I’m sure that just about everyone wonders how we come up with some of the crazy/interesting names that we come up with for a large number of cards for the WoW TCG.   Most cards in the WoW TCG have some sort of story behind how each one got its final name ranging from inside jokes, to NPC or Player names, to friends and family names.

Anyone who has played the MMO or even Warcraft 3 will know some of the well known Warcraft lore players like Warchief Thrall, Jaina Proudmore, Varimathras, and Lady Vashj.  There are only so many Warcraft characters that we can include, however, so for all of the other Heroes and Allies we all dig deep to come up with interesting names.  Let’s take a peek at a few of the cards that have vanity names:

Bhenn Checks-the-Sky – This interestingly named Instant Tauren Druid comes from our own R&D member Ben Cichoski because his last name pretty much sounds like “Checks the Sky”.

Elder Moorf – For those who don’t know who Moorf is yet, he is one of the characters of our rules dude Paul Ross.  Elder was added to his name to make him sound more distinguished (i.e. old).

Kena Shadowbrand – Originally named Keno, this little Gnome was supposed to be head developer Ken Ho’s vanity character, but in the end we found that the Gnome was actually a girl so we changed the name to Kena.

Meekway Humzinger – Named after the fearless leader of R&D, somehow this Gnome’s name is supposed to sound like Mike Hummel.

Shem Reznict – This nifty name came about as an anagram of Blizzard’s VP of Creative Development Chris Metzen.

So there you have five vanity or vanity related names and how they came about.  Stay tuned next time for a peek at some of the inside jokes, WoW jokes, and general TCG jokes that have made their way onto some other cards as names.

Peace out.

The Heavy.

Email us your questions and comments at WOW_R&D@upperdeck.com.