Last week at BlizzCon, Blizzard Entertainment surprised fans of its popular card battler Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft with the announcement that the game’s first new adventure in six months would be arriving in less than a week.

The new adventure, League of Explorers, opens its first wing today, and the subject on most player’s minds is the adventures new Discover mechanic, which allows a player to choose from one of three random cards of a certain mana cost. The cards drawn through Discover are completely random, and the only limitation is that they must be useable by the player’s class.

Some fans have voiced concerns that Discover is too dependent on luck, and while that may or may not be the case, Senior Game Designer Mike Donais explained that the new mechanic is all about making the game more fun.

“When you have more cards in your hand, you have more options,” Donais said in a recent interview with PC Gamer. “Having more options makes the game more fun, so we want to give you more options. At the same time, we ran into the problem of if you see every card in your deck, the games fill the same, so it’s not very fun.”

Discover works almost identically to the drafting mechanic used to create decks in Hearthstone’s arena game mode, which tasks players with building their deck by progressively choosing from one of three random cards until they reach a total of 30. The player must determine which card is the most valuable for what they are trying to accomplish in the end. Donais said that Discover offers a similar decision making process.

“First of all, you get the more interesting hands and the more interesting play situations,” Donais said, “but on top of that you also get the other advantages of Discover, which is if you’re playing against a certain style of deck like a rush deck, you’ll choose the healing or defensive cards, maybe the cheaper cards. If you’re playing against a control deck, you’ll take the bigger cards.”

Image courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment Inc