This is the road Hearthstone has been traveling down for years, because the developers believe:
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Players like to feel powerful on their turns, and they are not overly concerned about balance.
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Many casual players are content as long as they win close to half of their games. This why the algorithm is so effective at matching players. The design philosophy has intentionally been moving in the direction of turning matches into coin flips.
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Many casual players accept losses better if it was the result of some luck factor, like some bad RNG or their opponent drawing into their broken cards or combos first, rather than being outplayed by their opponent.
Dev Comment: The current power level of the top decks after the launch of Murder at Castle Nathria is pretty close to the level that we’d like it to be.
This ^ is evidence that the devs look at Hearthstone very differently than many strategy gamers do. Hearthstone is far from being balanced or in a healthy game state—unless your goal is achieve a similar euphoria to what is imparted by playing slot machines.
The devs are not overly concerned with a lack of strategy determining the outcome of matches. They know players will invest resources while trying to determine which new decks will give them better than a coin flip chance of winning—like into a deck that has a 53 percent or better win rate, and eventually they will nerf the deck(s) with the highest proven win rates, making many players invest even more resources into a new deck. This has long been the model—with the strategy aspect of the game becoming a bigger illusionary part the game.
Now, if powercreep, imbalance, broken cards, and insane amounts of broken RNG are not negatively impacting your play experience, then keep spending money on Hearthstone.
But, if powercreep, imbalance, broken cards, and insane amounts of broken RNG are making Hearthstone less fun for you, then you are going to have send a strong signal that that game needs major changes and improvements by voting with your wallets. Stop spending money on Hearthstone until the improvements you want, have been made, and be vocal about what you want and why you have stopped spending money on the game.
Voting with your wallet in an attempt to have a positive impact on the direction Hearthstone may require not spending money on the game until the expansions that you skipped spending money on have rotated out of Standard.
At this point, it is going take some squeaky wheels and some discipline not to spend money on a game (that is moving in a direction that is less fun to play) before there will be any real hope that Hearthstone can become a better game than it is now. Let me know if you agree.
