I haven’t played Hearthstone in well over a year. Naturally, I’ve returned to the fray and it’s no surprise that all my cards from Standard have been pushed over to Wild. So I bought card packs at the highest price, opened everything, disenchanted the extras, then did some research on which card combos were leading the meta right now. When I managed to find something, I found that I was missing at least 12 Cards to put everything together. This was likely because I didn’t have anything from prior Expansions either. I didn’t end up buying additional cards from other Expansions… I just went into Mercenaries and Battlegrounds and began progressing through those realms.
Blizzard is having loads of problems right now across the board with Hearthstone, Diablo, even World of Warcraft and it’s because they have no idea what their fans want… It’s like they’re pushing out content expecting something to be a hit, but if a player can’t even put deck together without homebrewing after a $90.00 expense…
…well, of course they’re going to feel a lack of interest if they’re feeling just a little bit ripped off.
Fix your games, Blizzard.
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You also can’t be expecting to have all the cards required right away for decks that have been built up from cards over the past 2 years.
Things have gotten better for players to catch up more recently. The Tavern Brawl each week offers a Year of the Phoenix pack, which will help you catch up on last year’s cards. There are Standard card packs in the shop which will cover all Standard expansions as well if you have more of the recent expansions’ cards already.
The gold over time from the Rewards track will help supplement any costs, it best rewards
long-term consistent playing.
They’ve also started selling pre-built decks, though we haven’t seen it this expansion cycle yet. https://playhearthstone.com/en-us/news/23665633
If you were gone for over 4 months, you should also have been able to select a deck for free, and have the “Return of the Hero” quest line, which awards 1250 gold over 5 quests.
Nevertheless even with all these things, collecting cards after missing previous expansions is like any other CCG, you don’t catch up right away. And they could still improve on it
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They did offer a free meta deck for returning players some time ago, but then offers like that dried up, along with all the other cool stuff they used to do (like really interesting duel class events, really interesting free stuff, etc). It was so all their effort could be focused on giving us…wallet mod, I mean mercenaries.
So now if you’re a new or returning player the answer is naturally (unspoken of course) “YOU DON’T HAVE A WALLET?!” And you have to either play one of the other modes (yay, right?) or get stomped by someone who either grinded for years non stop or did dump a ton of money into the game.
Because that’s the current state of the meta meta.
It’s called “catch up mechanic”, not “give me the last 3 expansions” 
Returning players should know how the game works and how to build a collection.
you mean you needed 12 cards to make a good deck?
They aren’t probably all epic/legendary: it should be very easy to find them or craft them.
You said you have wild cards: try playing in wild, you can still use your decks (in casual if you don’t have meta decks).
they used to sell 20$ decks in the mid of an expansion. I don’t know if it is still an option
it’s still there. You just have to be a returning player to claim it. (not playing the game for X days; 1 time only)
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It used to have an expiration date of that year. They must have forgotten to remove it. For once, a bug that works in the playerbase’s favor.