At the end of the month, The Elder Scrolls: Legends is heading to Sotha Sil's magical, mechanical Clockwork City in a new expansion that will add 35 story missions and 55 new cards, and we've got the exclusive reveal of one of the most fearsome: The mighty Clockwork Dragon, a 4/4 Epic that can drop the hammer on plodding opponents in the Field lane or shore up your position in the Shadow lane against faster aggro decks. 

The Clockwork Dragon is the only dragon card in the new set, and it's also something of a tip-of-the-hat to the previous expansion, Heroes of Skyrim. "We like to inject a little bit more before you move on to another totally new thing, which Clockwork does introduce. We also like to throw in one more dragon for you, maybe one more werewolf, because werewolves were big things in Skyrim as well. So the Clockwork Dragon is it. It fits the theme of the Clockwork City by being clockwork," Dire Wolf Digital creative director Paul Dennen explained. 

"It is a neutral card, which means it can fit into any dragon deck, and it also means it kind of works with a lot of the Clockwork City stuff too. There's a lot of new Clockwork City cards—the Fabricants—that have special abilities if you have a neutral creature or a neutral card in play. The Clockwork Dragon can activate those as well. So it's kind of a bridge card between the two sets." 

Despite looking like the sort of thing that wouldn't be out of place in the middle of a monster truck extravaganza, the new card also bears what Dennen described as "subtle" design elements that make it more versatile than first glance might suggest. "If you play it to the left, it gets +2/+0 and Drain, and I think the card can punish opponent decks that are being kind of slow and non-interactive. If you can take control of the Field lane, playing this 6/4 creature for 5 with Drain on the left can be quite fearsome. So if decks like that are frustrating you, then you can throw Clockwork Dragon in and punish them for that." 

"On the other hand, if aggro decks are punishing you, Clockwork Dragon has this fallback of, if you play it on the right lane, it gets +2 health and Guard. So you can go in with that strategy of punishing the slower, non-interactive decks, but then still react to the faster aggro decks, because the aggro decks tend to try to push in their final damage through the Shadow lane. So by putting the Clockwork Dragon over there you can try to shut them down." 

The Clockwork Dragon emphasizes flexibility over raw power at least in part due to Dire Wolf's desire to avoid making neutral cards too strong: Because neutrals can be played in anything, the concern is that an overly good card will appear in too many decks. "What we try to do is make the neutral cards not quite so powerful on their own, but offer synergy options with the Fabricants. So if you're playing those Fabricants, then you're really going to be looking deep into the card pile, looking for those neutral cards that will work well with your deck," Dennen explained. 

The long-term goal is to encourage diversity of play, although Dennen added that while the developers like to change things up to keep the game fresh, the process is ultimately an organic one. "The players can surprise us and find things that we didn't expect," he said. "And that's okay—we want it to be one big, elaborate puzzle that is very hard to understand and takes weeks or month to kind of gel and find what those top decks are." 

There's obviously a lot going on mechanically, but Return to Clockwork City also adds fresh story content to the game, something the Heroes of Skyrim expansion didn't offer. It takes place in the early days of the realm of Skyrim, amidst the return of dragons and a rumor of someone searching for the entrance to the Clockwork City. Dennen said this will be a "bigger, bolder," and more epic story than the one told in the first story expansion, Fall of the Dark Brotherhood, which—appropriately for a tale about people who commit murder for a living—had something of a dark tone to it. "[Return to Clockwork City] is more about treasure hunting and finding this lost magical place, and then discovering a mystery inside," he said. 

The narrative aspect of the expansion is important, because while PvP players get their fix—that is, new cards—with every expansion, Dennen said there are a lot of people who are into it primarily for the story. Because of that, card-only expansions don't do much for them. 

"They love to play through the single-player adventures, and then maybe they'll play a bit of PvP. But they'll fall off, and then they'll come back when there's new story stuff, because that's their focus," he said. Story-focused players are generally a little more casual than PvPers and so are less likely to hit the forums to demand more of what they want, which can make it a little tricky to gauge just how much call there is, especially in a relatively young game like The Elder Scrolls: Legends. But Dennen believes the demand for narrative is there. 

"We have to kind of balance cadence—how often do we do stories—and we don't quite have a final answer on that," he said. "But we figure having another story now made sense." 

The Elder Scrolls: Legends – Return to Clockwork City goes live on November 30. 

For those of you still playing The Elder Scrolls: Legends card game, and I have to confess I've lapsed for the last few months, a new expansion is on the way, and might finally make your dwemer-based dreams come true. Return to Clockwork City will be released on 30 November, and will add 55 new cards plus 35 story missions to the game. This is the second PvE expansion Legends has received, the first being The Fall of the Dark Brotherhood which launched in April this year. 

For those not familiar with the Clockwork City, which first featured in the Elder Scrolls III's Tribunal expansion, here's what Bethesda's equivalent of a tourist brochure has to say about it: "The Clockwork City is the grand workshop of the late god Sotha Sil, who was obsessed with crafting his own forms of life, reconstructing and building on the work of the Dwemer artisans." 

There are three main additions coming with the expansion, and we'll start with the most interesting: a new creature type called Fabricants. There will be five of these Fabricants in the set, (one per class colour), and they'll gain a powerful benefit from being played in conjunction with neutral cards. The idea here seems to be to encourage more players to experiment with cards like the Dwemer, which until now have been relegated largely to meme status.

Next up is Treasure Hunt, a mechanic which sounds confusing when written down but is probably quite simple once you play with it. As far as I can make out, you play the card with Treasure Hunt on, and then if you draw the card type that it's hunting for—Bethesda gives the example of a weapon—then that card will be buffed accordingly. It sounds pretty inconsistent unless you build the deck around the effect, so the payoff will need to be powerful to make it worthwhile.

Finally we've got another new mechanic called Assemble. This is based on the idea of the Clockwork City's automaton inhabitants having to repair themselves using spare parts. When you play a creature with the Assemble keyword, which are called Factotums, you'll get to pick from one of two bonuses (a bit like the Druid's 'Choose One' effects in Hearthstone). However, the big difference here is that the same bonus will be applied to all the Factotums in your hand and deck. So essentially you're committing to a particular line of play. 

As someone who never really loved the Dwemer stuff in Skyrim, I can't say I'm in love with the mechanical theme of Clockwork City, but new cards are the lifeblood of any CCG so I'm glad to see Legends receiving some love. Below you'll find a gallery of the first cards revealed from the set. We'll be unveiling a card exclusively later this week, and I think we snagged a pretty decent one.