Ben Thompson, a lead artist in Blizzard, talked about the how he brought the feeling of awesomeness to the cards that we use today, the Hearthstone cards. The same cards that provide us with minions, weapons and spells to aid us in the battle, have gone through a long artistic journey, and Ben expands more on it.
According to Ben, during the very first stages of the artistic card designs, the sky was the limit. The designs were so varied that some of them were even voodoo dolls, gear-driven contraptions, magical jars, moonwells and even papercraft minions. Even though the sky was the limit, these designs had a variety of cons and pros when judged their functionality as game pieces. Ben expands on the subject and says that as the team weighed the pros and cons, they became enriched with knowledge about what they wanted to be in the art, and what they didn't want: "We knew that we wanted it to feel like a physical object, that it should definitely feel valuable, but we also knew that the game should absolutely feel as though it belongs in the world of Azeroth." Phrases like "epically charming" and "delightful surprise" were beginning to form in their game vocabulary and soon, into the game itself.
After the early design, the art team started working on a more simplified, easy-to-read design. They worked better from a readability perspective, but ultimately lacked that spark of "awesome" that they needed to find if these were to be the defining assets in the game. The base-design was the best they have made, and they had stuck with it. After some time thinking, they took one of their successful base-designs and tweaked it.
After the base-designs, the team asked themselves: "What if the cards changed states after leaving your hand and entering the play field?" They also tried to experiment with the collectible in order to share a visual theme with the race of the character represented in the card. Below are some examples of the experimenting.
During the end of the design, the team asked themselves the most important piece of information: "How do we present the numeric values, the card title and the card art?" Once they were done with those three, anything else was a bonus. With the three values in mind, they worked out a concept that fulfilled all three requirements while simultaneously keeping the in-game asset as simple as possible.
Here are some of the cards that have been published as of the Open Beta:
