Hearthstone Dev Talks About Boomsday's New Keyword, Magnetic

"Magnetic" is the new keyword in Hearthstone's upcoming expansion set, The Boomsday Project. With Ben Brode off creating his own game company, Blizzard called upon Associate Game Designer Stephen Chang to explain how it all works in a developer video.

Minions with the Magnetic keyword can either play by themselves, as usual, or "attach" themselves to another mech already in play, adding their stats and keywords to the other mech. If you want to play a Magnetic mech by itself, you just play it to the right of your minions. If you want to attach it to another mech, you play it to the left.

That much is simple enough, but as Chang describes, it wasn't simple coming up with the final form of the Magnetic mechanic. An early version used a keyword called "Modular" and had players pick what kind of effect they wanted on their mechanized monstrosities. One such choice involved playing the minion by itself or attaching it to another mech, and it's this implementation that survived into Magnetic's final form.

Oh, and four new cards are revealed in the video. But who cares about spoilers, right? /s