Hello everyone,

My Ahn'Qiraj Adventure is complete! I enjoyed the process tremendously, but I made a lot of mistakes when building it. I thought I'd waste some ink passing along what meagre wisdom I can on the subject and hopefully help you succeed, where I didn't do so well:

Start with Theme

I went into building the Ahn'Qiraj Adventure with the thought that the theme was "It's the Ahn'Qiraj Adventure! Surely that's enough!" Spoilers: It wasn't enough. Look at Naxx - All class cards relate to death in some way. Some have Deathrattles, others have effects when things die. BRM had Dragons, with the new Dragon hold mechanic. LoE had Discover, which was a great thematic effect. My set had nothing, mechanically to tie it together. It tended towards control, but rather loosely.

So when you build your adventure start with theme. Decide on a mechanic, or feel for your adventure and build cards around the theme.

Think of the Narrative

Ahn'Qiraj may be a good dungeon that's well-loved by WoW alumni, but it doesn't have a very compelling narrative. The story of Naxx is livened up considering because Kel'Thuzad provides some fantastic banter that makes the experience fun and engaging. In BRM you get the back and forth between Victor Nefarian and Ragnaros. In LoE you have an entire cast of protagonists "helping" you along the way. Ahn'Qiraj had a good host character, with a bit of personality, but C'Thun, as a not-sleeping nor fully awake Old God doesn't really offer the most compelling dialogue. There's very little interplay available, and as such my narrative came across as very flat.

So, right at the beginning of your adventure, if you're planning on including details about the story of the adventure take the time to build out the cast of characters. Define who they are and pick one or two traits to accentuate, since you have so little screen-time to explain the character to your audience. Build characters with a sense of humour that can play off of each other and contribute to making the adventure fun for the audience.

Don't include cards that don't fit

In my effort to create a set there were a number of neat ideas and mechanics that I had that I wanted to include, but really had no right being there. The Bloodpetal Lasher, Arcanavore and Deadly Blunderbuss were all shoved into the set, when I could have gone into the lore of Ahn'Qiraj and pulled more thematically appropriate rewards. Also important is to better relate the card rewards with the boss that your audience is fighting against.

So if you have mechanics that you like do one of two things: Find an appropriate aspect of the adventure to connect that mechanic to, or put the mechanic aside and wait for a better opportunity to present it. Link rewards that fit the theme to the individual bosses.

Don't slack off

Much of the cards that I had were designed right around the time that TGT was coming out. There's a shortage of Inspire cards, only one Joust card and nothing that uses the Discover mechanic. What happened? Well, I basically got busy, stowed the adventure and didn't come back to it for a few months. What I should have done at that point was do a full audit of the cards, and updated everything. What I did instead is just slapped a couple of bandaids onto my existing work and JFSI'd it (That's "Just Fucking Ship It"). A bad call on my part.

Iterate more

As mentioned above, I didn't really spend enough time getting the cards right. There were a few cards that went through a few variations before getting locked in, but by and large the cards I was presenting were not particularly polished. For an expansion where I'm trying to put my best work out -- this is part of a growing portfolio, after all -- that's not good at all. One easy thing I could have done is create more cards than will go into the set, then trim it down to only the best. As mentioned before I needed to be more judicious in keeping to the themes of the adventure and culling anything that didn't fit.

So if you're building cards for a set, look at your set holistically. Ask yourself: "What are the 5 best cards in this set?" "What are the 5 worst?" "Do those bad cards need to exist?" "Why are they uninteresting?" If you create more cards than fit in the set you'll ensure that the quality of cards that do make the cut are better. Also, inspect your worst cards and try to understand why they're bad. Make some changes to them and see if that makes them better. Abandon cards that just aren't working out. That leads me to:

Creating Legendaries that really work is hard

When looking at the worst cards in my set, more often than not they were the legendary cards. That's because legendaries should be exiting. They should break the rules in little ways that make the player feel like they're cheating a bit when playing them. The effect should be startling, and troublesome, but doing that, while trying to match the card to the cnnon while feeling right is tougher than it looks.

My advice here is spend the time to massage your adventure to make the final boss of the wing one that is interesting and conducive to being a good legendary card. Structure the adventure to maximize the quality of the end boss as a card. Start designing your legendaries early, and brainstorm ideas based off of everything the boss is able to do. Pair it down to the best effects. Remember that players like expensive cards (which legendaries often are) want them to have immediate effects when they hit the battlefield so that value can be earned off of them immediately.

Don't become a slave to the canon

This is a major strike against my boss design and level layout: When building the AQA I treated the source material too canonically. Often I struggled to pull something interesting out of a tank and spank boss, attempting a literal translation of what it could do. Sometimes, the thing that makes the boss distinct are easy to find, and the flavour of the encounter leaps out at you. Other times, it's buried deep -- so deep that it probably wasn't worth finding in the first place.

My advice is take a look at the material. If there's something there, use it, but if you start to struggle pull from a database of interesting encounters. Derive the encounter off of another existing encounter, with a twist! Take a look at the boss, and infer stuff based on their appearance. Use the boss loosely to achieve a fun player experience, and don't get held up by trying to blindly adhere to the canon.

The video format obstructed viewers

I elected to try a video series. I'm not sure if anyone has done that before with this subreddit, so I thought it was worth a go. There were struggles with the format. I had some lapses in recording, and not enough technical skills or software to edit the video. I learned a bit about it, but ultimately elected to get the content out instead of delivering a highly polished

Further to this, the audience of this subreddit doesn't seem very interested in video. I had my reasons for doing it, but it meant that there was a lack of discussion about the specific cards I presented. That was a real bummer to me, because I love talking about the cards that people design (probably especially my own!).

I spend a considerable amount of time talking about the encounters themselves, including creating cards for hero powers and sample minions. There wasn't a single comment about any of the boss fights that I presented, which leaves me wondering whether that was worth it. Certainly this audience just wants to see the cards, and judge them. The only deep discussion we had was about Cobra Venom, a Rogue card that I'd undercosted significantly, but the conversation existed between 3 or 4 people only.

If you create an Adventure, seriously consider whether the boss fight write-ups are worth it. If they are, find a delivery mechanism that generates more engagement in the community.

Figure out your rarities

Mine were all over the place. The next time I do this, I'll be creating slots for rarity for class cards and neutrals, then be assigning cards to those slots, being sensitive to the types of cards that belong in those rarities.

Beware lumping class cards together

I made the mistake of revealing Warrior, Hunter, Warlock and Shaman cards in back to back wings, despite the fact that there were only 2 class cards for each class. I should have spaced them out better.

Well, that's that. Sorry for the long post, but I wanted to do a big thought dump of my experience creating this adventure, in case people can benefit from it.