Hearthstone Isn’t A Real Card Game (Yet), Here’s Why

From Magic to Pokémon, trading card games are having a moment right now. Yeah, the popularity comes with some drawbacks like scalpers and awful online queues, but it’s clear that there’s a market to jump into if you’re putting popular characters and good art on pieces of cardboard. Hearthstone, Blizzard’s Warcraft card game, has existed as a digital game for over a decade. Is Blizzard planning on jumping into this booming business? Not yet, at least.

In a roundtable interview on Blizzard’s Irvine campus that Kotaku was present for, executive producer Nathan Lyons-Smith and game director Tyler Bielman were asked if Blizzard had been considering bringing Hearthstone to physical card shops. According to Bielman, a lot of what makes the game special comes from qualities its digital platform enables that can’t be replicated with real cards, and the team is wary of losing some of those elements in translation.

I’ll start with, we have nothing to announce today. The team [has many] big physical TCG players. I came from physical TCGs; our friends at Riot and Riftbound are having a moment. It’s great for them. From the very beginning, our “founding fathers” of Hearthstone asked the question of, “What if you could remove all the pain points from physical play?” and, at that point, kind of looking at Magic as the foundational element, ‘[if you could] remove pain points around Magic, too?’ And they asked all these questions, and then they put this game together in a way that is [an] incredible digital [experience]. The things that we do, mechanically, that you can’t do on a tabletop, when we go to look at expansions and new mechanics, we value those really highly. It gets a little extra oomph from us if it’s something that is unique to the digital format. If you were to translate Hearthstone into a physical format, you would be sacrificing a lot of things that make it special. Now that said, the core of what makes Hearthstone a great game is pretty universal and very accessible, and that’s why we believe it’s been around for 12 years, but I think that we would lose so much in that translation, we would have to be really careful about defining for ourselves what makes Hearthstone great in the minds of all the players and then how much of that could we recapture if we take it to a different platform at all.

Lyons-Smith added that Blizzard wants Hearthstone to be positioned as the “best digital card game,” and that is the team’s focus, but also said that the company has been around for 35 years and a lot has changed in that time, so the company has a “long horizon” of research and development that it’s exploring. So while it has “nothing to announce” and “nothing actually even in development,” the team is happy to see the card game genre growing.

Today, Blizzard held its Hearthstone Spotlight presentation that laid out the game’s incoming updates, including an update based on World of Warcraft’s Cataclysm expansion, which you can watch below: