Well, I don’t agree that the issue is a keyword like lifesteal since it’s one of the worst keywords next to things like taunt and deathrattle because they are reactionary keywords subject to silencing and other types of removal but lifesteal on minions in particular tend to be slow and made better with other keywords such as rush (one of the stronger keywords).
But mana cheating is (and has been) a problem for years and the result of years of mana cheating stems from the same place Hearthstone has seen pretty break-neck power creep which, IMO, is from not fully exploring card design. This is pretty apparent in the number of archetypes that, over the years, have been completely abandoned or had support re-introduced so much later that they are disconnected from initial waves of support (think elemental shaman).
Other types of old card design were abandoned because the cards they were attached to were just made to be weak. Keywords like inspire were largely put on cards that were overcosted for their stats with rewards that, even at the time of release, were bad. A comparison might be 4 mana 2/2 minion with an inspire ability to summon two 1/1 treants versus a 5 mana 5/5 with inspire shuffle the highest cost minion from your opponent’s hand to their deck. Clearly one of these are better than the other but the former example is more within range of what we actually ended up getting with inspire cards. Then we have the situation of keywords being locked behind set flavor and is Blizzard’s reasoning on why they don’t re-use keywords within newer sets. For example, Nostalgic Clown has the exact same conditions to constitute having the corrupt keyword but doesn’t.
Moreover, most keywords never leave their native set (I mean this both technically but also spiritually). This means that Blizzard artificially has to create new cards in unexplored design spaces but is quickly bankrupting that same creative design space. The solution then becomes doing more of the same but bigger and cards that were released even 3 years ago don’t really hold up well compared to cards being released within the last few sets whereas other card games (like Yu-Gi-Oh!) have decks and entire archetypes that see some play on the casual to competitive spectrum (Sky Striker, Branded, P.U.N.K, Dark Magician, synchro piles, etc.). Those archetypes also continue to get support years down the line and often times have up to 2 years of continuous support, as we’ve seen with Branded and Tearlament whereas every new set in Hearthstone focuses on completely unrelated design space from previous sets.
While is seems that this should open up opportunity to home brew (this is largely what happens in Magic), this ends up not being the case because cohesion is so lost set-to-set that only the most obvious cards tend to make the cut. This isn’t always the case, paladin consistently has aggressive cards that support small minion based strategies and each other class has some kind of hallmark but we really often see packages and toolboxes being played over class identity (such as excavate).
And while I think it’s good to have these universal toolboxes, the difference between agency in deck construction between Hearthstone and Magic is that (1) Magic plainly just releases more cards even comparing the standard formats (2) Magic is governed not by class homogenism but by how willing you are to invest land resources into a multicolored deck, the equivalent being dual class cards or tri-class cards (which previously were seen in Mean Streets of Gadgetzan and Scholomance Academy and are making their ‘return’ in Perils in Paradise as the tourist mechanic).
As far as randomness is concerned, it’s pretty apparent that it’s not going anywhere since we’ve had random mechanics since classic and even random card generation has been in the game since the earliest sets with discover being one of the oldest mechanics in the game (November of 2015). It’s pretty cemented into the identity of the game. It’s the ire of a lot of players but it’s also one of the things people are pretty vocal about loving as well.
Luckily, there are alternatives and the main thing you suffer from leaving Hearthstone is FOMO. But if you like the art style, themes, the way the game itself plays out despite RNG then those are good reasons to tolerate RNG enough to play at least even casually. That’s kind of where I am at with the game. I don’t feel married to it, I don’t feel compelled to spend money (I’m not against it if I see product I like or feel like there’s a good bundle – I have heavily invested in sets in the past because I feel kindred to certain cards), but it’s a game and if you’re not having fun then don’t force yourself to endure wasting your time.
Personally, the last 2 years of Hearthstone have made some of my favorite sets between card design and artwork as well as creating death knight which is why I even came back into the game after 3 years of not playing (because I disliked RNG), and although some of my favorite sets are older sets I think there are some cool things being done today. Maybe it doesn’t feel very competitive but you don’t have to treat it that way either.
This back and forth is hilarious.