Hearthstone is a digital battle card game set in the WarCraft universe from Blizzard Entertainment.
You can select one of 9 heroes in the WarCraft universe, each with their own single hero ability, hero-specific cards and available-to-all-heroes neutral cards to battle other players in a random-but-fair matchup on Blizzard's own Battle.net to earn more cards and raise your ranks among other players.
Hearthstone will be
free-to-play with random card packs available for real-money purchase. Though this might discourage some players, the game matches you up with opponents of closely identical deck (card value wise).
ALL cards can be bought with in-game gold which is earned by completing daily quests, winning a set amount of games and playing Arena mode. Furthermore, all cards in your collection can be broken down into "Arcane Dust", a form of material to create ANY card in the game.
Hearthstone is designed to
streamline the
tcg (
trading card game) formula to provide equal parts fun and challenge to players of all levels. This is the current to-go
entry-level battle card game for novice players.
The game was announced at
Penny Arcade Expo, March 2013 and entered closed-beta in August 2013. Open-beta will begin from December 2013.
Hearthstone will be available for PC, Mac (currently available for closed-beta) and iPad. iPhone and Android version are expected
Q4 2014.
Bob: I FINALLY got all the
cards in Hearthstone, now I can sleep after
72 straight hours of
Arena.
Bill: Did you get all the GOLD cards?