Yes, the game is still supported well with new content and updates, and a new expansion is being released very soon.
If you are starting out as new player F2P, you have a lot of the game (and cards!) to learn while also needing to build your collection, so you won’t be having a lot of the cards that you might see in many online decklists and YouTube.
So, what to do? You have a couple of ways to approach this:
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Focus on building one deck that becomes proven to be a “good” or “meta” deck. This is probably the most popular or “recommended” way, but has significant downsides. If you put all of your resources into this one deck, when cards get nerfed or changed, you may have trouble adapting and finding a new deck to play.
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A good chunk of players only like to play 1-2 classes. If you’re one of them you do have the option of crafting/acquiring more of your chosen class’s epics and legendaries and ignoring the other classes. That way you have a richer experience with those 1-2 classes. May have trouble completing some daily quests for a class where you disenchanted all the cards for. And if your chosen class is not doing so well in the “meta”, you may have a bad time playing (though the most dedicated players handle it)
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With the cards you open, play several deck archetypes (but substituting expensive legendaries). This can teach you the difference between a legendary that is key to a deck type (for which a deck is usually named after), a legendary that looks powerful but is actually optional and/or can be substituted, or a legendary that could benefit you in multiple decks/classes, not just one class/deck type.
However it may be quite tricky to figure this out and it is far easier for existing players to just have the card and take it for granted as “required”, which then pushes up the total cost of a deck.
With how duplicate protection works https://www.hearthpwn.com/forums/hearthstone-general/general-discussion/241498-guide-to-new-duplicate-protection-system (since April 2020), the less cards you disenchant/ the more patience you have with building your collection, the better it is in the long run for what type of decks you can eventually play.
Some details on collection building and acquiring cards
This could use an entire another post about it, but here are a few things:
You are guaranteed all commons and rares of a set (135 cards) by around pack 67 of a set, not including the mini-set. There are also “Standard” and “Wild” packs you can buy in the shop, that can cover older set cards you might be missing.
The full miniset (35 cards) for each expansion can be purchased for 2000 gold and is available for around 3 months. After that, you can get still get the miniset cards from the expansion packs.
If you’re interested in learning more, here’s a discussion post I made in Jan 20 about what a new player might need to do to enjoy Hearthstone for the long term.
There are a lot of specific terms in there that would only make sense to regular or older players, and as HS keeps changing some information is outdated (eg: the Rank system), but otherwise my main point would be, if you play consistently over a long period of time, i.e do the daily quests, weekly Tavern Brawl and level up the Rewards Track every expansion, you find yourself with more and more freedom to craft what you want as you’ll own enough of each expansion.
But how to make sure you are still having fun before you get to that point? If Play Mode is not working out, there is certainly a lot of solo content you can play for free, and Battlegrounds is pretty much free (hence why it is just as popular if not more popular than Play Mode). But it is also like a different game.
Is Hearthstone worth putting time into playing? Yes! Cards can have simple wording, but have a lot of depth to their strategy. The laid-back nature of the characters, with elegant animations and visuals make Hearthstone a very charming game. Just know that frustration can be easy to trigger at times.