[personjerry]

Interesting criticisms, but I'd have to argue against most of your points here.

- You're right: card games inherently involve luck. But games like Hearthstone and MTG let you control your deck so that less luck is involved. And I would argue Hearthstone actually has the better model -- there's no way to get screwed out of mana or flooded with mana like in MTG.

- Card starvation exists, but is typically a problem with deck construction or gameplay rather than the game itself. Two ways about the problem in deck construction: more card draw, and bigger cards. Playing is more complicated, but consider keeping your options open rather than playing things immediately, since you can gain card advantage if you can 2-for-1. Consider the HandLock deck in which a warlock draws a huge hand to abuse abilities involving hand size. Rarely will their games go past 30 cards, and yet their hand is filled with options all the time.

- You are right, each class has but one or two competitive deck styles and are predictable. But knowing the meta is part of any card game, and I think as Hearthstone grows this will be better. Coming from MTG I found classes brought quite a variety of play styles (at least 9!), if somewhat unbalanced and artificial.

- Again you are right. This issue arises as a necessary consequence of classes. Blizzard has actively done this for balance. Cards outside class decks need to be generic or else they would make some decks too powerful in combos. For example I might want more spell power cards for my Druid deck but that would make Mage control decks unbelievably strong.

- This is a subjective point and your view is valid. IMHO their quest system is a pretty versatile option of getting gold. If you want you can play 2 games a day and earn 40 gold, or you can play 10 and earn 100, depending on the quest.

[gavanwoolery]

Good points :) The only thing I would make a note on is luck in card games: Some card games involve a lot more luck than others. One of my favorite iOS games, Orions, gives you a set of random cards (assuming you do a random match), and from there you play whatever cards you want (your full deck, basically, which is a random subset of about half the cards in the game). Of course, you have to build up enough mana to play a given card, and many increases by 1 each turn on its own. Its possible to be given a crappy deck, but even those matches you can play out more deterministically because you know what you've got to work with; also this is part of the fun - finding a creative path to victory with a deck that you are not used to (building decks can be fun in its own right, but I (personally) prefer being given a random set of cards - this makes each playthrough more unique and exciting).

In shorter words, there are a few types of luck you could work with: luck of the deck, luck of the draw, etc.