No land flood or land lock. It was super frustrating in MTG
Blizzard can actually change stats of cards, so the game will be more balanced. While in MTG if they have overpowered card it will become staple. In MTG they can only make slightly better / slightly worse “clone cards” but only in next card pack, which is every half year or so.
And it’s much cheaper than MTG. Also there are no good modern MTG games.
All Duels of the Planeswalkers series on Steam suck and not true MTG, and MTG:O looks too outdated like it’s game from 90′s (and too expensive, too)

It would be good if before the picking process you could specify what sort of deck you were looking to build – spellpower, slow, beatdown, etc. It could then offer you cards which suited that playstyle.

It would also be good if there was an increased chance to draw combos – like for example if you have starving buzzard in a hunter deck you might have an increased chance to draw unleash the hounds.

I’m sure more modes are coming but they’ll wait for expansions and the ‘Adventures’ to release them.

It’s a deep game based on easily-graspable building blocks. The game carefully helps you learn because all the basics are there, visible, clear and you can work it all out. You can put it all together, and you can do in short bouts.

Chance plays a part, but with such short games, and such freedom to experiment without any real blockers, is what leads to the elegance.

That’s why I don’t like Magic or various other card games. There are a lot of building blocks that put the game together. Even Netrunner has got a lot of nuance that flows out of the rules, and then even more out of how the rules and decks interact. In Hearthstone, the basic rules are very very simple, so you have to focus on how to put the decks together and then how to play what you get in front of you. And you build your deck not to do just one thing, but to provide you with a few strong options depending on the draw.

It kind of now makes me think of Summoner Wars again, which is probably one of my favourite card games, again because it relies on simple building blocks and lets the player evolve the complexity from the deck and their actions (it has a tactical aspect for being played on a grid where positioning and movement matters).

So yeah, Hearthstone – rather neat.

The main issue with arena is the pick mode basically funnels every deck into a very specific model whereby you are unable to create any sort of interesting themed decks as you can’t rely on the other half of your combo coming up in the draw. Therefore you’re encouraged to pick hard removal or standard minions over some of the more interesting cards which homogenises play-styles quite a lot. It also makes combo dependent classes (hunter, rogue) much poorer choices than classes with more flexibility such as the mage. What I would like to see instead is a list of all 30 choices in advance so you can play with deck builds before committing. Easy to present in a 3×30 column but obviously isn’t as casual friendly.