I think it's all about supporting mobile devices. I love Hearthstone and play nearly every day, but I play exclusively on tablet (mostly iPad, but I temporarily had to use a cheap android for a couple of months). I'd play on PC if I could, but my netbook would never be able to run it, and my family can't afford a better one. I've been playing for almost a year and a half, and I've had my share of problems from time to time. Whenever the board gets too full, or too many spell animations have played the game gets really laggy, and most of the time this happens the app crashes. There were more than a few times that I was about to win with a massive Patron turn and end up losing due to disconnect. The Unstable Portal brawl was the only one a never managed to finish a game in (although I got my packs by persisting until my opponent conceded in early game to bad RNG). Sometimes, I don't crash, but the lag is so bad that Nozdormu might as well be out. I think that adding the things you want might simply be too taxing on low-end systems, and would lead to problems like I've detailed becoming more widespread and mobile players leaving the game out of frustration. Another problem could just be about the file size getting too big. My wife played for about four months last year, right up until TGT. Then she could no longer fit it on her iPad with all of the apps she actually needed for work. As much as some players might complain about mobile players making it so they can't have nice things, Hearthstone would not be nearly as big as it is without players like me.
You have a great point on the real. If the game gets more complicated, the fun simplicity to the game would be lost and so would fans as well. I'm sure Blizzard knows it though, the quote they put up in ads is "deceptively simple, insanely fun". No matter what the game's dope still
I think multi-targetting could be done easily enough. One way would be to have all the targets be presented to you like the cards in Discover. You then click on the ones you want to target and click DONE.Complexity isn't necessarily the only reason they went with the choices they did, though. The element of randomness is a big part of Hearthstone. The unpredictability can increase the fun and the tension involved with playing a card like .
Interesting video on Forbidden Shaping. I noticed that everyone on the Angry Chicken reckoned it, along with the other two, were pretty bad but Spacewizard isn't the only commentator who seems to be quite enamoured with it.