Perils in Paradise marketing
Blizzard Entertainment | Hearthstone ● Creative Design & Content Live Ops Designer ● 07.04.2024 - 10.24.2024
As a long-time fan of Blizzard and after a year of working on the LCS, switching from Esports work at Riot to marketing expansions on Hearthstone was a welcome change of pace.
I joined the Creative Design & Content team in the summer of 2024 right at the tail end of the Whizbang’s Workshop expansion as a Live Ops Designer on the community side of things. This role would have me create everything from live stream assets to blog posts to user acquisition ads. With Hearthstone’s 4-month development cycle, my contract at Blizzard would allow me to experience the full duration of a release, from the launch of one expansion to the pre-release phase of the next. And so, I began work on Hearthstone patch 30.0 Perils in Paradise, a lighthearted vacation themed release.
30.0 Launch
Hearthstone's blog updates truly are unique. I honestly didn't think we were doing anything special until I started doing competitor research and found that many games in the current ecosystem of live-service games have nearly no official information on updates and releases. Outside of fan sites, staying informed is only really possible by actively playing the game.
My main responsibility as the CD&C Live Ops Designer assigned to community projects was to maintain quality and consistency across all the blog posts. At the time, the posts were written by Nicholas Weiss (on the development team as of 2026) whom I worked alongside to create the visual content for each one. These posts were featured on the Hearthstone website and in the Battle.net launcher along with fan sites like Patch Bot and Hearthpwn.
Blog content included a wide range of deliverables and would often times require game capture to demonstrate new features and updates. Below are just a few of the many gifs, screenshots, and created images used to keep players informed.
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.
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.
Theorycrafting Announcements
Theorycrafting Community Social Frames
Theorycrafting Community Livestream Frames
30.2 Battlegrounds
For Hearthstone, every .2 patch is a battlegrounds update, and for 30.2 it was the launch of Season 8. Blog post assets during this month consist of the usual suspects -- rewards track updates, balance patch card resizing (the grid of cards below is just a drop in the bucket of the amount that need resizing), and video captures of new features like the trinket shop below.
There is also the addition of the Battlegrounds Early Access events, in which I provide social media overlays to content creators, similar to Theorycrafting during the 30.0 launch period.
Battlegrounds Early Access Event
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 30.2.2 -- Standard, Wild and Battlegrounds.
Balance Patch Social Teasers and Blog Posts
30.4 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.
The 30.4 patch introduced a first-of-its-kind item to Hearthstone -- the Mythic Skin. A Mythic Skin is a hero skin that is unique in every way; full animations and voice lines, unique intro, win and defeat sequences as well as a full board takeover. As a premium product, it was paramount that the blog explained in detail how cool the skin is. So I captured the Ragnaros Mythic Skin in-game and create a series of animated gifs for the blog showing each unique feature.
30.6 Pre-release
The final patch of an expansion tends to be the most exciting because its all about building up to the release of the next expansion. The pre-release patch introduces players to what they can expect in the coming expansion, which in this case is outer space epic -- The Great Dark Beyond. There's quite a bit of the usual assets being created for blog posts with some new additions, like the pre-release tavern brawl, community events and the much anticipated card reveals.
For the card reveals, Hearthstone partners with community influencers to record first impressions and quick gameplay moments. These are genuine spontaneous reactions from the influencers when they get to see a new card and what it does. For these recordings, I create 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 lower thirds and a 2-cam gameplay screen.
And finally, towards the tail end of the pre-release period, are the reveal videos, which require high-engagement thumbnails for YouTube and verticals for social media.
