Working on a card game about emotions and need help with defining the characters

So a friend and I have started working on designing a virtual card game centered around grid combat, like Faeria or Duelyst. In essence, the objective to defeat the enemy would be to fight their "hero" until it has 0 health points.

The thing is we hit a bump in the road when working on the thematics. We started brainstorming and stumbled upon the movie Inside Out, so we thought that it would be cool to have different factions you can use on your deck be centered around certain emotions like Joy or Sadness.

My question would be: how can I convey in the best way that your "hero" is something closer to an emotion rather than a person that expresses that emotion. F.I. Let's say Anger's hero is a barbarian-type character in design. How do you differentiate between it being an incarnation of Anger rather than an angry barbarian?