Hero card



Hero cards are a type of card first introduced in the Knights of the Frozen Throne expansion. Upon being played, a hero card will replace the player's hero, give them a small amount of Armor and replace their Hero Power with a new one.

Trivia

 * Knights of the Frozen Throne was the first expansion (and card set) to introduce hero cards into Hearthstone.
 * While Knights of the Frozen Throne introduced one hero card for each class, they have since been more spaced out, with sets thereafter usually featuring only a single hero card each. According to Principal Game Designer Mike Donais and Senior Game Designer Peter Whalen, making a character a hero card is an effective way of signifying that the character is the central focus of the set and draws attention to the fact that it is a character that players should know and care about. According to Whalen, however, this does not mean that they've completely settled on a precedent for how many hero cards they'll include in future sets; the team will likely continue to experiment and do whatever's right for the expansion in question.
 * According to Peter Whalen, one design lesson learned since the introduction of the first hero cards is that ones that generate infinite late-game value through use of their Hero Powers (such as Deathstalker Rexxar) tend to feel repetitive and frustrating to play against, especially when they lead to one player slowly losing a game over several turns. As a result, the developers have tried to create less of that sort of experience with later hero cards, with Hagatha the Witch and Dr. Boom, Mad Genius both having inherently random Hero Powers, while Zul'jin has most of his power contained in his over-the-top Battlecry with a relatively mundane Hero Power to compensate.
 * While Lord Jaraxxus (Classic) and Majordomo Executus work similarly to hero cards, they were not reclassified as such at the release of Knights of the Frozen Throne. This is due to the fact that they work slightly differently from hero cards; most notably, they set the hero's Health to a predetermined amount rather than retaining the hero's current Health.
 * The Knights of the Frozen Throne death knight hero cards were originally available in the Arena, but on November 14, 2017, they were removed from the Arena draft pool since "while the Death Knight Hero Cards are exciting and powerful to play, their permanent Hero Power upgrades are hard to combat in a format where answers are limited".
 * Hero cards are the only card type so far to only be featured in Legendary rarity. Furthermore, there are no neutral hero cards.

Gallery

 * Card frames

Patch changes

 * (Undocumented) All hero card frames updated to consider an option for hero cards without rarity.