# The Many AI Challenges of Hearthstone

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.06562 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06562/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jul 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

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- [GPT for Games: A Scoping Review (2020-2023)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17794/) (2024)
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- [Summarizing Strategy Card Game AI Competition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11814/) (2023)
- [Evolving Evaluation Functions for Collectible Card Game AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01115/) (2021)
- [Collaborative Agent Gameplay in the Pandemic Board Game](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11388/) (2021)
- [Introducing Tales of Tribute AI Competition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08234/) (2023)
- [UrzaGPT: LoRA-Tuned Large Language Models for Card Selection in Collectible Card Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08382/) (2025)
- [A Comparison of Contextual and Non-Contextual Preference Ranking for Set Addition Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.04438/) (2021)
- [Causal Reinforcement Learning for Complex Card Games: A Magic The Gathering Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06066/) (2026)
- [A Taxonomy of Collectible Card Games from a Game-Playing AI Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06299/) (2024)
- [Failing to Explore: Language Models on Interactive Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22345/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Games have benchmarked AI methods since the inception of the field, with classic board games such as Chess and Go recently leaving room for video games with related yet different sets of challenges. The set of AI problems associated with video games has in recent decades expanded from simply playing games to win, to playing games in particular styles, generating game content, modeling players etc. Different games pose very different challenges for AI systems, and several different AI challenges can typically be posed by the same game. In this article we analyze the popular collectible card game Hearthstone (Blizzard 2014) and describe a varied set of interesting AI challenges posed by this game. Collectible card games are relatively understudied in the AI community, despite their popularity and the interesting challenges they pose. Analyzing a single game in-depth in the manner we do here allows us to see the entire field of AI and Games through the lens of a single game, discovering a few new variations on existing research topics.