I am enjoying this expansion although my time in Vanilla was extremely small. I could not imagine playing with out many of the new fantastic cards. I have seen so many a beautiful thing as well and so much I want to try myself.Still, as a newer player with minimal vanilla time, I really wish I could set arena to give me Vanilla packs instead of always GvG ones.Speaking of, today was my very first arena 12 win key. Was so beautiful and the excitement abounded as I brought home 2 packs and nearly 390 gold.
I really like the new expansion, though I am finding my win/loss ratio getting significantly worse as I play more of the expansion, simply because I'm going F2P. I know, card games are by nature Pay-to-Win, but it's reached the point where I simply cannot keep up with most other players who have invested money into the expansion. They have all the good cards, I don't. It's a stupid thing to complain about, but I find myself being put off Hearthstone because I rarely win any games due to my old cards not being a match for better GvG cards.
I am a f2p player as well, some days are much worse than others running into opposing decks with game changing Legen wait for it daries.... I actually find it much easier to win in ranked play ( I usually only play a few games every other day for dailies so I hover around 15th rank) than to win in casual mode. I use low cost minions and try to rush people down(warlock, hunter, druid, pally), win or lose it usually happens quickly, so I can play another game sooner rather than later.
Slightly nitpicky, but aren't honorable mentions for when the thing in question didn't make the cut? (Harvest Golem was mentioned in the previous sentence, so he did make the cut)
I know I've been extremely unlucky in my opponents recently, who all seem to have the 'best' decks available. It is perfectly possible to have fun playing F2P, just less so than the people who swipe their credit card and instantly get all the cards they need. Practically all I see nowadays are the same copy-pasted decks (control warrior, handlock etc), and the induction of GvG only makes most of these decks stronger. For someone who can't get cards anywhere nearly as easily as those who pay (or those who play Arena, which I hate due to the fact that winning is almost entirely based on getting a good draft rather than actually playing well), I find Hearthstone to be extremely frustrating.Mind you, I hate most F2P models in general due to people who pay money having a large advantage, and Hearthstone is no exception from that. Meh :\
I agree it can be frustrating. I was able to minimize that to some degree by stockpiling my gold for a while before GvG dropped, so I was able to buy about 25 packs right from day one. Still, I have only one legendary to my name and it is Hemet Nessingwary, which is only useful against decks with big beasts in them. The real advantage to spending money is that you can accelerate your win chance because it accelerates your card acquisition. Remember that most of your daily quests can be completed in Casual mode as well as Ranked. Casual mode tends to have more creative decks, but also seems to have a less skilled player pool overall. Plus, if a game is going poorly, there's much less of a penalty to conceding, since all you lose is the time already invested in that match. If you grind out 4-5 daily quests in a week, you should be getting 2-300 gold, or 2-3 packs. I stay away from arena usually, since the rewards are less consistent.
My experience since GVG has come out is worse than before. That mech mage deck is all I see and it is way better than any crappy minion deck I can cobble together on my money challenged account. But its not just the mech mage deck it is any deck. The game is so focused on minions now its hard to do anything with the not so good minions. My normal daily play will be lose to mech mage, then handlock, then control priest, then maybe a paladin that has quarter master muster for battle. Then to top it off, some random deck with good legendary cards.Some days are much worse than others. I still like the game it just gets really frustrating some days. I think the worst part is, having to play any of the 9 classes at any time to get a daily done, so its not like I can concentrate on one class and then win all my dailies that way.