During a panel at the Penny Arcade Expo, Blizzard Entertainment announced Heartstone: Heroes of Warcraft. It's the next game the company will release, and it's a free-to-play collectible card game "focused primarily on one-on-one." It boasts 300+ cards, with five cards coming in each pack you earn or purchase, and uses Battle.net matchmaking.

You can register for the beta now.

Card crafting allows players to consolidate duplicate cards of various types. This feeds into the deck-building system, which is as automatic or micro-management heavy as you desire. You'll build your deck around your class, such as a rogue, both in terms of the kinds of skills and buffs you bring into battle, and the class-specific cards you're able to use. A medal ranking system categorizes duelists by skill, similar to Starcraft II. Hearthstone is coming to PC and Mac in addition to iPad, which will release later, though feature and networking parity remains to be seen. The current goal is to release Hearthstone in the same territories World of Warcraft is currently available.

Strategy relies on the balance of health and mana, the use of summons, and killing enemy minions with various cards and hero powers.

The 3D presentation of Hearthstone is very animated, with plenty of icons, animations, and imagery bringing the tabletop game to life. It also appears to move quickly -- Blizzard demonstrated a 1v1 duel with a shoutcaster commentating on the events, strategy, card types, and effects of each card. Blizzard created a new team of 15 developers, and describes them as fast and experimental. It was conceived to cook up different styles of games, smaller scale but in line with the "epic Blizard" style.

Each pack of cards you earn or buy comes with five random cards in common, rare, epic, and legendary forms.

You can also build decks in the the Forge mode, which then matches your deck type to a similar opponent's Forge deck.

The beta for Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft begins this summer, the release is this year, and it's coming "not Blizzard soon, but IRL soon."

http://uk.ign.com/articles/2013/03/22/blizzard-reveals-hearthstone-heroes-of-warcraft

Looks cool, but ill stick with Shadow Era for my Free to Play card fix.

Awesome! Thanks for the post. I'll have to try it out!

For anyone who is really into this F2P card idea, there are some huge card games on Kongregate.com that are suuuper popular. I believe there's already one on iOS that's huge as well.

Anyways, cool project from Blizzard (and an extremely safe bet). I was kind of hoping they'd do something more unique, or that this new reveal would have been their new MMO, but oh well.

Updated OP with a bit of new info. There's also a couple of videos for it on the IGN link.