- You're right: card games inherently involve luck. But games like Hearthstone and MTG let you control your deck so that less luck is involved. And I would argue Hearthstone actually has the better model -- there's no way to get screwed out of mana or flooded with mana like in MTG.
- Card starvation exists, but is typically a problem with deck construction or gameplay rather than the game itself. Two ways about the problem in deck construction: more card draw, and bigger cards. Playing is more complicated, but consider keeping your options open rather than playing things immediately, since you can gain card advantage if you can 2-for-1. Consider the HandLock deck in which a warlock draws a huge hand to abuse abilities involving hand size. Rarely will their games go past 30 cards, and yet their hand is filled with options all the time.
- You are right, each class has but one or two competitive deck styles and are predictable. But knowing the meta is part of any card game, and I think as Hearthstone grows this will be better. Coming from MTG I found classes brought quite a variety of play styles (at least 9!), if somewhat unbalanced and artificial.
- Again you are right. This issue arises as a necessary consequence of classes. Blizzard has actively done this for balance. Cards outside class decks need to be generic or else they would make some decks too powerful in combos. For example I might want more spell power cards for my Druid deck but that would make Mage control decks unbelievably strong.
- This is a subjective point and your view is valid. IMHO their quest system is a pretty versatile option of getting gold. If you want you can play 2 games a day and earn 40 gold, or you can play 10 and earn 100, depending on the quest.
In shorter words, there are a few types of luck you could work with: luck of the deck, luck of the draw, etc.
After more than a hundred of hours on it, to date I haven't spent a dime of real money (I'll happily buy the single player expansion, though).
Just do daily quests in Ranking and spend the coins on Arena,which doesn’t depend at all on real money spent, and you'll get a lot of mileage (also considering that for an Arena run you get a pack of cards, so you'll get better at Ranking).
BTW, to the OP: thanks for ruining my plans for the weekend :)
If you were kept separate from the rest of the decks how would that work?
(FWIW, my best deck doesn't is the one that doesn't have any legendaries in it anyway, and it got as high as rank 2, 4 stars.)
If you were isolated from decks with legendaries and had a seperate ladder, h
Offtopic but that reminded me of those decade-old Slashdot posts with the sudden cutoff mid-sentence followed by 'Connection dropped' modem messages.
I agree that classing causes a bit too predicable deck strategies, MtG felt more balanced on this aspect.
What Hearthstone got right was the flow: they had to remove instants and introduce secrets and taunts, but with that they achieved an excellent flow for a turn-based card game.
*(in the colloquial sense of the word restrict, except in vintage (and trivially in commander/EDH/Australian Highlander/Chromandercore), where cards are restricted in the magic sense of the words restrict)
From what I understand, design makes and tests sets at a flat power level, development adjusts the power level and creates more cards, and future future league plays the new cards for months/years and makes more adjustments to balance before the cards go to print.
Off topic: I've played Heathstone enough to appreciate it. It is a good game (I'd give it maybe 4.5 stars), but not perfect; my critiques:
- Chance of winning is based largely on luck - the same deck drawn two different ways can be almost a guaranteed win/fail, even if it is balanced.
- Card starvation is way too common of a problem. Could not count how many times I ended up exhausting the deck, even with plenty of cards to counter it. When you only have one card to play at a time, the game becomes rather dull.
- Classing leads to a certain lack of permutation and surprise - most decks have a few basic strategies.
- Cards outside of the class decks tend to be fairly generic feeling for the most part. Many cards feel a bit mundane compared to other CCGs.
- Free to play model hurts the game a bit - I don't mind paying money, but many aspects of the game feel too grindy (in order to get you to pay money).