Blizzard announces Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, a F2P collectible card game

Well, that didn't take long. Just a few minutes into Blizzard's PAX East panel, the company unveiled their brand new game — Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft.

In its most basic description, Hearthstone is a "charming" free-to-play strategy card game set in the Warcraft universe. The game features many heroes from 9 World of Warcraft classes. Although it's technically a digital card game, Blizzard has gone to great lengths to keep a whimsical, charming feel to it. They showed a brief gameplay video showing off the game's 3D, animated board.

As most card games, Hearthstone comes down to card collection, which also serves as the game's business model. There are over 300 cards in the game and players can buy Booster packs. These packs contain five cards and although pricing has not been announced, Blizzard is estimating it will cost around $1.00 per pack. Looking to replace the feeling you get when physically opening a new pack of cards, Blizzard showed off some flashy animations when you purchase and open one of these digital booster decks.

Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft will launch for Windows and Mac, as well as iPad "shortly after." It is described as "coming soon" in 2013. Beta will be out this summer.