone ● Marketing, Creative & Production Designer ● 2025
A thematically resonant time-travelling expansion -- perfectly timed with my return to the Hearthstone team at Blizzard.
Team Lead: Julie Kimura ● Producer: Dana Nuber
MC&P Design Team: Lisa Ou, Millie Maddox, Stephanie Wang
Project Stakeholders: Joshua Yehl, Lana Williams, Eliana Gori
MC&P Design Team: Lisa Ou, Millie Maddox, Stephanie Wang
Project Stakeholders: Joshua Yehl, Lana Williams, Eliana Gori
I re-joined the Hearthstone Creative team (now operating as Marketing, Creative & Production) in the fall of 2025, after my role as Art Director at Riot Games. Expansion-wise, the timing was just after the launch week of Across the Timeways. Jumping back on the community side of things, I would create everything from blog posts to livestream assets to promotional product visuals.
34.0 Launch
My main responsibility as the MC&P Designer assigned to community projects was to maintain quality and consistency across all the blog posts. Working with a new content writer, Joshua Yehl, I created the visual content for posts that lived on the Hearthstone website and in the Battle.net launcher along with fan sites like Patch Bot and Hearthpwn.
About a week or two after each patch launch there is a significant balance patch (the X.X.2s). For these, I create social media teasers that give a vague idea which cards are being buffed, nerfed, added or removed from the card pool, giving fans time to speculate on what the balance changes might be. Below are the three for 34.0.2 -- Standard and Battlegrounds.
Battlegrounds Early Access Event
Balance Patch Social Teasers and Blog Posts
With each new expansions comes Theorycrafting, a community focused livestream event where Hearthstone provides social and stream overlays for content creators to discover and theorize the potential ways new cards can be played. The event spans several days and gives creators access to Twitch Drop giveaways, helping attract viewers to their channels.
Theorycrafting Announcements
One of the main aspects of the job is to utilize Hearthstone’s treasure trove of gorgeous card artwork -- commissioned work from talented artists from across the globe. Below are a few examples of card art from Perils in Paradise and the repurposed elements that ended up in some final assets.
34.2 Battlegrounds
For Hearthstone, every .2 patch is a battlegrounds update, and for 34.2 it was the launch of Season 12 -- one of the biggest battlegrounds updates in a while. Blog post assets during this month consist of the usual suspects -- rewards track updates, balance patches, card & asset resizing, and video captures of new features like the Timewarped Tavern and the game-wide Signature card tooltip update.
Because of how hefty the update for Battleground was this time around, the team chose to do a big card reveal stream with influencers and developers. For these recordings, I create social media promos, stream overlays and put together several different parchment layouts of the new cards, sorted by what the team is trying to highlight with each set. The stream overlays consist of single-cam reveal screen and a dual-cam gameplay screen that feature the Battleground Bundle.
34.4 Mini-set
The 30.4 Mini-Set patch introduces a smaller set of cards to supplement the standard expansion cards released at launch. For my work, the blog and community assets tend to be the same as the expansion launch except on a smaller scale. Below are some of the assets created during this period.
34.6 CORE SET UPDATE
With the last expansion of the year drawing to a close, Hearthstone's core set needs to be updated. This core-set rotation is denotated using specific zodiac symbols displayed as watermarks behind the cards. This time around, the set rotated from Year of the Raptor (2025) to Year of the Scarab (2026) and had the largest introduction of new cards to the core set since the core set debuted in 2021.
For this particular instance, the usual blog announcement assets were created along with a large infographic showing all the cards leaving and entering the core set.
