Do ppl that wrote comments "this game is not expensive, you just need to win 30 games every day for only a year to play deck that contain more than 1 legendary" are joking or are they serious?
I started playing Legends of Runeterra about 3 weeks ago. I spent a total of $20 on the game, and already own most of the collection.
$14 went to buying my first deck outright using wildcards (Mogwai's Heimerdinger control deck) with no RNG or luck in the purchase. The other $6 went to buying two expedition runs (aka Arena).
Obtained most of the cards through maxing out the weekly chests, the progression milestones, and through repeated value on the expeditions, which is significantly easier, since the runs cap out at 7 wins, allow up to 5 losses, and give you a free second chance if you fail the first time.
The cost I paid was equivalent to an indie game, the progression took about as long as a AAA game, and I got to play a Masters tier deck from the get-go.
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Contrast this to the $90 I spent on the expansion bundle, which only unlocked about 1/5th of the legendaries, and that's with insane highroll on my unpacks. Then on top of that, I still can't craft the deck I want without disenchanting other legendaries.
To add, it'd also take until next xpac to get maybe 1/2th of the remaining collection.
dude, do you have a job? i mean a place where you can earn money for comfortable living? or maybe you are from 3rd - 4th world country? as for me, i am from Europe and i have a job. And mega pre-purchase bundle is about 10% or less of my average monthly income. Why is it too expensive? It is absolutely fine to spend money on things you like to do. My wife spends minimum 100$ every month on stuff like shopping, make-up and other women stuff, which is fine. And here you are offered to spend ~150$ every 3-4 months to have a solid card collection to be able to play any deck you want. Stop complaining and raise more money, or simply f2p this shit.
Really fucking weird flex that $90 is 10% of your monthly income. That's $900 a month. You're working a part time minimum wage job.
Let's say you pay $400 a month in rent (which is cheap!). Then your car insurance is $80, your utilities at maybe $80, and groceries at maybe $200 a month, which is also cheap since you mention a wife.. Though that's likely a lie, since you describe her expenditures as "make-up and other women stuff.
That's $850 a month, assuming NO ADDITIONAL EXPENDITURES, which would be insane. With only $50 in savings, which is hugely financially irresponsible.
Either you're a financial disaster, in which case Hearthstone is 100% guaranteed TOO EXPENSIVE FOR YOU by indisputable definition. Or you live with your parents and have that disposable income, which would mean Hearthstone is affordable, but means you're in no place to offer financial advice.
I'll let you pick one and adjust your poll answer.
Dude, what’s wrong with you? Do you judge people by yourself or what? In my country 900$ is a good sum of money to get. The average income in my city is 461$ And I live in a major city, not mentioning villages and stuff like that. personally for me I don’t have to pay for the apartment , because I live in my own place, which I bought 12 years ago with help of bank (don’t know the term when you pay % every year for the big money bank gave you). I pay only for electricity, heating and hot water (which is 61$ on average). I also have a Wife (who works too) and a 1 year kid, but even he brings money to my family (we have a government support in my city).
i also have a car, but it is in a pretty good condition, so I don’t need to fix it or repair, only supplying gasoline (which is 90$ a month if you are interested).
Groceries Price a month is pretty near to what you mentioned (it is 184$ to be precise).
so at the end of the day I have enough money to spend and to save (I can afford a 1 time a year vacation for 3 weeks in sunny Thailand and believe me, this is not a small sum of money). You can guess what country I am from :D
Compare Hearthstone to Magic: I can buy 90 Hearthstone packs for $100, while in Magic, I have to pay $115 for a booster box (30-some packs). Is Hearthstone expensive?
Your comparison is wrong.
Compare Hearthstone with another game. You buy it for 50, 60 or 70 and you have done. In Hearthstone you have to pay at least 50 every 4 months if you want to play. Is Hearthstone expensive?
By the way. The resources required in order to develop a game are very high. GTA 5 costs 265 millions in order to develop it. What it the cost to develop a new expansion in Hearthstone? For sure less than 1 million.
Cards games are overpriced and cash cow.
As I said to another user, your comparison is not an equivalent of the one I presented. Card games and video games only have one relatable trait in the fact that they're both games. The similarities end there.
Every card game makes use of expansions, and all AAA card games price their booster boxes around the same prices as their competitors. Of course, digital packs are much cheaper than the physical cardboard. In relation to much more popular card games, Hearthstone is a much cheaper AAA alternative.
Are card games overpriced in general? Perhaps, but I couldn't say what exactly goes into the making of the game. I know there are designers that need to get paid, the coders, the manufacturers, and so on, but note that a portion of the cost of a booster box is markup. From what I understand, a booster box of Magic is sold to retailers around $50 or $60 USD, which the retailers then markup an extra $20-$40. This tells me that a box of Magic must cost around $20-$40 USD to make. Not crazy expensive, but the supply chain inflates the price of the product, which can be said about most retail products.
Do ppl that wrote comments "this game is not expensive, you just need to win 30 games every day for only a year to play deck that contain more than 1 legendary" are joking or are they serious?
1- There is competitive and cheap decks don't have any legendary, like face hunter, this is the place to go for who don't have money or time to spend.
2- The developers give in recent releases playable and free legendarys like Snip, Galakrond and Vargoth, have more than one legendary don't require too much time, just a little dedication like login for few minutes a day.
3- Have a lot of free content, packs free, Brawls, etc..., again, with a little daily dedication you can build a reasonable collection, your claim of hours and hours everyday for a year don't is real.
4- This is a comercial game, to make money, you have a door open for dedication instead of money, so, you can spend your money or your time to get the cards, what you can't is get everything for nothing, if this is "too expensive" then you need to reflected about your expectations.
I've only spent money I earned through google surveys on the game, so I don't think it's too expensive! I just focus on two-three classes and burn cards from the others. I'm having fun with that.
I'm F2P, since Beta, minus one XPac I bought a couple of years ago. It might seem tough for newer players to start out, but once you get a solid core of cards going you really don't need to spend any money.
I buy (with gold) about 100 packs each expansion. That's more than enough to get most of what you need. Don't be stupid and craft cards the first two weeks for the flavor of the day. Be smart with your resources and you'll be fine if you play for the long run. I've probably crafted under 20 cards in my life (no joke). I should go through my collection one of these days and see which ones were crafted.
Oh, and I really stopped playing a year or two ago. I just do the bare minimum to complete my daily quest and the weekly Tavern Brawl, that's it. Maybe 15 or 20 minutes a day. Just doing the daily quest should give you about 240 packs a year, not including promotions and giveaways Blizzard does. I have 20K gold and 60K dust, I just never spend it because I really don't need to.
FYI, if you want to really gain packs at no cost, get good at arena. But I haven't played that mode in three years, but that's how I started out the first year to get a stockpile of gold/dust.
In sets with quests for instance it is prohibitively expensive to play. On the other hand, the upcoming expansion looks incredibly affordable. I dont see hardly any must have legendaries this expansion.
Do ppl that wrote comments "this game is not expensive, you just need to win 30 games every day for only a year to play deck that contain more than 1 legendary" are joking or are they serious?
1- There is competitive and cheap decks don't have any legendary, like face hunter, this is the place to go for who don't have money or time to spend.
2- The developers give in recent releases playable and free legendarys like Snip, Galakrond and Vargoth, have more than one legendary don't require too much time, just a little dedication like login for few minutes a day.
3- Have a lot of free content, packs free, Brawls, etc..., again, with a little daily dedication you can build a reasonable collection, your claim of hours and hours everyday for a year don't is real.
4- This is a comercial game, to make money, you have a door open for dedication instead of money, so, you can spend your money or your time to get the cards, what you can't is get everything for nothing, if this is "too expensive" then you need to reflected about your expectations.
When the only deck that's affordable, it leads to an oversaturation of the singular deck on ladder. Which is why Face Hunter is currently so oversaturated right now. It was a similar case with big druid.
Galakrond, like C'thun, were deceptive. The cards themselves were free, because of their reliance on support cards in the same set. The literal reason they gave Galakrond and C'thun for free was so that players would need to buy packs to use those free legendaries. It's the same reason as to why both Galakrond and C'thun had an extremely strong support legendary. It's an extremely common marketing tactic.
And again, packs being 'free' is just so the game can advertise as 'free to play', similar to League of Legends. But the content is gated behind extremely high paywalls. Again, another common marketing tactic. The games aren't really 'free to play', since paying money for the playable cards and characters gives a significant advantage over other players.
And finally, ALL games are commercial games. That point is redundant. Literally all games exist to make money. But the standard retail price for games is $60 for a AAA, or less for smaller titles. The retail price of Hearthstone sits at around $90 for your first set OR daily plays for 3-6 months.
Dude, what’s wrong with you? Do you judge people by yourself or what? In my country 900$ is a good sum of money to get. The average income in my city is 461$ And I live in a major city, not mentioning villages and stuff like that. personally for me I don’t have to pay for the apartment , because I live in my own place, which I bought 12 years ago with help of bank (don’t know the term when you pay % every year for the big money bank gave you). I pay only for electricity, heating and hot water (which is 61$ on average). I also have a Wife (who works too) and a 1 year kid, but even he brings money to my family (we have a government support in my city).
i also have a car, but it is in a pretty good condition, so I don’t need to fix it or repair, only supplying gasoline (which is 90$ a month if you are interested).
Groceries Price a month is pretty near to what you mentioned (it is 184$ to be precise).
so at the end of the day I have enough money to spend and to save (I can afford a 1 time a year vacation for 3 weeks in sunny Thailand and believe me, this is not a small sum of money). You can guess what country I am from :D
So you wanted to go with the story of being financially irresponsible and that this game IS too expensive for you. Got it.
You really should be putting that money into savings. What you described is called a mortgage, and you still have to pay for it. The bank doesn't just *give* you the money for free.
Do ppl that wrote comments "this game is not expensive, you just need to win 30 games every day for only a year to play deck that contain more than 1 legendary" are joking or are they serious?
1- There is competitive and cheap decks don't have any legendary, like face hunter, this is the place to go for who don't have money or time to spend.
2- The developers give in recent releases playable and free legendarys like Snip, Galakrond and Vargoth, have more than one legendary don't require too much time, just a little dedication like login for few minutes a day.
3- Have a lot of free content, packs free, Brawls, etc..., again, with a little daily dedication you can build a reasonable collection, your claim of hours and hours everyday for a year don't is real.
4- This is a comercial game, to make money, you have a door open for dedication instead of money, so, you can spend your money or your time to get the cards, what you can't is get everything for nothing, if this is "too expensive" then you need to reflected about your expectations.
When the only deck that's affordable, it leads to an oversaturation of the singular deck on ladder. Which is why Face Hunter is currently so oversaturated right now. It was a similar case with big druid.
Galakrond, like C'thun, were deceptive. The cards themselves were free, because of their reliance on support cards in the same set. The literal reason they gave Galakrond and C'thun for free was so that players would need to buy packs to use those free legendaries. It's the same reason as to why both Galakrond and C'thun had an extremely strong support legendary. It's an extremely common marketing tactic.
And again, packs being 'free' is just so the game can advertise as 'free to play', similar to League of Legends. But the content is gated behind extremely high paywalls. Again, another common marketing tactic. The games aren't really 'free to play', since paying money for the playable cards and characters gives a significant advantage over other players.
And finally, ALL games are commercial games. That point is redundant. Literally all games exist to make money. But the standard retail price for games is $60 for a AAA, or less for smaller titles. The retail price of Hearthstone sits at around $90 for your first set OR daily plays for 3-6 months.
Dude, what’s wrong with you? Do you judge people by yourself or what? In my country 900$ is a good sum of money to get. The average income in my city is 461$ And I live in a major city, not mentioning villages and stuff like that. personally for me I don’t have to pay for the apartment , because I live in my own place, which I bought 12 years ago with help of bank (don’t know the term when you pay % every year for the big money bank gave you). I pay only for electricity, heating and hot water (which is 61$ on average). I also have a Wife (who works too) and a 1 year kid, but even he brings money to my family (we have a government support in my city).
i also have a car, but it is in a pretty good condition, so I don’t need to fix it or repair, only supplying gasoline (which is 90$ a month if you are interested).
Groceries Price a month is pretty near to what you mentioned (it is 184$ to be precise).
so at the end of the day I have enough money to spend and to save (I can afford a 1 time a year vacation for 3 weeks in sunny Thailand and believe me, this is not a small sum of money). You can guess what country I am from :D
So you wanted to go with the story of being financially irresponsible and that this game IS too expensive for you. Got it.
You really should be putting that money into savings. What you described is called a mortgage, and you still have to pay for it. The bank doesn't just *give* you the money for free.
Spending 10% of the 1 month income once In a 4 month period is absolutely fine for me. It is like buying a pair of jeans the trademark you like. Is it a big deal? I don’t think so. Can you live without a new pair of jeans? Yes you can. Should you buy something that brings you good vibes while using it? That’s for sure. but I don’t see any reason to continue arguing with you any longer.
Do ppl that wrote comments "this game is not expensive, you just need to win 30 games every day for only a year to play deck that contain more than 1 legendary" are joking or are they serious?
1- There is competitive and cheap decks don't have any legendary, like face hunter, this is the place to go for who don't have money or time to spend.
2- The developers give in recent releases playable and free legendarys like Snip, Galakrond and Vargoth, have more than one legendary don't require too much time, just a little dedication like login for few minutes a day.
3- Have a lot of free content, packs free, Brawls, etc..., again, with a little daily dedication you can build a reasonable collection, your claim of hours and hours everyday for a year don't is real.
4- This is a comercial game, to make money, you have a door open for dedication instead of money, so, you can spend your money or your time to get the cards, what you can't is get everything for nothing, if this is "too expensive" then you need to reflected about your expectations.
When the only deck that's affordable, it leads to an oversaturation of the singular deck on ladder. Which is why Face Hunter is currently so oversaturated right now. It was a similar case with big druid.
Galakrond, like C'thun, were deceptive. The cards themselves were free, because of their reliance on support cards in the same set. The literal reason they gave Galakrond and C'thun for free was so that players would need to buy packs to use those free legendaries. It's the same reason as to why both Galakrond and C'thun had an extremely strong support legendary. It's an extremely common marketing tactic.
And again, packs being 'free' is just so the game can advertise as 'free to play', similar to League of Legends. But the content is gated behind extremely high paywalls. Again, another common marketing tactic. The games aren't really 'free to play', since paying money for the playable cards and characters gives a significant advantage over other players.
And finally, ALL games are commercial games. That point is redundant. Literally all games exist to make money. But the standard retail price for games is $60 for a AAA, or less for smaller titles. The retail price of Hearthstone sits at around $90 for your first set OR daily plays for 3-6 months.
Dude, what’s wrong with you? Do you judge people by yourself or what? In my country 900$ is a good sum of money to get. The average income in my city is 461$ And I live in a major city, not mentioning villages and stuff like that. personally for me I don’t have to pay for the apartment , because I live in my own place, which I bought 12 years ago with help of bank (don’t know the term when you pay % every year for the big money bank gave you). I pay only for electricity, heating and hot water (which is 61$ on average). I also have a Wife (who works too) and a 1 year kid, but even he brings money to my family (we have a government support in my city).
i also have a car, but it is in a pretty good condition, so I don’t need to fix it or repair, only supplying gasoline (which is 90$ a month if you are interested).
Groceries Price a month is pretty near to what you mentioned (it is 184$ to be precise).
so at the end of the day I have enough money to spend and to save (I can afford a 1 time a year vacation for 3 weeks in sunny Thailand and believe me, this is not a small sum of money). You can guess what country I am from :D
So you wanted to go with the story of being financially irresponsible and that this game IS too expensive for you. Got it.
You really should be putting that money into savings. What you described is called a mortgage, and you still have to pay for it. The bank doesn't just *give* you the money for free.
How is he financially irresponsible if he is in a comfortable financial place to spend or save leftover money as he pleases?
I've been playing since the game came out of Beta more or less, I get to have fun if I want to and I can be competitive if I want to, in several ways, despite some horrible crafting decision throughout the years and even dropping the game for quite some time, I still haven't spent a single nickel on the game and only ever felt like I would want to is because of goodwill rather than anything else.
I also have a friend who got into the game 2 years ago, he feels pretty much the same way, and I also got someone into the game less than half a year ago, he's fairly single minded and doesn't really branch out too much yet, but he still has his fun while being able to experiment aplenty.
So I have to say hard no, and i certainly hope things won't get any worse on this front. Of course the definition of "fun" differs from person to person so I can't really dictate that, but when it comes to the cards you can have fun without a budget and even be competitive if you want to, the only thing that's really required is the same amount of patience you need for card games to begin with, so it's not really all that expensive.
If you want to own every single Golden card that you can get without having to pay or even grind too hard then too bad, things are fine as is, there's no need for it to be much cheaper, but it's very important for it to not be more expensive preferably.
The variety of decks makes Hearthstone fun. However, I think it is too expensive as a new player or return player to get that experience as there are too many card packs to open. There is no way to catch up without paying tons of money, or you need to stick to cheap deck forever.
I just return to play HS. I already spent 80$ for Ashes of Outland mega pack, 20$ for quest. However, the card I got is not enough to build any deck. I got only 4 useless legendaries and I still don't have cards from Descent of Dragon and Savior of Uldum. This means I need to spend at least 100$ to get some cards from those expansion.
Comparing with other multiplayer games like Battlefield or Starcraft, you pay 40-60$ and you can play forever with worry-free. This helps me realize why I quitted Hearthstone at the first place, and I think I will quit again soon after this expansion.
Blizzard should somehow dump the price down and attract more new player to maintain the balance sheet and grow community. IMO, a single free deck is by far not enough.
The variety of decks makes Hearthstone fun. However, I think it is too expensive as a new player or return player to get that experience as there are too many card packs to open. There is no way to catch up without paying tons of money, or you need to stick to cheap deck forever.
I just return to play HS. I already spent 80$ for Ashes of Outland mega pack, 20$ for quest. However, the card I got is not enough to build any deck. I got only 4 useless legendaries and I still don't have cards from Descent of Dragon and Savior of Uldum. This means I need to spend at least 100$ to get some cards from those expansion.
Comparing with other multiplayer games like Battlefield or Starcraft, you pay 40-60$ and you can play forever with worry-free. This helps me realize why I quitted Hearthstone at the first place, and I think I will quit again soon after this expansion.
Blizzard should somehow dump the price down and attract more new player to maintain the balance sheet and grow community. IMO, a single free deck is by far not enough.
70 free packs of cards every expansion is very doable and should provide you with enough cards for a workable deck or 2
Games free. You don't have to spend real money. You are at a disadvantage of course. Its a lot of cards. I've spent 5 years not buying anything on my EU account. I've had to disenchant most stuff from wild to get by. But that's every game. ESL is like that now. I've pre every expansion on NA except the last 3 because I've got the cards and extra gold and dust.
So yes and no. No because you can play this without money and yes if you want to instantly get a head start.
Do ppl that wrote comments "this game is not expensive, you just need to win 30 games every day for only a year to play deck that contain more than 1 legendary" are joking or are they serious?
Dude, what’s wrong with you? Do you judge people by yourself or what? In my country 900$ is a good sum of money to get. The average income in my city is 461$ And I live in a major city, not mentioning villages and stuff like that.
personally for me I don’t have to pay for the apartment , because I live in my own place, which I bought 12 years ago with help of bank (don’t know the term when you pay % every year for the big money bank gave you). I pay only for electricity, heating and hot water (which is 61$ on average). I also have a Wife (who works too) and a 1 year kid, but even he brings money to my family (we have a government support in my city).
i also have a car, but it is in a pretty good condition, so I don’t need to fix it or repair, only supplying gasoline (which is 90$ a month if you are interested).
Groceries Price a month is pretty near to what you mentioned (it is 184$ to be precise).
so at the end of the day I have enough money to spend and to save (I can afford a 1 time a year vacation for 3 weeks in sunny Thailand and believe me, this is not a small sum of money). You can guess what country I am from :D
As I said to another user, your comparison is not an equivalent of the one I presented. Card games and video games only have one relatable trait in the fact that they're both games. The similarities end there.
Every card game makes use of expansions, and all AAA card games price their booster boxes around the same prices as their competitors. Of course, digital packs are much cheaper than the physical cardboard. In relation to much more popular card games, Hearthstone is a much cheaper AAA alternative.
Are card games overpriced in general? Perhaps, but I couldn't say what exactly goes into the making of the game. I know there are designers that need to get paid, the coders, the manufacturers, and so on, but note that a portion of the cost of a booster box is markup. From what I understand, a booster box of Magic is sold to retailers around $50 or $60 USD, which the retailers then markup an extra $20-$40. This tells me that a box of Magic must cost around $20-$40 USD to make. Not crazy expensive, but the supply chain inflates the price of the product, which can be said about most retail products.
1- There is competitive and cheap decks don't have any legendary, like face hunter, this is the place to go for who don't have money or time to spend.
2- The developers give in recent releases playable and free legendarys like Snip, Galakrond and Vargoth, have more than one legendary don't require too much time, just a little dedication like login for few minutes a day.
3- Have a lot of free content, packs free, Brawls, etc..., again, with a little daily dedication you can build a reasonable collection, your claim of hours and hours everyday for a year don't is real.
4- This is a comercial game, to make money, you have a door open for dedication instead of money, so, you can spend your money or your time to get the cards, what you can't is get everything for nothing, if this is "too expensive" then you need to reflected about your expectations.
I've only spent money I earned through google surveys on the game, so I don't think it's too expensive! I just focus on two-three classes and burn cards from the others. I'm having fun with that.
For a new player? Yes, it's too expensive.
For someone who has been playing for years? Not at all, especially with the new duplicate protection feature.
These two articles are interesting on the matter. The first one shows how last year was the most expensive in a while thanks to Blizzard shenanigans.
https://www.thegamer.com/hearthstone-price-history-galakronds-awakening-adventure/
And then this one talks about how this new year will be more affordable relative to other years, but still overall similar in price to keep up.
https://www.thegamer.com/hearthstone-year-of-the-phoenix-ashes-of-outland-expansion-affordable/
Is shark repellent too expensive?
Well, depends...
I'm F2P, since Beta, minus one XPac I bought a couple of years ago. It might seem tough for newer players to start out, but once you get a solid core of cards going you really don't need to spend any money.
I buy (with gold) about 100 packs each expansion. That's more than enough to get most of what you need. Don't be stupid and craft cards the first two weeks for the flavor of the day. Be smart with your resources and you'll be fine if you play for the long run. I've probably crafted under 20 cards in my life (no joke). I should go through my collection one of these days and see which ones were crafted.
Oh, and I really stopped playing a year or two ago. I just do the bare minimum to complete my daily quest and the weekly Tavern Brawl, that's it. Maybe 15 or 20 minutes a day. Just doing the daily quest should give you about 240 packs a year, not including promotions and giveaways Blizzard does. I have 20K gold and 60K dust, I just never spend it because I really don't need to.
FYI, if you want to really gain packs at no cost, get good at arena. But I haven't played that mode in three years, but that's how I started out the first year to get a stockpile of gold/dust.
For me the answer is, "it depends".
In sets with quests for instance it is prohibitively expensive to play. On the other hand, the upcoming expansion looks incredibly affordable. I dont see hardly any must have legendaries this expansion.
Galavant Animation
When the only deck that's affordable, it leads to an oversaturation of the singular deck on ladder. Which is why Face Hunter is currently so oversaturated right now. It was a similar case with big druid.
Galakrond, like C'thun, were deceptive. The cards themselves were free, because of their reliance on support cards in the same set. The literal reason they gave Galakrond and C'thun for free was so that players would need to buy packs to use those free legendaries. It's the same reason as to why both Galakrond and C'thun had an extremely strong support legendary. It's an extremely common marketing tactic.
And again, packs being 'free' is just so the game can advertise as 'free to play', similar to League of Legends. But the content is gated behind extremely high paywalls. Again, another common marketing tactic. The games aren't really 'free to play', since paying money for the playable cards and characters gives a significant advantage over other players.
And finally, ALL games are commercial games. That point is redundant. Literally all games exist to make money. But the standard retail price for games is $60 for a AAA, or less for smaller titles. The retail price of Hearthstone sits at around $90 for your first set OR daily plays for 3-6 months.
So you wanted to go with the story of being financially irresponsible and that this game IS too expensive for you. Got it.
You really should be putting that money into savings. What you described is called a mortgage, and you still have to pay for it. The bank doesn't just *give* you the money for free.
Spending 10% of the 1 month income once In a 4 month period is absolutely fine for me. It is like buying a pair of jeans the trademark you like. Is it a big deal? I don’t think so. Can you live without a new pair of jeans? Yes you can. Should you buy something that brings you good vibes while using it? That’s for sure.
but I don’t see any reason to continue arguing with you any longer.
How is he financially irresponsible if he is in a comfortable financial place to spend or save leftover money as he pleases?
I've been playing since the game came out of Beta more or less, I get to have fun if I want to and I can be competitive if I want to, in several ways, despite some horrible crafting decision throughout the years and even dropping the game for quite some time, I still haven't spent a single nickel on the game and only ever felt like I would want to is because of goodwill rather than anything else.
I also have a friend who got into the game 2 years ago, he feels pretty much the same way, and I also got someone into the game less than half a year ago, he's fairly single minded and doesn't really branch out too much yet, but he still has his fun while being able to experiment aplenty.
So I have to say hard no, and i certainly hope things won't get any worse on this front. Of course the definition of "fun" differs from person to person so I can't really dictate that, but when it comes to the cards you can have fun without a budget and even be competitive if you want to, the only thing that's really required is the same amount of patience you need for card games to begin with, so it's not really all that expensive.
If you want to own every single Golden card that you can get without having to pay or even grind too hard then too bad, things are fine as is, there's no need for it to be much cheaper, but it's very important for it to not be more expensive preferably.
You can go to the food bank to get free food... You can go to The Keg, and have a $100 steak dinner. Both can provide a hearty dinner.
A person standing in the food bank line demanding a filet mignon from the clerk deserves a snack upside the head.
Hearthstone is dinner. You can eat steak, or you can eat canned beans. If you don't like beans, get a better job, or go find food somewhere else.
With minimal time investment you can get 70 packs free each expansion not counting the freebies you get straight from hearthstone.
The variety of decks makes Hearthstone fun. However, I think it is too expensive as a new player or return player to get that experience as there are too many card packs to open. There is no way to catch up without paying tons of money, or you need to stick to cheap deck forever.
I just return to play HS. I already spent 80$ for Ashes of Outland mega pack, 20$ for quest. However, the card I got is not enough to build any deck. I got only 4 useless legendaries and I still don't have cards from Descent of Dragon and Savior of Uldum. This means I need to spend at least 100$ to get some cards from those expansion.
Comparing with other multiplayer games like Battlefield or Starcraft, you pay 40-60$ and you can play forever with worry-free. This helps me realize why I quitted Hearthstone at the first place, and I think I will quit again soon after this expansion.
Blizzard should somehow dump the price down and attract more new player to maintain the balance sheet and grow community. IMO, a single free deck is by far not enough.
70 free packs of cards every expansion is very doable and should provide you with enough cards for a workable deck or 2
Games free. You don't have to spend real money. You are at a disadvantage of course. Its a lot of cards. I've spent 5 years not buying anything on my EU account. I've had to disenchant most stuff from wild to get by. But that's every game. ESL is like that now. I've pre every expansion on NA except the last 3 because I've got the cards and extra gold and dust.
So yes and no. No because you can play this without money and yes if you want to instantly get a head start.
This game is free to play so it's hard to call it "too expensive"...
That being said... Blizzard keep raising the prices of pre-orders every expansions and because of that, they lost me.