I have another design challenge for those who enjoy them.
The theme: All cards in your deck become tradable.
I am curious how people would balance this mechanic. Make it a start of game effect? Make it a conditional battlecry?
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All cards are tradeable once per turn for 0 mana
BUT, drawing cards any other way triggers fatique dmg (scaling, ofc)
As long as playing K’J doesn’t make you immune to Insanity Warlock’s dmg, it wouldn’t help against this, neither
So let’s say we want this to be a permanent effect.
It can have a start during the game, but not an end.
Such effect adds a lot of consistency to a deck, but you lose tempo by spending mana.
The bigger winners of such effects are combo decks, then control decks, and at the very bottom aggro decks.
So we need something that would balance that.
I think a start of game effect isn’t good. It’s too radical, even with a condition. Either the condition is too impactful and the deck won’t be enjoyable, or it will be irrelevant. Like if the condition is to start the game with 10 tradeable cards in your deck, which means 10 mostly bad cards, it’s not that bad of a drawback since you can precisely trade them away. But it’s not a fun experience to just stuff your deck with trash just to make one card work.
So it would be better triggered during the game.
At first I thought of it in reverse. Instead of making all cards tradeable, I wanted to make it a tradeable payoff with “For the rest of the game, your trades are free”, which rewards you for having a lot of tradeable cards in your deck while being an implied condition.
That’s still off the track but an idea I keep in mind.
My next idea is that instead of making it conditional, we can make it detrimental, and I like this one : “For the rest of the game, ALL cards are tradeable. Your opponent’s trades are free.”
With such a symetrical effect, you can make all your cards tradeable to get a combo piece or specific answer, but at the cost of risking your opponent to do the same even better.
That adds a layer of whever or not you should play the card. You can play it against an aggro deck if you think they are out of fuel, but it basically means that now every time they topdeck they will get the best card in their deck. You can play that against a control deck, but you give them the opportunity to cycle all their useless tools to get their disruptive effects, and so on.
Seeing how impactful the drawback is, it can be printed on a low cost minion with decent stats like a 2 mana 2/3. Maybe even a 2 mana 3/3.
You don’t really want to play it early anyway since it would mean giving your opponent the ability to chose the specific card they want from their deck every turn
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additional and separate idea, also partially off the track : We could have a new side deck legendary in which we put like 5 cards from our deck to give them tradeable. This way it’s a start of game effect but less impactful than all cards being tradeable yet still impactful enough. Kinda remind sme of the “specialist” tournament mode
This would make for a pretty cool brawl
People are exagerrating.
Trade itself already cost 1. That card could even be free and It would probably be balanced
Not Fun but balanced for sure. Ideally Just do something as idiotic as:
“Start of the game: If your deck list contains 2 copies of “this card” all cards in your deck gain tradable”.
Add that to a generic vannila minion of any cost and It is balanced enough with 2 DUDS in your deck.
It’s true that trade costing 1 means it would be pointless to have all cards being tradeable, which is why it only makes sense to make the trades free, but that would make it too much
and honestly, I’d rather take 6-10 fatique dmg than:
That would wreck the god damned deck in 2025, you just can’t afford to be running 2 duds AND then to be paying 1 mana to trade cards
A card that any control or combo deck would put in their deck to gain a passive advantage against aggro deck with no drawback, or against mirror matches that don’t run the card. I don’t really see the balance.
The entire point of deckbuilding is that in order to include big cards in your deck, you have to build so you have a defensive early. The more big cards you add, the less likely you are to find your defensive stuff.
If suddenly all big cards can be replaced by your defensive ones, that’s a huge advantage.
In a sens it’s like you replaced all cards in your deck with variations of the gift cards. You pay a 1 mana tax to get the card you want. A lot of gifts included trash cards. Those who included good cards were played despite the 1 mana tax.
that you can trade away at any time 
You seem to underestimate how much mana is left unspent in the early turns of the game
This probably wouldn’t be too broken to put on something cheap.
I could see something like this existing
Perky Trader
1 Mana
1/2
Cards in hand have tradeable.
I wouldn’t do it as a rest of game effect, but you could pretty safely put this on a minion as an aura.
Peddling Prince
Legendary
4 mana
3/4
Tradeable
While this is in your deck, all cards in your hand are Tradeable
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This is the most interesting by far! I really like this design as if you would draw it you need to first trade it away before getting the effect again. The chances of drawing it again also increase over the course of the game. Very nice.
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Clearly I’ve misunderstood the header.
I thought this would be a thread challenging players to build decks with only tradeable cards.
That would be a challenge indeed.
I don’t think tradeable is that good a card modifier. It’s a great modifier to have on tech cards, that is cards that bump winrate in very specific matchups but are near useless in others. It should be obvious why, it lessens the dead weight tech cards can be, but it’s not without cost.
Other than that trade has minor utility in rogue decks because a lot of them drawing cards advances their main synergies.
Beyond those two cases, tradeable is nearly a useless modifier, so the answer to your question is, whatever is the top deck in the meta will remain the top deck.
If your question is how do you make a deck full of tradeable cards relevant, then you would have to redesign the mechanic itself.
For example, add a new effect to creatures, “diplomatic immunity: when you trade on your turn, this minion gains immune until end of turn.”
Another great design space for trading would be secrets that trigger when an opponent trades. For example, when your opponent trades a card, add a copy of it to your hand it costs 1."
You posted all of this just for none of it to have anything to do with the thread.
Lol well if you enjoy printing useless cards you should join the dev team they seem to love doing it too 
My point is, your theme would never see play. If you want a fully tradeable deck to see play it would have to have synergies, such as those as I listed.
I’ve also detailed why tradeable is mostly a useless mechanic other than in a few cases.
You did specifically use the word “balance” implying you’d want this theme/mechanic to see play, at least that’s how I interpreted it.
Tradeable is not useless by any stretch. Your analysis is honestly just kind of trash. Most tradable cards are understated BECAUSE hand fixing is powerful. Being able to swap out an unneeded card at any time is actually quite powerful when it is on hand picked cards.
Wow. Show me one t1 deck in the last like 5 years that ran 5 or more tradable card, and then I’d concede you have a miniscule probability of being correct.
You are conflating 2 things. Tradable being inherently bad(which it is not) with the tradeable cards that have been printed not being that great. Imagine all the most powerful cards. Now imagine you could toss them to draw other cards if they were clogging up your hand.
Does this make sense now?
Let’s be real, it’s not that big of a mechanic
When it’s just 1-2 cards in your deck that are tradeable, you have:
- 1/30 or 1/15 chance to trade it in the first place,
- Lowered by the fact that you sometimes want to keep it because you anticipate it being useful,
- lowered by the fact that it takes having 1 mana surplus, which is inefficient play, which happens rarely
And you’re down to almost never trading it.
With that said, it FEELS good to have that option. Brilliant, in fact
Exactly. Imagine you’re playing control and turn 1 you draw a high mana cost card in your opening hand. Boom. Toss it away on turn 1 and get a chance for something else. Floating 1 or 2 mana? Draw cards.
I don’t think people understand how strong it COULD be.
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Why the hell would you trade when you can draw? Really the only downside to drawing is hand size and that is the only argument for tradeable other than the niche cases I described above.
Draw is superior to trading in every way (with the exception of hand size), and this game has enough draw and tempo to make tradeable a useless modifier.
In classic Hearthstone tradeable would be broken. In today’s Hearthstone it’s basically useless.
If you are not playing on curve in today’s Hearthstone you are probably just losing. Trading, by definition, destroys your curve.