With Hearthstone's latest expansion out today, which not only kicks off the new Year of the Dragon but also a year-long narrative, we recently had the chance to sit down with Liv Breeden and Stephen Chang of the Hearthstone team to talk about overall design philosophy and what goes into creating cards and spells and mechanics for villains.

Turns out, thinking like one.

“We started with Schemes pretty early on because the idea of sitting and plotting, the best villain waits until the perfect moment before they unveil what they’ve been planning the entire time,” Liv tells me. “That's such a cool idea that we wanted to play that up. And we got into it early.” In Rise of Shadows, Scheme spell cards grow in power over-time which leads to the potential for a perfect play – where the planets align, and everything goes to plan. Hagatha's Scheme starts as one point of damage to all minions costing five mana, but if it’s held for three more turns that becomes four points of damage for the same cost. And it only grows from there.

Click Here For Our Full Interview with the Hearthstone Team