Looking at really prolific game studios, they tend to be in less art-intensive genres. 8/16-bit RPGs, pixel-art platformers, etc.
And the people that really crank out games on a limited staff and art budget tend to reuse the same engines and assets with minor iterations. Think Spiderweb Software[1], or SSI with the Five Star games[2].
Art costs (measured in man-hours) are one of the more predictable aspects of game development, they scale well and can be outsourced easily.
I certainly have my criticism for the game such as the slow card releases, RNGfiesta, and lack of QOL updates, but ultimately the game is really well put together.
Though Hearthstone does have its own set of issues like you mentioned, I'm very glad they drew the lines on complexity where they did (notably no user interaction on opponent's turn except for secrets)
An exact sequence of events can be replicated with the timing of them altered and you'd get different outcomes.
Whole board affecting secondary effects can also have unpredictable interactions with cards in play's triggered abilities.
In MTG parlance, the "stack" is broken in Hearthstone.
Unless you are talking about something else and I misunderstand you? Maybe something like the order of deathrattles (they are triggered in order of the cards played, just like the few instances of time-stamp-matters interactions in MTG). Or do you mean how the max minion limit works where "dead" minions are still there during "on damage" effects but not during deathrattles? There is a few nonobvious rules like that, but I'm pretty sure the rules are actually pretty solid and not bugged.
I mean, everyone at Blizzard knows what an "Orc Warrior" should look like. Green skin, muscles, some type of weapon. But someone had to actually create new drawings of it for the game.
This means that the main challenge behind coming up with a new franchise is to come up with a consistent, compelling concept for its various elements.
Is the problem that there are lots of mediocre artists but not many who can actually execute projects? Or that it is hard to parallelize things like this? Or that once you parallelize too much, the amount of value added by a marginal artist is not enough to pay them?
I think part of it is that standards keep increasing. Compare this demon concept art from Warcraft 2 (1995): http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/wowwiki/images/c/cb/Daem... to this one from WoW: Legion (2016): https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/56/f2/7f/56f27f98a...
There are probably a lot of artists that can execute at the 1995 level who aren't employable in 2016.
I would imagine artists need to be involved in technical discussion and would need to learn & bug-test custom software for importing and processing assets. It seems like a different skillset to traditional art & design backgrounds.
Blizzard does focus on quality and feel, and is very open about their willingness to push dates or cancel projects if it doesn't meet their quality standard. Titan didn't work as an MMO, and a lot of that work was reused in Overwatch.
Starcraft 2 is a great example for deconstructing this design philosophy (while ironically Starcraft 1 is a great example of the complete opposite), Blizzard have intentionally and constantly changed the balance of the game and create new imbalances so the meta would evolve and be fluid by forcing players to adapt, change, and find the imbalances and find ways to deal with them.
The art of most video games is not to create perfect balance but to create multiple subtle imbalances that can be discovered and overcome this in effect what creates the meta of the game and without a living meta games often can become stale and boring.
Making a mathematically balanced game is easy, making an imbalanced game that is still interesting is an art form.
This is what sets a few games apart from the rest, games like LoL and Starcraft are a great example of the "imbalanced by design" distilled to an art form.
Hearthstone is also imbalanced by design to both create a fluid meta, as well as to push the progression both the in-game progression and the out of game monetization progression.
That is absolute rot. A simple balanced game. A perfectly balanced complex game with thousands of combinations of disparate variables is incredibly hard - because actually ranking what equality means is in and of itself an incredibly hard problem when abilities are significantly different.
Blizzard approached this problem by homogenization at one point and recognised this is a terrible solution. They now attempt to balance within a structure of variety - largely by responding to the evolution of the meta as players learn new ways to min/max
It's a deceptively simple piece of wisdom, but it goes a long way to explaining some of the outcomes of the business. AAA-scale development is riddled with stories of brute forced effort on every front - attempts to chase after quality without being able to define it in positive terms, resulting in dozens of retakes on the same concept. Smaller studios, being less encumbered by the usual organizational overheads, are much better prepared to plan and focus themselves exclusively around a single facet of the work and align all the other pieces around that. At the extreme end you get the solo developer, who generally produces something radically imbalanced and unmarketable, but with just a few team members, major issues get smoothed out.
The risk that comes with any team change is that things don't get smoothed out in quite the same way as before - the conversations, timelines, and conventions shift around, so the pieces all get resolved slightly differently with tangible impacts on the result. Rob Pardo working on World of Warcraft, Rob Pardo working on Hearthstone, and Rob Pardo at his new venture all might as well be different designers. What will make the difference is in whether the team coordinates well. For an example of how it can flop, see Flagship Studios[0].
[0] http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=0&cId=3169356
Im not sure who thinks this is "wise", when it's simply not true. The problem is making a game better enough to gain marketshare before the changes are absorbed by the dominant player.
I try to keep this in mind as the space sim genre is awakening again with E:D, Star Citizen, NMS, etc.