How to Spot a Fake Hearthstone Card

I’ve been doing this website for over three years now. I’ve covered every expansion and adventure, and with that comes a fair amount of experience with fake cards. About 95% of the time it’s pretty easy to tell that the card is fake because the person who created the card will make some obvious mistakes. I really hate the idea of potentially spreading false information, so I’m usually pretty careful about what cards I post. I’m going to detail some of the things I look for when I’m considering posting a card.

This post is obviously relevant due to the leaked Mage Death Knight Hero Card. I still believe that it’s real, but it has yet to be confirmed. Frost Lich Jaina was confirmed to be real! I have to admit I was a bit scared writing this post and having that card end up being fake.

Obvious Mistakes

• No Watermark: Every expansion has a unique watermark that displays behind the text of the card. If it doesn’t have one it’s usually a fake.
• Clear Photoshopping: The font and way it appears on a card is always the same. Lazier fakes will use the wrong font or leave it looking too sharp.
• Card Text/Grammar Mistakes: Most text follows pretty standard rules these days. If the card has a similar effect of a card that already exists it will likely share similar text.
• Keywords Aren’t Bold: Keywords like Battlecry, Charge, Combo, etc. are always bold.
• Cellphone Photo: While this doesn’t always mean it’s fake, this method was demonstrated by Kripp in a YouTube video.

Card Created via HearthCards

If you don’t know HearthCards, it is a website that allows you to create Hearthstone cards. It’s a great site, and I use it to this day to create cards for the site when a card is revealed in a different language and I need an English version. While it comes close to replicating a card, there’s some ways to tell if it was created via the site.

Don’t focus on the part where the card text is on different lines. I couldn’t get HearthCards to keep the “Battlecry: Deal 2 damage” part on one line.

One of the most obvious things with a HearthCards card is that the Mana Crystal is always the same. Blizzard’s official high quality cards that they release will have Mana Crystals that usually all look slightly different. I’m not positive how they produce the cards, but if you look at a card in your collection manager the Mana Crystal is animated with the lighting constantly changing.

The other obvious part is the text shadows. The shadow that is used via HearthCards is too thin where the actual shadows are thicker. Also, when the card has a long name you can see that the Blizzard version is more condensed while the HearthCards version is spread farther out.

Artwork

Card art in Hearthstone can be all over the map. Take a look at Vicious Fledgling compared to Swamp King Dred, it looks like they are from different planets. One of the big reasons for this is that some art is digitally created and some is made using traditional methods (Alex Horley’s art for example). Blizzard uses multiple different artists that each have unique styles and mediums.

The artwork was far more difficult to use as an indicator in the past because Blizzard used A LOT of art from the WoW: TCG (take a look at these galleries and play spot the Hearthstone card). Now that Hearthstone is a bigger game Blizzard has custom art for just about every card. If you see a card that uses art you’ve seen in the past then it’s usually a fake. It appears that Blizzard is using some recycled art currently for Knights of the Frozen Throne.

Using Artwork to Spot a Fake

Using a reverse image search is the most obvious way to see if the artwork was used for something else. It’s best to actually cut out the artwork, because the borders and other parts of the card will give you false positives.

Jade Golem Fake

One way I spotted a fake in the past was when Jade Blossom was leaked. The Jade Golem mechanic had yet to be revealed, and there was a fake Jade Golem token card being spread around. They even went through the trouble of taking a screenshot of a Hearthpwn tweet and slapping the fake card on top of it. I went ahead and literally just typed something like “Green Golem” into Google Image Search and looked through the images and found the original image:

Jaina, Frost Lich

So that brings us back to the recently leaked card. I’ve used all of the methods above to check if the card is fake and have come up empty. The biggest argument for it being fake is the artwork. Jaina doesn’t appear how she does in any of the officially released artwork for the set. This is a valid point, but I’d point out that cards like Aya Blackpaw end up looking quite a bit different depending on the artist.

The big difference in the Jaina leak and a typical card fake is the video that accompanies it. If it’s a fake then this is the most effort I’ve seen put into one. The video looks exactly like something Blizzard would produce, so if it’s fake this is the greatest fake in the history of Hearthstone.

I hope you enjoyed a look at spotting fake cards in Hearthstone. I know this is kind of a weird post, but I thought it might be interesting to some!