Hearthstone is selling a single card for $25 and players aren't loving it

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"If this costs more than every minion in your deck, summon 2 of them."

(Image credit: Blizzard)

A year ago, Blizzard added diamond cards to Hearthstone. A tier above golden rarity, diamond cards are animated, though otherwise the same as the regular version of the same cards. They're cosmetics, and when they were first introduced you could get them either by buying an expansion or collecting all of a set's legendary cards. The latest diamond card, which is of orc shaman Drek'Thar, can only be obtained by purchasing it from the in-game store where it costs 3,000 gold or $25.

"I'm as much as a whale as anyone but there's no fuckin way I'm spending $35CAD on a card. This is ridiculous", Hearthstone streamer Zeddy tweeted. A post on the Hearthstone subreddit has attracted replies like, "hey blizzard, your greed is showing again", "Is this an out of season April Fools Joke ?" and "It's like Blizzard thinks these are real trading cards."

Plenty of other players aren't fussed by the fact Blizzard are, for the first time, selling an individual card that can't be obtained any other way. As they point out, it's a purely cosmetic enhancement of a card that was previously given away for free. The regular gold-rarity version of Drek-Thar was offered during the Fractured in Alterac Valley expansion pre-release. 

Players chose to receive either a horde card (Drek-Thar), or an alliance card (Vanndar Stormpike), and then completed quests for that faction. A diamond version of the winning faction's card was given away to everyone, and since the alliance won, everyone got a diamond Vanndar Stormpike. If you want a diamond Drek-Thar instead, well, you have to cough up the dough.

While 25 simoleons is a lot of money to charge for a single card, it could be worse. I mean, at least it's not an NFT.

Jody Macgregor
Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.