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HS is the League of Legends to Magic the Gathering's Dota and I feel it's important to make this comparison because the first thing a lot of people will think when they see or hear about HS is "gee this seems a lot like Magic".

Like magic you take turns drawing cards and summoning creatures and cast spells and try and turn your opponents life total to 0, but HS is a much more accessible game in basically every way. It takes about 5 seconds to learn the rules and it's free to play whereas high level magic tournaments require a team of judges because of how complex some of the rule subtleties are and a dedicated magic player could easily drop 500 a year on cards just making good standard and limited decks.

And it's fun! And it's colourful! And there's a pleasing way to how all the things interact and it's really easy to start playing and games feel about as fair and unpunishing as a Card game can be with the perfect level of pacing. Hearthstone is a tight well polished product and I can't recommend it highly enough!

Except, well...

You remember my analogy? It was only 2 paragraphs ago, the one about League of Legends? It's fairly apt. Hearthstone is a much shallower game compared to Magic. And for most people that's fine you won't particularly notice or care you can have a great time doing drafts or dueling your friends but for people who are looking for the beauty of complex game mechanics and multilayered decision making and planning and finding weird ways to achieve victory then you're not going to find it within this game. It's a fun puzzle but not one you'll likely spend much time on.

Oh and as for the Pay to Win factor, it's actually pretty damn good. I slung about 25 bucks at it and don't particularly feel the need to spend more. Part of it is the crafting system to unmake cards you don't want to make cards you do but for me it's mostly Arena. The Arena is a pay to enter challenge option where you craft a deck by choosing a bunch of cards at random and face off against other players who have done the same. If you win 9 games or lose 3, whichever happens first, your run is over and blizzard hands you rewards, and at ~7 wins it's enough to actually pay back your entry fee plus extra.

Basically what this means is that a skilled player can play for hours and hours without having to pay extra, which means the game encourages people to actually improve and master it's systems and for a Free to Play game to actually do that is a really positive move by Blizzard.

HS is currently in beta but I don't really see them adding that many more features or cards to it before release. After release I foresee them making stupid amounts of money and many more cards. Best of luck to the new Blizzard money printing engine; something has to fund Starcraft tournaments!