Hearthpwn

I'm enjoying 17/3 Lifesteal weapons. Been using Southsea Squidface + Carnivorous Cube + Sonya Shadowdancer to ramp attack like a beast. Got my deck in the signature if you want to take a look.

Welcome to the game! Which recommendations you should take will vary depending on how much money you feel comfortable spending on the game and what your goals are, but here's a few things I've found to be useful.

1. When disenchanting cards, never dust cards that are "overpowered" until the next expansion. If Blizzard nerfs them you'll be able to dust them for 2-4x the value. Also don't dust legendaries, even ones you don't use, until you're certain you're not going to buy more packs from that set. Hearthstone doesn't give you duplicate legendaries when you open packs, so if you get a useless one that you want to dust, hold on to it to ensure that any additional legendaries you open will be different (this saves a ton of dust)!
2. Research and plan a deck before you craft cards for it. Find youtubers who have played it and see if it looks fun/good first. Even people with a lot of money invested in this game can lose big time with an impulse crafting spree.
3. If you're trying to play for free. Look up a strong deck that's cheap and play it in ranked to ensure you can get some decent monthly ranked rewards.
4. If you're willing to pay, adventures and pre-orders are the most efficient way to get lots of cards for the least real money. It's still pricey, but it's better than buying $15 pack bundles on an impulse throughout the year. It adds up!
5. If you're playing for free, Tavern Brawl and Arena are quite good. Watch hearthstone youtubers do arena runs and see how they draft/play and five it a shot. In Arena, it doesn't matter if you're a F2P'er or a big spender, everyone's deck has the same limitations, and you can win some huge rewards. If you can get to 7 Wins, you effectively get a free pack plus enough gold to play arena again. This is called "going infinite" and can let you earn a lot of gold quickly. Don't expect to be an arena master right away, but my friend started off doing arena runs and has had good success.
6. Open classic packs first. These stay in standard and are overall more useful in the long run. Then open packs from the newer sets. If you open old sets, take advantage of the guaranteed legendary in your first 10 packs (buy 10 packs to ensure you get it).
7. Lastly, none of the above matters if you're not enjoying your time playing. Don't let the desire to get new cards prevent you from experimenting with different things or playing decks that are more fun than good. There's more to this game than net-decking, even if it means losing a bit more.

Honestly, if you're smart about it you can buy the adventure (guaranteed legendaries) and one pre-order and have enough cards and dust to build a deck or two. From there just hit rank 5 each month with your meta-mancer deck and then use the rewards/quests/tavernbrawl goodies to craft fun stuff.

I would argue that the set was designed well given that Blizzard intentionally tries to control the metagame by cycling which classes are dominant. Sure, we want an expansion that's more or less balanced and allows all 9 classes to function and be more/less successful, but that's not what Blizzard has on their agenda. It's easier to balance the 9 classes if you decide ahead of time which ones are allowed to be a bit stronger and which are going to be on the weak side.

Jade Idol and Raza are really the only cards that pushed things too far imo. I don't care for the designers picking which classes are allowed to be good and which ones have to blow when we're all paying so much money to play it.

Paladin is plenty strong, but I am less than thrilled at how much of their strength is focused into their legendaries. It makes their consistency go all over the place. Unless of course you're playing some kind of aggro paladin or something with murlocs.

I run my own version of it and from my early plays with it I've found that by turn 3 I should expect to have it either equipped or in my hand, but getting the buffs to make it really strong is rather hard to balance along with having a board and making sure you have enough spells to use Gadgetzan Auctioneer. I'm tempted to run Sprint now so that I don't feel like I need to hold on to my cards for so long.

Interestingly, I think the strongest thing about Kingsbane Rogue is the Striders and the spiders they spawn. I have yet to lose a match where I Played 2 copies of the Strider using Valeera the Hollow. It is a very strong card and it does the majority of the attrition work to make the Kingsbane so powerful. Overall, I think that the Miracle Rogue w/ Kingsbane kit is not quite where the weapon belongs, but rather in a deck that uses more minions. We'll see I guess.

So your concern is that by making it more affordable to get legendaries, which are the most costly and difficult to acquire, people would be even more upset about the game being p2w?

That seems very suspect. Anything that allows people to complete their collection or reach for a new deck without having to dust old ones for less money is a good thing. If F2Pers genuuinely have a problem with someone paying $5 per week to get more legendaries (which, mind you, are not even typically tier 1 cards) then they almost certainly will have a problem with that person just buying an additional 40 packs at launch with that same money and having every single common/rare/epic in the expansion from day 1 and out meta-decking them all year round.

Honestly, I think if it were easier to complete the collection, less people would spam boring, uninspired, metadeck garbage because they'd be free of worrying about their precious dust being spent on cards that end up hurting their monthly dust/pack income. That would, in turn, make it easier to play decks that aren't MLGPRO curated, scientifically meta-tested highlander cancerfests, as players who reach their end goal are free to experiment without worrying about their winrate.

That feel when you draw 17 cards from your Kingsbane deck by turn 8 and you can't find your Kingsbane or either of your Cavern Shinyfinder .

I think it'd be cool to have a legendary showcase every week, where a Blizzard employee highlights a legendary currently in standard and talks about it's use and synergies etc. and then during that week you can buy it for like $5. Blizzard would still be able to bathe in money and it would give players a small window to get exactly the legendary they wanted for about the price of 2 packs. That or have a legendary pre-order pack: one pack that contains only legendaries for like $20 or something.

I'd still rather just get 2 more cards per pack and be guaranteed at least 5 common, 1 rare, and 1 golden card. Statistically, that'd put you very close to getting all non-legendary cards after dusting the gold cards you don't want from the pre-order bundle.

Sorry for the crap photo editing, I'll fix this card up when I get home.

I spend about $100 per expansion on this game and I still feel like I can only really play one class competitively. It's ridiculous, at $300/yr I should be able to expect a complete set of cards to choose from, not almost half.

Why do I only see 10 cards?

I don't really see many bonemares anymore. Maybe it's because the new expansion has people experimenting, but even as the first decks emerge from the forge I'm seeing maybe 2 bonemares in a day of matches. Even keleseth has only shown up 3 times in my last 40 or so games.

Now if I had a dollar for every time I heard "Surrender your will to the kabal~" I'd have more gold cards than Kripp.

I think the deck has enough control/dragons, I'd take out Hoarding Dragon for The Darkness to help ensure you win against other Razakus Priests (shuffles duplicates into their deck so raza/kazakus won't work).

Hoarding Dragon would actually help your opponent more often than not unless they've got an empty hand.

Yeah I agree with Void Ripper on Warlock, as you know. It's even a demon so you get to revive it with guldan!

Warlock has a really awesome kit right now and I'll be burning a ton of dust to catch up on warlock legendaries when the new set launches this week.