Hearthstone VFX- Amitut Legendary Card VFX

I had the great luck and privilege of interning on Hearthstone over the last 6 months!
My first proper big VFX task, I was assigned Amitut due to her extra technical difficulty of figuring out and implementing additional Cast On Drawn VFX- a card function not often used that required extensive collaboration with engineering and finding folks that remembered the "ancestral knowledge" of it all. I was lucky to have access to the artist that concepted her. I connected to their original inspirations of kintsugi and being repaired with molten gold to "come back to the fight stronger than before" and based my VFX on it. 1.5 seconds is not a lot of time to sell a story, so it was an exciting challenge. I was also very pleasantly surprised that Amitut is actually important to the expansion of Reign of the Black Empire. She made an appearance in the reveal trailer (https://youtu.be/imZ4rqFbHFc?si=F5pRZnRzMQF0VTC4) that was shown off at the BlizzCon 2026 opening ceremony, other cards in the set, and supplemental YouTube videos. It's not something I knew of going into it, so it's a nice bonus for her to receive extra love from the game.
A special shout-out to James Jaimes (my mentor) and Thomas Horwath (my manager) for their guidance and support, and Dez Bencosme (senior 2D artist on the team) for collaborating on Amitut's theming.