Hello and welcome to the lovely Fan Creations section here on our wonderful HearthPwn Forums! This Primer aims to help you get started in fan card creation, providing you with the resources you need to create whatever interesting ideas are buzzing around in your head.
Whether you're looking for lore help, balancing tips and tricks, or just plain old where to start, we've got you covered.
Section I: The Basics
While it's highly unlikley you've managed to stumble upon this Primer without the basic game knowledge of Hearthstone, it's always best to start at the very beginning, so here we go!
There are currently four (4) different types of cards you might be interested in making, along with two (2) other gameplay elements that might have crossed your mind - Minions, Weapons, Spells and Hero Cards, along with Hero Powers and Heroes themselves. See the examples below.
A Minion
A Weapon
A Spell
A Hero Card
A Hero Power
A Hero
Minions are creatures that are summoned to the battlefield and attack enemy minions and the enemy hero.
Weapons can be equipped by certain classes and used to attack enemy minions or the enemy hero.
Spells are used to trigger various immediate effects, from damaging to healing to card draw.
Hero Cards are cards that replace your hero with a new one, granting a new Hero Power.
Hero Powers are unique abilities each Hero has that can be used once per turn at the cost of mana.
Heroes are the characters we play as. Reducing an enemy Hero to 0 Health wins you the game.
To find a full list of all of the cards of each type in the game at the moment, click the bolded words above, or search for yourself in our card database.
Section II: Balancing and Mechanics
The links below will take you to a wide variety of resources to help you get to grips with various balancing concepts. Note that sticking strictly to stat point systems when designing cards can be helpful, but can also be a hindrance, since some combinations of effects or cards can be vastly more important to some classes than others - Warlocks and Rogues, for example, value self-healing far more highly than any other class.
Also note that we can't verify how well these threads and blogs will translate to current Hearthstone, as many of them were written quite a while ago. If you know of any other good balancing resources, feel free to let us know!
Custom Hearthstone Reddit - Minion Balance A huge thanks to dorian467 for this: a nice overview and analysis of how to calculate the cost of minions based on Keywords and other effects.
Custom Hearthstone Reddit - Other Balance Resources Theres a great deal of really useful stuff here, including user and Blizzard blogs about balance philosophy.
Hearthstone 'Colour Chart' For anyone that wants a quick overview of how the nine Hearthstone Heroes differentiate from one antoher (Keywords, Mechanics etc.), here is a nice set of images to show you!
Class Development and Discussion Thread While primarily a thread for collaborating with others, getting help creating a class and helping them in return, the initial post also contains some valuable insight into the basics of designing a Hearthstone class.
Searchstone.io Looking for a quick way to check the wording of a card, or to find all the cards with certain stats? Searchstone is a good alternative to our own database of cards, and features all the collectible cards in the game.
Fan Creations Grammar Guide Phoenixfeather created a handy-dandy guide to Hearthstone Grammar (with input from the rest of the mods) for anyone looking to make their cards extra perfect. Comes with a free quiz to test yourself!
Section III: Lore and Theming
While its fun to imagine what it would be like if Pokemon were included in Hearthstone, or the heroes of Overwatch, many people want to create as authentic a Hearthstone card as possible, and that means delving into the lore of the Warcraft universe. This can be daunting for people who know very little, so here are some resources to help you.
WoWpedia - A good resource for information on all the characters of WoW, along with Warcraft itself.
WoW Wiki - A different source for WoW and Warcraft information, so you can crosscheck between them.
The Lore Help Thread - Got a burning question that you can't seem to find a satisfactory answer to? Throw it in the lore thread, and one of our kind forum members will help you with their own knowledge from their presumably extensive WoW career.
Section IV - Artwork
It's the art that makes the card! While Hearthstone does have a wide variety of art styles shown, these places are a good place to start looking for art until you get a feel for what sort of art works on Hearthstone cards, and can scour the internet yourself. Again, reference pages for artwork are more than welcome, so if you know of any, let me know and we'll add them.
WoW TCG - Card Browser All cards from the Wow TCG are too at your disposal! Filters are available on the sidebar to narrow down to specific cards you are after. You'll have to edit and crop cards to grab the artwork you need however.
WoW TCG - WoWcards Another repository for finding cards from the WoW TCG should you need it. The artwork can be a little blurred, and you'd have to do the cropping yourself, but if in doubt, they have the artist listed for each card and Google is a wonderful tool.
aiDen's Hearthstone Gallery - Fan CreationsThread Fellow Hearthpwn user, aiDen, has handpicked over 4000 pieces of Artwork specifically for creating fan-made Hearthstone cards! Each image has a tag for easy searching, so you'd be mad not to have a look at this amazing collection of artwork right now!
DeviantArt - Hearthstone GvG Contest 2014 A Goblins Vs Gnomes art contest was held back in 2014, showcasing some spectacular user created art for the expansion. Be sure to check this out!
(Note: The polite thing to do is to reference the artist for any art that isn't yours in your creations)
Section V - Generating Hearthstone Cards
Now that you've got your art and your lore down, and you know the ins and outs of the kinds of cards you want to create, it's time to actually start making them! Luckily for us, there's a fantastic tool available.
HearthCards HearthCards is an amazing tool, kept well up to date with all the latest in Hearthstone. Choose from any type of card, any of the 9 existing classes along with many fanmade ones, and any of the expansion watermarks, including multiple fanmade ones as well. You can even click the 'import' button and type an existing card name to have it appear in the generator if buffing or nerfing cards is your thing.
If you're looking for help figuring out some of HearthCards nuances, check out this thread on changing the colours of stat points. There's other hidden features to it, so try messing around and see what you can come up with (HINT: Try typing in boxes that appear to be greyed out).
List of Common Mistakes A Google Docs list maintained by the creator of HearthCards listing common mistakes people make when designing cards. This offers help making sure you're cards look as authentic as possible.
HearthCards is completely free to use, although your card won't be kept in their servers forever - you'll have to rehost it. Speaking of which...
Section VI - Image Hosting
As mentioned before, HearthCards won't keep your cards forever, so its best to rehost them on another site. Here's a bunch of the more popular ones! (Note that some of these sites may require you to sign up to use them).
Using these websites also allows you to directly embed images into the Forums without the need for pesky attachments! To do so, click on the Icon depicted below. From there, you can adjust the size of your image.
For those of you wondering, yes, this is an image of the old card creation guide by BerserkMidget08, from which a large portion of this content has been taken. If you want to check out the original, here's a link.
Section VII - Posting to HearthPwn
Now that you've got the hand of creating cards, you'll want to share them with the rest of the forums!
If you're looking to create your own thread, check out this thread on Presentation Tools for the forums. These can make your thread look extra professional! It also includes some handy hints for Hearthcards card creation.
Stuck on ideas for what cards to create? Why not try joining the fun at the Make the Card game thread. In it, the last poster will specify a requirement that the next card has to meet. You make the next card, you get to decide on a requirement for someone else to make a card by. Helping get those creative juices flowing for everyone!
Looking to create an entire Hearthstone class? Why not swing by the aforementioned Class Development and Discussion Thread to get opinions on your concept and help others out at the same time.
Well done for making it to the end! Feel free to suggest any additions to this you think would be good, and if you have any questions about the forums or need any help, don't hesitate to PM one of the mods and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.
wow.tcgbrowser.com doesn't seem to work. I usually use http://wowcards.info instead. The arts are of very bad quality due to scanning though but if you look the artist's name on google you may find the art in high-quality version if you're lucky.
wow.tcgbrowser.com doesn't seem to work. I usually use http://wowcards.info instead. The arts are of very bad quality due to scanning though but if you look the artist's name on google you may find the art in high-quality version if you're lucky.
Works fine for me, but I'll definitely include wowcards as well! More options is always good.
The site I frequent the most when creating cards is http://searchstone.io/ ,primarily to get the wording right or cross check balance. It's just the best search engine for existing cards in the game. Forgot the name? Search for mana cost and rarity and class etc. You can search for anything within card texts or tribes as well.t
The site I frequent the most when creating cards is http://searchstone.io/ ,primarily to get the wording right or cross check balance. It's just the best search engine for existing cards in the game. Forgot the name? Search for mana cost and rarity and class etc. You can search for anything within card texts or tribes as well.t
Added! Good alternative to HearthPwn's own database if you're having trouble with load times on the site.
Very very good job man. I was actually planning on doing something similar, but being the almighty lazy person i am, now i dont have to :D Very polished guide with tons of good information. Now all we need to do is spread the word so everyone knows about this :)
PS: i think u could add link to the List of Most Common Mistakes dnikko is keeping on his hearthcards site (bottom right corner), those r some nice basic things everyone should follow :)
I would put Wowpedia higher on that list than WoWWiki, because it came to my attention that articles on WoWWiki these days are lifted straight from Wowpedia, and the old WoWWiki team has gone to Wowpedia, thus their articles are more up to date and detailed.
http://www.blizz-art.com/ is a site someone recommended to me. It's in a non-English language French, but you can still search for most generic terms in English. It contains a huge assortment of art, and shows you if its already on any TCG or Hearthstone card (including non-collectible). Hope this helps, too!
http://www.blizz-art.com/ is a site someone recommended to me. It's in a non-English language French, but you can still search for most generic terms in English. It contains a huge assortment of art, and shows you if its already on any TCG or Hearthstone card (including non-collectible). Hope this helps, too!
That site can be viewed in English. Click the UK national flag on top left.
http://www.blizz-art.com/ is a site someone recommended to me. It's in a non-English language French, but you can still search for most generic terms in English. It contains a huge assortment of art, and shows you if its already on any TCG or Hearthstone card (including non-collectible). Hope this helps, too!
That site can be viewed in English. Click the UK national flag on top left.
FYI, this is a great video if you want advice for creating cards. It's absolutely an essential video for Card Game Designers...heck even game design in general!
You should either update the links to the official WoW art galleries, or remove them, because they no longer work.
Thanks for the heads-up - I've removed the links, as unfortunately I wasn't able to find them at all on any of Blizzard's sites, so I assume they were quietly removed at some point. If they do exist still somewhere, I'd gladly add them back in, as they were excellent places to look for art which fit the style of Hearthstone well.
You should either update the links to the official WoW art galleries, or remove them, because they no longer work.
Thanks for the heads-up - I've removed the links, as unfortunately I wasn't able to find them at all on any of Blizzard's sites, so I assume they were quietly removed at some point. If they do exist still somewhere, I'd gladly add them back in, as they were excellent places to look for art which fit the style of Hearthstone well.
It's a shame, I liked those galleries. But Pintrest still gets the job done!
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Hello and welcome to the lovely Fan Creations section here on our wonderful HearthPwn Forums! This Primer aims to help you get started in fan card creation, providing you with the resources you need to create whatever interesting ideas are buzzing around in your head.
Whether you're looking for lore help, balancing tips and tricks, or just plain old where to start, we've got you covered.
Section I: The Basics
While it's highly unlikley you've managed to stumble upon this Primer without the basic game knowledge of Hearthstone, it's always best to start at the very beginning, so here we go!
There are currently four (4) different types of cards you might be interested in making, along with two (2) other gameplay elements that might have crossed your mind - Minions, Weapons, Spells and Hero Cards, along with Hero Powers and Heroes themselves. See the examples below.
A Minion
A Weapon
A Spell
A Hero Card
A Hero Power
A Hero
Minions are creatures that are summoned to the battlefield and attack enemy minions and the enemy hero.
Weapons can be equipped by certain classes and used to attack enemy minions or the enemy hero.
Spells are used to trigger various immediate effects, from damaging to healing to card draw.
Hero Cards are cards that replace your hero with a new one, granting a new Hero Power.
Hero Powers are unique abilities each Hero has that can be used once per turn at the cost of mana.
Heroes are the characters we play as. Reducing an enemy Hero to 0 Health wins you the game.
To find a full list of all of the cards of each type in the game at the moment, click the bolded words above, or search for yourself in our card database.
Section II: Balancing and Mechanics
The links below will take you to a wide variety of resources to help you get to grips with various balancing concepts. Note that sticking strictly to stat point systems when designing cards can be helpful, but can also be a hindrance, since some combinations of effects or cards can be vastly more important to some classes than others - Warlocks and Rogues, for example, value self-healing far more highly than any other class.
Also note that we can't verify how well these threads and blogs will translate to current Hearthstone, as many of them were written quite a while ago. If you know of any other good balancing resources, feel free to let us know!
Custom Hearthstone Reddit - Minion Balance
A huge thanks to dorian467 for this: a nice overview and analysis of how to calculate the cost of minions based on Keywords and other effects.
Custom Hearthstone Reddit - Other Balance Resources
Theres a great deal of really useful stuff here, including user and Blizzard blogs about balance philosophy.
Hearthstone 'Colour Chart'
For anyone that wants a quick overview of how the nine Hearthstone Heroes differentiate from one antoher (Keywords, Mechanics etc.), here is a nice set of images to show you!
Weapon Balance
A rough pricing model for Weapons in Hearthstone - a huge shout-out to Triskaidekaphilia for this Thread!
Class Development and Discussion Thread
While primarily a thread for collaborating with others, getting help creating a class and helping them in return, the initial post also contains some valuable insight into the basics of designing a Hearthstone class.
Searchstone.io
Looking for a quick way to check the wording of a card, or to find all the cards with certain stats? Searchstone is a good alternative to our own database of cards, and features all the collectible cards in the game.
Fan Creations Grammar Guide
Phoenixfeather created a handy-dandy guide to Hearthstone Grammar (with input from the rest of the mods) for anyone looking to make their cards extra perfect. Comes with a free quiz to test yourself!
Section III: Lore and Theming
While its fun to imagine what it would be like if Pokemon were included in Hearthstone, or the heroes of Overwatch, many people want to create as authentic a Hearthstone card as possible, and that means delving into the lore of the Warcraft universe. This can be daunting for people who know very little, so here are some resources to help you.
WoWpedia - A good resource for information on all the characters of WoW, along with Warcraft itself.
WoW Wiki - A different source for WoW and Warcraft information, so you can crosscheck between them.
The Lore Help Thread - Got a burning question that you can't seem to find a satisfactory answer to? Throw it in the lore thread, and one of our kind forum members will help you with their own knowledge from their presumably extensive WoW career.
Section IV - Artwork
It's the art that makes the card! While Hearthstone does have a wide variety of art styles shown, these places are a good place to start looking for art until you get a feel for what sort of art works on Hearthstone cards, and can scour the internet yourself. Again, reference pages for artwork are more than welcome, so if you know of any, let me know and we'll add them.
WoW TCG - Card Browser
All cards from the Wow TCG are too at your disposal! Filters are available on the sidebar to narrow down to specific cards you are after. You'll have to edit and crop cards to grab the artwork you need however.
WoW TCG - WoWcards
Another repository for finding cards from the WoW TCG should you need it. The artwork can be a little blurred, and you'd have to do the cropping yourself, but if in doubt, they have the artist listed for each card and Google is a wonderful tool.
aiDen's Hearthstone Gallery - Fan Creations Thread
Fellow Hearthpwn user, aiDen, has handpicked over 4000 pieces of Artwork specifically for creating fan-made Hearthstone cards! Each image has a tag for easy searching, so you'd be mad not to have a look at this amazing collection of artwork right now!
DeviantArt - Hearthstone GvG Contest 2014
A Goblins Vs Gnomes art contest was held back in 2014, showcasing some spectacular user created art for the expansion. Be sure to check this out!
(Note: The polite thing to do is to reference the artist for any art that isn't yours in your creations)
Section V - Generating Hearthstone Cards
Now that you've got your art and your lore down, and you know the ins and outs of the kinds of cards you want to create, it's time to actually start making them! Luckily for us, there's a fantastic tool available.
HearthCards
HearthCards is an amazing tool, kept well up to date with all the latest in Hearthstone. Choose from any type of card, any of the 9 existing classes along with many fanmade ones, and any of the expansion watermarks, including multiple fanmade ones as well. You can even click the 'import' button and type an existing card name to have it appear in the generator if buffing or nerfing cards is your thing.
If you're looking for help figuring out some of HearthCards nuances, check out this thread on changing the colours of stat points. There's other hidden features to it, so try messing around and see what you can come up with (HINT: Try typing in boxes that appear to be greyed out).
List of Common Mistakes
A Google Docs list maintained by the creator of HearthCards listing common mistakes people make when designing cards. This offers help making sure you're cards look as authentic as possible.
HearthCards is completely free to use, although your card won't be kept in their servers forever - you'll have to rehost it. Speaking of which...
Section VI - Image Hosting
As mentioned before, HearthCards won't keep your cards forever, so its best to rehost them on another site. Here's a bunch of the more popular ones! (Note that some of these sites may require you to sign up to use them).
Imgur
(A handy Chrome Extension is available here that allows quick capturing and uploading of images.)
TinyPic
PhotoBucket
ImageShack
Using these websites also allows you to directly embed images into the Forums without the need for pesky attachments! To do so, click on the Icon depicted below. From there, you can adjust the size of your image.
For those of you wondering, yes, this is an image of the old card creation guide by BerserkMidget08, from which a large portion of this content has been taken. If you want to check out the original, here's a link.
Section VII - Posting to HearthPwn
Now that you've got the hand of creating cards, you'll want to share them with the rest of the forums!
If you're looking to create your own thread, check out this thread on Presentation Tools for the forums. These can make your thread look extra professional! It also includes some handy hints for Hearthcards card creation.
Stuck on ideas for what cards to create? Why not try joining the fun at the Make the Card game thread. In it, the last poster will specify a requirement that the next card has to meet. You make the next card, you get to decide on a requirement for someone else to make a card by. Helping get those creative juices flowing for everyone!
Looking to create an entire Hearthstone class? Why not swing by the aforementioned Class Development and Discussion Thread to get opinions on your concept and help others out at the same time.
Well done for making it to the end! Feel free to suggest any additions to this you think would be good, and if you have any questions about the forums or need any help, don't hesitate to PM one of the mods and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.
Have fun!
You can find me here! Good luck everyone!
A round of applause for ShadowsOfSense for creating this forum!
After working so hard to organise everything, his reward is...working even more to make the updated Winner's Gallery (may God have mercy on the Mods).
wow.tcgbrowser.com doesn't seem to work. I usually use http://wowcards.info instead. The arts are of very bad quality due to scanning though but if you look the artist's name on google you may find the art in high-quality version if you're lucky.
Custom cards :
CLASSES : Alchemist (CCC#5 | Phase V) | Chef (CCC#4)
EXPANSIONS : Year of the Scorpion (Year Comp)
You can find me here! Good luck everyone!
The site I frequent the most when creating cards is http://searchstone.io/ ,primarily to get the wording right or cross check balance. It's just the best search engine for existing cards in the game. Forgot the name? Search for mana cost and rarity and class etc. You can search for anything within card texts or tribes as well.t
You can find me here! Good luck everyone!
That art section is going to save my life tens of thousands of times by the end of this year XD.
Why Rogue is my favourite class:

My submission for this week's card design competition.
PRAISE THE ALMIGHTY MODS WHO HAS BETTER ORGANIZING SKILL! WE ARE NOT WORTHY!!!
Click here to visit my Timestream Tracking Finalist Year of the Dragon in collaboration with Demonxz95
Class Creation Finalist: The Astromancer
Best cards vote by community:
Very very good job man. I was actually planning on doing something similar, but being the almighty lazy person i am, now i dont have to :D Very polished guide with tons of good information. Now all we need to do is spread the word so everyone knows about this :)
PS: i think u could add link to the List of Most Common Mistakes dnikko is keeping on his hearthcards site (bottom right corner), those r some nice basic things everyone should follow :)
- Click Here To Join Us On Discord! -
Nice work on the primer. Always useful to have extra resources when creating cards.
My Entry for this week's Card Design Competition - Season 8.16:
I would put Wowpedia higher on that list than WoWWiki, because it came to my attention that articles on WoWWiki these days are lifted straight from Wowpedia, and the old WoWWiki team has gone to Wowpedia, thus their articles are more up to date and detailed.
please consider voting for my custom class in the fan creations competition :]
• TRIALS IN AUCHINDOUN - A Custom Hearthstone Adventure (4th Wing!) • New and Interesting Hearthstone Mechanics (by me!) •








http://www.blizz-art.com/ is a site someone recommended to me. It's in
a non-English languageFrench, but you can still search for most generic terms in English. It contains a huge assortment of art, and shows you if its already on any TCG or Hearthstone card (including non-collectible). Hope this helps, too!Currently working on the Tinker! K&C and WW / JUG and KotFT / Classic / Basic / Introduction
My Previous Classes: Apothecary (unfinished) / Chronomancer / Death Knight (old)
My Previous Expansions: Hallow's End
THERE IS NO GAME.
Currently working on the Tinker! K&C and WW / JUG and KotFT / Classic / Basic / Introduction
My Previous Classes: Apothecary (unfinished) / Chronomancer / Death Knight (old)
My Previous Expansions: Hallow's End
FYI, this is a great video if you want advice for creating cards. It's absolutely an essential video for Card Game Designers...heck even game design in general!
In response to the above, there is also a text version of the lessons for those that prefer reading it instead. Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
And in a similar vein, Ben Brode has also done a similar talk about the design lessons he learned from improv.
AKA Coolboypai, the head moderator of r/CustomHearthstone
Come check us, and our Discord server, out! :D
Updated Presentation Tools.
The joke is you.

You should either update the links to the official WoW art galleries, or remove them, because they no longer work.
You can find me here! Good luck everyone!