Blizzard Announces Free-To-Play Card Game, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft

Blizzard Entertainment has been creating quite a stir in the gaming community lately as they not only announced its Diablo III will be headed to consoles, specifically the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 at this point, and today, they’re announcing they’re going to be releasing a free-to-play game.

The game is called Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft and will be shown at a PAX East panel sometime this weekend. Hearthstone will be an online free-to-play collectible card game, similar to Magic: The Gathering, and will be made available on the PC and Mac in beta form this summer. Shortly after its initial beta release, it will be made available for the iPad.

Players will be able to create their individual decks, buy booster packs and craft new cards by combining existing ones. Hearthstone will look to combine the addictive card-game genre with the high-level polish and dynamic animations Blizzard games are known to have. New players will be more than welcome to play Hearthstone as Blizzard says they will receive the guidance and deck-building tools that will suggest or automatically select cards for them. Dueling against other players will be handled through Blizzard’s Battle.net matchmaking system, with duels focusing on 1-on-1 battles.