Evolutionary Deckbuilding in HearthStone

One of the most notable features of collectible cardgames is deckbuilding, that is, defining a personalized deck beforethe real game. Deckbuilding is a challenge that involves a big andrugged search space, with different and unpredictable behaviourafter simple card changes and even hidden information. In thispaper, we explore the possibility of automated deckbuilding: agenetic algorithm is applied to the task, with the evaluationdelegated to a game simulator that tests every potential deckagainst a varied and representative range of human-made decks.In these preliminary experiments, the approach has proven ableto create quite effective decks, a promising result that proves that,even in this challenging environment, evolutionary algorithms canfind good solutions.