It's not necessary for us to police copyright law to this degree. In this instance you're even policing Blizzard's copyright harder than Blizzard itself does.
The comments were removed and not acted on by moderators because the concern you were bringing up is actually something we'd prefer not be worried about.
Let's talk briefly about fansites and card generators
Every trading card game has card generator fansites nowadays. I know we're talking about a Hearthstone one, but let me talk about Magic: the Gathering for a moment because it's got both a longer history and a bigger custom card community. MTG has at least three extremely well known custom card generators: MTG Cardsmith, Magic Set Editor, and MTG.Design. One of those has existed for eight years at this point. These tools are part of a lively custom card creator community. Wizards of the Coast has never acted to shut these down because they embrace the custom card creator communities as a vitally important part of the game's social health, and because nobody is actually using them to damage Wizards's profitability off their intellectual property. In fact, custom card creators wind up being free marketing and increase community engagement with their game, leading to better profit. For the same reasons, Blizzard is never going to shut down Hearthcards.
Wizards has acted to shut down sites in the past that damage their IP or profitability by allowing people to make easily-printable card proxies on a large scale. One such recent site took a list of cards and generated dozens of pages of printable images so you could print your deck at home for free. These sites don't do that, haven't been shut down, and will never do that because the site owners know better. Hearthstone can't really be pirated this way, but the principle is the same and Hearthcards isn't a mass proxy site.
In general games have a fansite policy. They enforce it loosely, allowing fan communities to use even unlicensed intellectual property as long as they're doing it in capacity as a fansite. For example, MTG sites aren't technically permitted to use the game's mana symbols, but loads of the largest MTG sites do it anyway and you're not going to find Wizards sending out a cease & desist about it. Intellectual property law is an imperfect system and this is one of those areas where companies like Wizards and Blizzard choose not to enforce them and prefer to just quietly allow fans to do their thing.
The use of the fansite is integral to the answer and its usage is fine
Our primary official reason to not link to pirate sites on here is because the links are guaranteed to go dead (sooner than links might otherwise) and we don't want guaranteed link rot on our site. There's other good pragmatic concerns too, for example we want to maintain a good-faith relationship with publishers and we don't want our site to become a hive of scum and villainy.
The custom card generator probably won't go dead though, at least not sooner than any other site might. It's not going to damage our relationship with any third party. It's not going to turn our site into a hive of scum and villainy either.
The answer also does no harm. The legal concerns are literally Blizzard's business and Blizzard is fine with it; this is the opposite of a problem to them. These are obviously Hearthstone cards and nobody's doing anything to damage Blizzard's IP or its sales. Nobody's being exploitative here or doing any damage to anybody.
The only thing that the answer is doing with the card generator recommendation and images is providing people a cool way to solve a problem in their games. It's a good answer, it makes a good recommendation, and it stands to improve the quality of peoples' games at no cost to anyone. Worrying about the state of copyright here stands to do the community a disservice for no reason and no benefit.
Everything is OK. We should leave it be.
We'd ask that you highlight when an RPG piracy reference site is being used, but this specific case doesn't warrant action.
