This is very true, but gold and dust streams are also much higher with start of expansion freebies, new player freebies, end of month rewards and event freebies.
If they start cutting back on any of these things, it will be worth revisiting, but right now it’s pretty easy to keep up.
well for me the game is f2p but as a f2p player its really frustrating to play the game because most of the time you just dont have the cards to build a newish deck.
It takes sometimes months to get the deck you want and at this point a new expansion comes out and you can start over again and thats the point where i dont feel like playing this game anymore and take a break.
there are 9 heroes most of them have 2-3 different decks and here as a f2p player you struggle to finish one.
i think we need more ways to get on cards /gold
Paying does not guarantee winning. But paying CERTAINLY increases your average chance of winning any given game. Which means you climb the ranks more quickly than someone who does not.
Logic:
rank 15-20, “deck A” has the highest win percentage
rank 10-15, “deck B” has the highest win percentage
rank 5-10, “deck C” has the highest win percentage
rank 1-5, “deck D” has the highest win percentage
legend, “deck E” has the highest win percentage
The veteran player who buys a couple hundred packs per expansion can build all five of these decks and cruise through the ranks playing the best possible version of the deck with the highest win percentage, minimizing the number of games it take to rank up.
The newer player who did not pay, had to pick one or two decks and dust everything else in order to make them. Then he has to hope that the two he selected happen to be among the current top tier decks when he decides to do his ranked matches.
As long as whatever decks the free player focused on have a 50.01% or better win rate, he will eventually rank up. But it will take him a LOT more games than the guy who’s playing the optimal version of the optimal deck (with say a 55% win rate) at every rank.
The first guy “paid” with money to buy packs. The second guy “paid” with time, because it took him a lot more of it to rank up. Either way, they paid.
Why is nobody commenting on the fact that the creator of that first Reddit post specifically claims, even edited his post to make it clear because people still twist his words, that his intention is to make you understand that it’s better to play Arena (or buy packs, of course) instead of grinding as F2P if you want a full collection?
He even suggests you can theoretically get an all-golden collection if you are able to make 7+ wins each run.
Show some respect to the person’s work by at least reading it before spending twice as much time commenting it.
Actually these posts are ‘‘meaningless’’ cause their purpose is to describe how much money/time you need to spend to get full collection. Nobody needs a full collection but rather most people need ‘‘key’’ cards to build decks around them.
And taking this as a creteria Hs has become lot more expensive through the last years:
Yes we also had some interesting changes through the years (For ex no duplicate legendaries, 1 free legendaries at the beggining of each expansion, 1 legendary at the first 10 packs) combined with some extremely rare ‘‘events’’ (and Dean expects from these events to save the community acording to Reddit ![:stuck_out_tongue:](https://dacy5cilkxabf.cloudfront.net/en/hearthstone/images/emoji/twitter/stuck_out_tongue.png?v=6" ":stuck_out_tongue:")
). Still all these are nothing in front of the cost that Hs has these days.
This. People who predicate their complaints about CCG value from the ridiculous baseline point of a 100% complete collection of all the cards are being idiotic. CCGs are games that are designed to be played with incomplete collections. Framing an argument on baseline CCG pricing from the starting point of the absolute highest level of collection density possible is the argumentative act of crapping a bed.
That logic though doesn’t really flow from what the data shows:
Decks A-C, for example, tend to be in a cluster at every bracket (Say Odd Paladin and Secret Paladin) so the difference between A-C is minimal (less than 1%). There is rarely a deck where it is 53% at ranks 1-5 and 50% at ranks 20-15 or 15-10. I’m not going to say that it never happens but the top decks tend to be top decks throughout the rank curve. The might swap in order a bit but, again, your variance is usually in the 1% or 1.5% which impacts the ability to rank-up minimally.
Hopefully with the new system that veteran player isn’t starting below rank 15 
I’ll be interested to see if these costs come back down. Until KoFT the cost for budget decks was low (Token Druid and Aggro Paladin in JtU) but increased to the base baseline once Keleseth and later Genn/Baku were introduced.
Zoolock probably has it’s 4k dust floor with Solarium; however, other classes with aggro or aggressive MR decks might not. Off the top of my head the only other class that would, currently, have a “must use” legendary in an aggro deck is Shaman with Electra.
These two points have certainly increased the cost of the game by a decent amount. Can’t disagree with this at all
I can’t +1 this neough
it IS p2w if you can only get a fraction of the content without paying
which are not enough for the endgame
and you can’t win/climb up at high ranks or tournaments if you don’t have several complete decks
you and theriddler don’t understand that rank 15 isn’t the whole ladder
I don’t agree with you there.
You don’t need half the legendary or epic cards for the endgame, assuming you mean rank 5 to legend. You definitely cannot play every deck being F2P but you certainly can make most of the best decks and reach the highest ranks.
you and theriddler don’t understand that rank 15 isn’t the whole ladder
Where you are making your mistake is when you assume my mathematical decision not to rank past 15 (because the ROI sucks) means I lack the ability to do so. In this you are quite wrong.
Despite having paid $0.00 for expansions in the past 12 months, I can build fully optimized versions of…
Even Paladin
Odd Paladin
Secret Paladin
Control Priest
Mid-Hunter
Odd Warrior
Zoolock
The only T1 decks I can’t build the fully optimized version of are Tog/Thun Druid (not gonna craft Togwaggle right before he drops out) and Odd/Taunt Warrior (not gonna craft the Warrior Quest right before it drops out). And of course I can build Cube Hunter, Wall Priest, Miracle Rogue, Even Warlock, Odd Mage, Cube Rogue, Gallery Priest, Aggro Mage, Rush Warrior, Cube Rogue, Big Spell Mage, Cubelock, Miracle Druid, and Maly Rogue and a practically infinite number of homebrews and snowflakes.
So it’s not that I can’t rank to Legend. I simply find the exercise to be tedious, so I don’t do it. But if I was some guy who liked ranking to Legend, I could do it for free with nothing but Secret Paladin and Mid-Hunter … both very cheap decks.
You sure about that? Because the Specialist format says otherwise, and that’s competitive Hearthstone. Additionally, people pilot one or two decks into legend quite frequently.
Having all available content =/= winning.
Winning =/= having all of the content.
Stop trying to push such a false notion.
What about Legend? Does Legend count?
I’m not sure where you get this idea from. Every time I’ve hit legend I’ve stuck to a singular deck the whole time. Jumping from deck to deck tends to make the climb harder as you are less in tune with mulligan and play strategies of the other decks.
The only thing you need multiple decks for is the tournament scene, but not even there anymore thanks to the specialist format they are rolling out.
Some people on the ladder play the “meta within the meta” game where they pay very close attention to which deck is doing best at which rank tier. As a theoretical example … Rank 5 to 1 may be heavily saturated with a lot of players using Mid-Hunter and so the “meta meta” players would use a deck when in that range which was favored against Mid-Hunter and then swap to a different deck for Legend.
You’re absolutely right though in saying that there is value in sticking to one deck and getting to know it really well. People who practice with a deck a lot get a sort of “spidey sense” for it that is hard to duplicate when you’re constantly deck hopping.
Ultimate, ranking at the high levels though is 99% persistence and only 1% which deck you use. Any decent T1 or T2 deck can hit legend as long as the player is willing to hunker down and play a lot.
Have to agree w/ Smeet here Shakou. Most of my climbs I’ve only really ever used two decks when I decide to ‘seriously’ climb to legend. I have ‘tripped’ into legend before just playing various decks but if my main goal is legend I am usually just playing two decks or so.
Maybe there are some CCG type games out there that aren’t in some ways p2w, but I think for most it’s inherent to this type of game. Anyone who plays CCGs probably realizes that fact and if that upsets them then they most likely shouldn’t be playing CCGs. There are plenty of other types of games out there.
That said, Hearthstone, IMO, has such generous ways of rewarding players that it’s far easier to play without spending much or any money. Aside from the first three Adventures I’ve been a FTP player and am able to enjoy the game, so much so that it’s remained one of my favorites for years now, something other games rarely do.
Not even close to p2w as a whale that spends large amounts of $$$ and have a large collection i struggle to go past rank 15. Sure i may have an advantage in creating a whichever deck i want but if I’m constantly making bad plays and not learning from my mistakes what good is buying more packs.
Heck i’ve dueled some f2p players on these forums and still get my butt kicked.
As some have stated here many people have gotten legends going completely f2p. I think Trump or Disguised Toast have some videos on youtube showing their f2p grind to legend ranks.
I’ll play a bit of devil’s advocate and say the the only arguable p2w aspect in Hearthstone is tournaments because competitive Hearthstone players often make different tech choices in their decks and experiment, and you won’t be able to freely do that if you are limited by collection and don’t have most of the legendaries/epics.
Even so, the new competitive format - Specialist - will only require a single deck with two other variations that can only have a 5-card difference from the core deck. 40 cards in total, not at all out of the realm of possibility for someone who’s been playing long enough to aim at attending serious competitive events.
This is the only aspect of the game where I would say there is a legitimate argument to be made for the claim that a person needs a full (or nearly full) collection to ‘compete’.
However, since 99.9999999999999999% of the game’s players do not swim in that pond, I would argue that the point is all but irrelevant.