So, I had been playing Hearthstone since Naxxramas and stopped shortly after the Rastakhan expansion because it had gotten kind of boring and I couldn't keep up without paying.
Switched to MTGA but am taking a breather from that too during this Kaldheim thingy (because vikings are dumb) and decided to check out what was going on in Blizzard land.
My impression is that the devs didn't learn a thing. I thought MTG had a rough year with Ikoria and Eldraine but the power creep seems insane. There's still combo decks that waste half of the play time with stupidly slow animations. They are still using random card generation whenever they run out of ideas. Did they really spent more than a year basically on autopilot or am I missing something?
TL,DR: Did Blizzard fix any of the frequent complaints about HS?
Short answer: No.
Long answer: The game is faster-paced, more combo and key-card dependent, and less creative/fun than it was when it was released. Just like in MTGA, it's basically impossible to win without the right super-rare cards on hand. The one thing that keeps me going is the fact that the freemium model doesn't require me to go out-of-pocket. I get enough in-game gold / free packs to maintain a competitive collection. Finding competitive decks online is fairly easy (there's rarely more than one or two per class). And as a phone-game, it's reasonably quick to load and fairly stable, so I can bang out a game or two over lunch without trouble.
If MTGA had been a thing a few years earlier, I'd probably have stuck with that rather than this. I definitely like online card games more than physical card games, as maintaining a collection doesn't take up a shelf in my house. But I generally like MTG more than Hearthstone.
That's what frustrated me, the game felt more railroady as it went on. The most fun thing in CCGs for me is discovering an iteraction you never thought of before and trying it out.
It might be a fun phone game if I can resist the impulse to grind for some stupid legendary that will most definetly suck.