Almost everything in Hearthstone is a card; more than you’d normally expect. There’s the card types you can play (Minion, Spell and Weapon), but you will also find in the game files cards for heroes, hero powers and enchantmentts.

Card IDs

Cards have two primary types of IDs: Numeric and String.

String “CardIDs” (sometimes referred to as “mini guids”) are a short-form unique identifier that usually looks like ABC_123, where ABC is a card set and 123 is a number within that card set. For example, EX1_001 is Lightwarden, EX1_116 is Leeroy Jenkins, HERO_01 is Garrosh Hellscream, and UNG_034 is Radiant Elemental.

Numeric “DBF IDs” are integers that uniquely identify those same cards within the DBF files. Lightwarden is 1655, Leeroy Jenkins is 559, Garrosh Hellscream is 7 and Radiant Elemental is 41176.

CardIDs are inconsistent and case-sensitive. Some other examples of CardIDs are TB_RandHero2_001, XXX_001, skele11, tt_004, LOEA02_01h, DS1h_292_H1 and TB_PickYourFate_7_EnchMiniom2nd.

Reference databases

HSData.git

The hsdata repository on GitHub is an auto-generated git repository of the game data files for each Hearthstone build publicly available.

Its contents are:

• Strings/: Localized string data for the game (globalstrings).
• CardDefs.xml: A custom XML file with a consistent format across all builds.

CardDefs.xml contains all card data in one easily parsed and human-readable XML file. Both CardIDs and DBF IDs are available for all cards.

HearthstoneJSON

The CardDefs.xml file is used to generate HearthstoneJSON. Since web developers most likely do not want to deal with XML files, the HearthstoneJSON files make that same card data available in JSON format.