Hearthstone suffers from a lot of poor balance and powercreep these days, which translates into a lot of broken cards and broken combos that are so impactful it creates scenarios where there is little hope for counter-play when these cards or combos get played.
I watched a video of an Arena Board Leader, named Kolst, discussing how Arena is less about playing “curvestone” or “tempo” these days and how it’s more about having lots of these broken cards and combos in your deck to increase your chances of getting to play them. To borrow a quote from Gordon Gekko from the movie Wall Street to Illustrate this point: “Greed is good” in Arena right now.
Kolst used a “cupcake” analogy to illustrate his point about how Arena was once more about building an important foundation (the cake of a cupcake) of having a good curve and good tempo-based cards with a just a little “icing”—the “secret sauce” in a deck that was a few strong cards that served as finishers.
Kolst goes on to explain that Arena is now much more about having a lot of “icing” and less “cake,” which means having a deck with a lot of greedily drafted broken cards and combos, because having a lot of icing is now far more important than having a perfect curve or trying to win through tempo or through the steady exchange of minions from playing “tradestone.”
https://youtu.be/UVNK0opmTwI
Also, Arena has another important complication these days, which is the abundance of “Super Drafts” in the format: