Hearthstone is celebrating its 10-year anniversary today, and the weeks-long birthday blowout is well underway. The celebration includes free giveaways of special “gift spell” cards for each class, a new Harth Stonebrew card as a login card that grants iconic hands from Hearthstone history, and an upcoming nostalgia-tinged expansion that brings a new twist on some fan favorite cards and mechanics. GameSpot spoke with senior game designer Cora Georgiou and executive producer Nathan Lyons-Smith about how they approached paying homage to a decade of Hearthstone.

GameSpot: When you were brainstorming for the 10-year anniversary, what did you want to accomplish? How did you want to mark this big occasion?

Cora Georgiou: Well, we had no shortage of options, I will say. We started, oh goodness, we started out [on] Whizbang’s Workshop a little over a year ago, and at the time the 10th anniversary was still so far away that it was just a little nugget of an idea in our brains. And when we were brainstorming as a team and with our narrative design team thinking about what the expansion theme should be, we weren’t 100% sure when the set was going to come out–[we were] just hopeful that it was going to be around the right time.

“Well, that timing does line up pretty closely with Hearthstone’s 10th anniversary. Would it be a wild idea to do a theme that really leans into that?” And the more that we thought it over, the more that the dates sort of solidified with the planning for the coming year and the more we realized that it was going to be quite literally perfect timing with the actual 10th anniversary date. We realized we have to go for it. This is the one opportunity, our one shot–[we]cannot throw away that shot.

And from there it was just really figuring out, ‘Okay, we want to do the 10th anniversary? How do we do that? How do we make an expansion that encompasses 10 years of Hearthstone?’ We’ve certainly done expansion themes in the past that have brought back characters like the League of Explorers; we just did with Showdown in the Badlands. We brought the League of Explorers back. So how do we make this one feel really special?

And I think [it] really just came down to the vibes, just the overall vibes of celebration and joy and humor and whimsy. A little bit of dark in there as well. Death Knights can only be so whimsical before they start getting annoyed at us. But from there it really was just, ‘Hey, what are the most beloved characters from Hearthstone of all time?’

And Whizbang was one that really came to the forefront because so many of us as designers really just fondly remembered playing with that first version of Whizbang and playing with those Whizbang decks. And it had been a character that we’d wanted to bring back for a long time but hadn’t had the right opportunity to do so. And so it seemed like he was just a great sort of hallmark character for the setVenir de Tragamonedas Gratis Online. And then from there, I think every good story has an antagonist–has a little bit of conflict. We needed a foil to Whizbang, and I think there’s no better villain, there’s no better foil in Hearthstone’s history, than Dr. Boom.

And then that also kind of brings us back to Hearthstone’s history with a goblin versus a gnome, which was really then how we were thinking of this story. It’s Whizbang versus Boom, but it’s also kind of goblins versus gnomes at its core. But it’s also so whimsical and fun that there really isn’t much conflict there. It’s all around just a really good time. So it seemed like a really good foundation for bringing back all of these characters and just have a good time.

So it sounds like it kind of clicked in such a way that it synergized in all these myriad ways that you weren’t necessarily expecting.

Georgiou: Yeah. Once we got the ball rolling, different people came with different ideas. The picture started to really come together.