Isn't that how all CCGs work? Other than the part about not actually having anything besides binary bits in the end, anyway. They're made to be money sinks.

I win about 5 times in arena on average, which makes my balance so-so. Last arena run I won a pack of GvG cards, 60 gold and 60 dust, which is not bad, since a pack is worth 100 gold, and admission fee is 150 gold, so the profit was 10 gold and 60 dust - and it's the dust that is valuable. Other time I won 5 times, but I won again a pack, and 110 gold in total, which is worse value - I would prefer the dust. 

And yes, I prefer arena more too, at least it's a bit fair, though RNG dependent, in Ranked you always get owned by those that paid enough to get cards for the highly optimal decks. 

Welcome to every single TCG in existence. (well, there's no trading in Hearthstone so... every TCG and... I think it calls itself a CCG?) If you think cracking open packs is a good way to build your collection, well, reality will sink in and you'll realise "nope, not happening". It's also unfair to say you can't buy cards in Hearthstone. You can, it's just expensive (crack a pack and just dust everything in it). Expensive, of course, is a relative term. The buy-in for basically every competitive deck these days that isn't control warrior (not that that sees a lot of play these days) is probably a few hundred dollars barring absolute dismal luck (like, not just no-epics/legendary bad like, brick-on-every-rare-as-well bad), which, well, is way better than MTG. The buy-in for LANDS ALONE in standard is like a thousand. LANDS. You know, that stuff you need to actually do interesting things in MTG?

Think it costs a lot to craft an epic? 4x Thoughtseize will run you 80-100 pretty easily. If you totally brick on every hearthstone pack, it costs about 10 bucks to make an epic. Also on that note, don't run bouncing blades in Patron Warrior, it's pretty bad. (primary problem being unless you reduced the cost of it and a few other spells there's very little else you'll be able to do on that turn unless you just yolo'd out the patron and it's often not enough on its own to win the game ESPECIALLY consistently)

I think it's like 500 on average to get EVERY card in hearthstone (that includes all the hot junk like Flame Leviathan/Hemet/Nat Pagle/Milhouse). To get every card in MTG standard is probably like 10k.

Kripparrian, while he may be very good at exploiting flaws in a system, that doesn't make him a good game designer. He's utterly wrong when he says there doesn't need to be bad cards. In multiple ways. What Ben Brode really wanted to do was to tell Kripp to type in "bad cards mtg" into google and come up with http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/mr5#summary and http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/ld/164 but, well, for obvious reasons he couldn't. The issue has not only been studied extensively, it's been done so for AGES. "Bad" cards need to exist and for good reason. Kripp would then backpedal and say he meant more to buff complete trash cards... of which there are actually surprisingly few, mostly legendaries (which are amongst the hardest to design so a good portion will be trash, ask anyone's who tried to design actually viable TCG expansions based on other IP. For the other end of design problems see Dr. Balance whose stats don't make sense at all but they can't really be "scaled down" because something that spawns mobs like that can't be cheap). How far down the list in http://www.heartharena.com/tierlist do you have to go for each rarity to see mostly really bad arena cards? For legendary, it's around average/below average. For the other rarities it's in the bad/terrible range. Fiddling around with anything else has an actual effect on the balance of arena beyond any doubt. (which was Kripp's likely actual motivator, a shakeup in arena since that's what he plays mostly)

There's plenty to rail on Hearthstone for sucking at (not actually solving many of the problems it's attributed to "solving" like mana screw probably being at the top), but compared to its largest competitors, its monetization is not really one of them. If you want something similar with a more fixed cost you can try a living card game.... Not sure if many people play those, though. Or scrolls, I guess, if you want to get in on a dead game. MTG Duels might be good if it weren't for the fact that it's run by WOTC and, well, their horrendous track record for anything online. (which was seen on the phone launch... then the steam launch. Not so sure how it's doing now.)

Imho the "problem" is the game launched with a certain F2P scheme, and as more collectibles have been added the scheme has changed over time to become more expensive. In a normal tabletop card game, this is to be expected - new editions etc. However, in a computer game, this is not a normal pay scheme. Hearthstone is in the grey area between those - obviously a computer game, but at the same time a card game that needs to output new collectibles to stay relevant.

That said... it's obvious that their pay scheme is working. The game is immensely popular and Blizzard have said that it is much more successful than they anticipated.

As for allowing people to buy dust directly for crafting, that's something you'll never see. It has two implications: first, you'll immediately know the cost of all the top decks. Second: as players are now paying for specific cards, altering the relevance of those cards in the future would result in an insane backlash from the community ("I paid 30$ for aggro deck, now I can't use it because you introduced 1 new counter"). 

double post delete.

Or you can just craft it, a mechanic that doesn't exist in MtG and is really nice.  It gives value to all the commons (which have essentially no value in MtG) since you can dust them, and the crafting cost for non legendaries isn't very high.

Oh, and the cards that do have highish crafting costs?  You only need one of them anyway. And they don't rotate out of standard constructed so quickly (someday Hearthstone might do something like this, but its not even close yet).

So its a vastly cheaper system than something that essentially requires that you to buy 4-ofs that will rotate out of constructed regularly.

Alstein - Heathstone is not "extremely P2W", I disagree.

Hearthstone offers the Arena. There is an entrance fee, true, but you can pay 150 gold you can collect on daily quests, and if you are good enough, you can win back much more - cards, dust, gold. Good arena players are able to maintain their gold balance while playing one arena round after another. 

Moreover, you cannot pay to get advantage in arena even if you wanted to.

Constructed is another matter, yes, you need cards to be competitive, but again, once you have a decent deck, the opponent cannot pay to have advantage over you. You can stuff only 30 cards into your deck too. 

AgaresOaks - read your writeup, interesting insights, but while introducing the new TGT cards, Blizzards have clearly shown that rather than to buff the terrible old cards nobody actually plays, they release the buffed version of the old card as a new card, to make more money and to push the old garbage in card packs as a filler. 

I mean - an old card, Magma Rager, a 5/1 card for 3 mana - absolute garbage, nobody plays it, ever. With TGT, they are releasing a new card, Ice Rager, which is a 5/2 card for mana. What is the reason for Magma Rager to exist now? None at all. It's just Blizzard's confession that Kripp was right (useless cards need to be buffed), and confession of Blizzard's greed.

100% OJ had a competitive tournament.  A friend was actually in it.

I'd rather play that than HS any day of the week.  Then again I like that dojin games circle as well.

Look, as much as I despise HS for being mostly devoid of interesting game play, their economy is not that terrible.

It's not good though either, in fact, pretty much every other CCG out there right now has a superior economy to HS, but that still doesn't make the HS economy 'bad'.  Just worse.

The real issue with HS is that it's just too simplistic and the meta always turns into the same decks beating on themselves, because really, ti's just that bad.  And fair enough, HS caters to a different crowd than other CCGs.  I'm not going to claim any is superior to any other, that's all down to your own personal preference.  For me, HS is too simplistic and 'dumbed down'.  The mechanics don't allow for a lot of complex interactions, and the resource system is overly limiting.  As is the card draw/deck size.  But, it plays fast, and it's not that taxing on your mental faculties compared to some others out there.

Try some other CCGs if you want, they are all F2P, though of course P2W exists, though it's more P2W(faster).  HS is also that, but the card gain is just slower.

A quick list off the top of my head...

MMDoC

Spellweaver

Infinity Wars

Magic Duels Origin

stuff I've not played

Hex

Scrolls

Dogs of War

A bunch of other 'tactical' games like Dogs of War

So many of them out there, if you don't like Blizzard or HS for whatever reason, just go play something else.

Everyone Is Doing This? http://southpark.cc.com/clips/srfuqa/everyone-is-doing-this