Investigating Similarity between Hearthstone Cards: Text Embeddings and Interchangeability Approaches

We investigate similarities between cards and decks from the video game Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. We utilize some NLP methods, such as word2vec and LSA, to learn card representations from their descriptions. We also attempt to quantify interchangeability of cards in Hearthstone decks. We experimentally validate the presented methods and compare their performance using the data obtained from players. The results of our analysis can help us to introduce a kind of clustering of the space of Hearthstone cards, for the purpose of providing new decision support tools for the community of players.