Welcome to the Custom Hearthstone section here on Hearthstation. This primer is aimed to help you get started on your card creations adventures, providing you with the resources to help you get into the field of Hearthstone Card Creation!
This primer will include anything related information regarding lore, balance, flavor, art-sources and in general other tricks that you might find useful on your journey.
An important thing to mention above all else, however, is that you're enjoying making cards. Following resources and guides are merely a means to help create cards alike to those that Blizzard themselves create.
Part 1: The Basics
In Hearthstone there currently exists 6 types of images, that you can create during your Custom Hearthstone adventure. Among those, 4 are playable card types (Minions, Spells, Weapons and Hero Cards) , while the last 2 are gameplay elements (Heroes and Hero Powers)
A minion A spell A weapon
A Hero Card A Hero A Hero Power
Minions: Minions are units, that can be played, that after a turn will be able to attack either the enemy hero or an enemy minion. Minions can be targeted by spells and Battlecries.
Spells: Spells are an immediate effect, that triggers when the card is cast. Currently, only classes have collectible spells.
Weapons: Weapons can be equipped by your hero, on the left side of your hero. Weapon classes (prior to Kobold and Catacombs) are, Warrior, Paladin, Hunter, Shaman and Rogues.
Hero Cards: Hero cards alters your Hero Power, while triggering an effect while played. They also give an amount of Armor when played.
Heroes: Heroes are the characters we play as. Reducing the Health of a hero to 0, results in that player losing the game.
Section 2: Balance, Mechanics and Flavor
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 my boi CoolBoiPai 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!
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 - WIP
Fan Creations Flavor Guide - WIP
Section 3: Lore from the Warcraft Universe
Despite not being called "Heroes of Warcraft" anymore, Hearthstone still have strong connections to the Warcraft universe, and it will generally be prefered to include flavor and art that depicts characters or races from Wow. Here is some pages that can help you look up Warcraft lore, to help create the flavor for your cards.
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.
Section 4: Art
Art is extremely important for the flavor and identity of your card. The difference in art quality can make the entire difference for the success of your card, so be sure to pick carefully. Generally speaking for Hearthstone, you're going to be looking for something that is somewhat more cartoonish than something like MTG, but still more realistic than cartoon art.
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.
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!
Artstation - Artstation Hearthstone
Here you can find some truly magnificent artwork, although the search generally will take a bit longer if you're looking for something specific. Artstation also shows who made the artwork, making it a lot easier to identify the creator.
Wow Blizzgame - Wow Blizzgame English
An enormous and regularly updated list of brilliant Wow and Hearthstone related artworks, which a great search system. The artists for each artpiece is also mentioned for every piece of art.
(Note: The polite thing to do is to reference the artist for any art that isn't yours in your creations)
Section 5 - 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.
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 6 - Image Hosting
As mentioned before, HearthCards won't keep your cards forever, so its best to rehost them on another site. Generally speaking, we recommend Imgur, as it's easy to access, and rarely causes any problems.
Imgur
(A handy Chrome Extension is available here that allows quick capturing and uploading of images.)
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.
Section 7: The Next Step
Optional Applications
Lines of text: As of current time, no single card has more than 4 lines of text. Furthermore, having more than around 25-30 characters on any given line will make the text look smaller, which generally isn't ideal.
Orphans: Orphans are singular words or numbers on a line for themselves. This is generally not ideal, as it makes the text box look weird.
