Why Blizzard Isn’t Making Hearthstone Cards Yet

Trading card games from Magic to Pokémon are enjoying a surge in popularity, even as scalpers and long online queues create headaches. There’s clearly a market for slapping popular characters and strong art onto cardboard, but not every digital hit is an automatic fit for physical shelves.

Hearthstone has been a digital-only card game for over a decade, and in a roundtable on Blizzard’s Irvine campus executive producer Nathan Lyons-Smith and game director Tyler Bielman explained why the team isn’t rushing into real-world cards. Bielman said much of what makes Hearthstone special relies on mechanics and systems the digital platform enables, and translating those elements to tabletop would mean sacrificing a lot of what gives the game its identity.

They emphasized that Hearthstone’s core is universal and accessible, yet reproducing its digital-only features would force the team to carefully define what players consider essential and how much could be recaptured on another platform.

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