A disclaimer first: I'm only going to talk about the (in-game) economical implication of changes Blizzard has made over the years, not if they were needed, good or bad from a gameplay perspective.
The Dust System
Ironically I'll start with something Blizzard hasn't changed since release.
| Rarity | Crafting Cost | Disenchant Reward |
|---|---|---|
| Legendary | 1600 | 400 |
| Epic | 400 | 100 |
| Rare | 100 | 20 |
| Common | 40 | 5 |
When disenchanting cards, you only get back between 12,5%-25% of their crafting cost. This means for every legendary you want to craft, you need to disenchant 4 others, 16 epics, 80 rares or 320 commons. This system was implemented when Classic was the only set in the game. But with the amount of new cards coming out every year, this should have been updated years ago.
Another thing Blizzard has not touched since release are the drop rates: At least 1 rare per pack (or better), 1 epic every 5 packs, 1 legendary every 20 packs on average with a pity timer of 10 packs for epics and 40 for legendaries. Same thing, should have been looked at years ago.
Content Release Schedule
The frequency of content releases heavily influences the amount of gold you can accumulate between expansions. Let's take a look how things have changed over the years:
2014-2016
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Ignoring the first year, we had 3 expansions released per year ever since 2015. The difference back then was that adventures and pack based expansions alternated. This had major upsides for the average player: You had 8 months between pack based expansions which you could use to either bolster your collection or save up for the upcoming release. You could get all meta relevant cards guaranteed for 2800 gold. For a F2P player this was amazing, bar the fact that if you joined way after an adventure was released and wanted just one specific card, you still had to pay 700 gold per wing because Blizzard made those cards not craftable. Still a small price to pay in my opinion.
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With the first expansion of 2016, Whispers of the Old Gods, came the introduction of the standard rotation. Probably needed for the health of the game, it resulted in a hefty increase in cost for the playerbase. You lose half your playable cards every year, which means if you skip an expansion or don't play much for a longer period of time, you fall behind. A lot. You only have to look at the huge amount of players dusting their rotating cards each year despite the fact that they only get about 20% of crafting value in return, just to be able to keep up.
2017-2018
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In 2017, Blizzard got rid of adventures and started releasing 3 pack based expansions per year. Now we always have 4 months per expansion to accumulate gold. They also promised to add PvE content for free with future expansions.
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2018 didn't change anything, though Rhastakan's Rumble was the last expansion with free PvE content.
2019
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With Rise of Shadows, PvE content is now has a cost attached to it (either gold or $), but doesn't reward any unique cards (except for one promotional card most players hoped to dust anyway)
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With Descent of Dragons that changed. The corresponding adventure was now released a month later, containing unique cards that were playable in constructed, priced the same as former adventure expansions at 2800 gold. Hearthstone's first "mini - set".
2020
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PvE content is now free again, such as Illidan's campaign in Ashes or the monthly Book of Heroes.
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Starting with Darkmoon Faire, 35 card mini-sets will launch at the halfway point each expansion going forward. Those cards will be added to the corresponding expansion's packs and will be craftable on launch day. For me at least, this change made me stop opening packs after I had every common and rare card on expansion launch which felt really, really bad.
TL;DR, we went from alternating between adventures and pack expansions to 3 pack expansions per year with additional mini-sets released in between.
Cards per expansion
Epics
Not much has changed here. Between GvG and DoD, you pretty much always had 2 unique epics per class + 9 unique neutral epics. Ever since the introduction of Demon Hunter, neutral epics have been reduced to 3 per expansion.
Legendaries
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GvG: 1 Legendary per class + 11 Neutral = 20 in total
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TGT: 1 Legendary per class (2 for Hunter) + 10 Neutral = 20 in total
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WOG: 1 Legendary per class + 12 Neutral = 21 in total
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MSoG: 1 Legendary per class + 3 Tri Class + 8 Neutral = 20 in total
Up until here, things have been pretty stable. With Journey to Un'Goro though, they started adding 2 legendaries per class to every set.
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UG - DoD: 2 Legendaries per class + 5 neutrals = 23 in total
With the addition of Demon Hunter, 2 Legendaries were added to the total.
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AoO - DMF: 2 Legendaries per class + 5 neutrals = 25 in total
In conclusion: In my opinion, you can't overstate how big of a change it was to introduce two class specific legendaries per expansion. Not only are most legendaries now restricted to one class, they more likely than not push one specific archtype for that class. If you lack the supporting cards for said archtype, you either craft those or your legendary card has no use to you as a player. Though some neutral powerhouses still come up here and there, their use is rather limited in today's game which leans way more into class specific synergies.
The most likely scenario when opening packs at launch is this: You open around 60 packs, get 2 or 3 class legendaries and you can't build any deck around them.
Other
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Nerfs: This might be controversial but in my opinion, regular nerfs do indead increase the games cost. Yes, you can refund the nerfed cards for their full dust cost but those cards don't exist in a vacuum. Let's take Gala Shaman as an example. After the nerfs the class as a whole was pretty much not playable at a reasonable level in standard. Any Shaman cards you may have crafted for that deck are now useless.
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Events: It may be my personal bias but it feels like events nowadays are happening more in the shop than they do ingame. Where we used to get double gold or gold/dust rewards, you now get at best 6 packs, 4 of which are from old expansions.
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Achievements: Linking those that award XP to cards the current expansion. Usually the more XP, the higher the card rarity.
Blizzard's solutions so far
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Tavern Brawl added around 50 Classic packs per year - introduced mid 2015
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Duplicate protection on legendaries - introduced with KFT in 2017
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1 Legendary in your first 10 packs rule also introduced with KFT
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Free Legendary on expansion launch, starting with Death Knights in KFT
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40 gold daily quests now give 50 gold instead - introduced with WW in 2018
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Duplicate protection on all rarities introduced with AoO in 2020
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Reworked Ranked reward, also introduced with AoO in 2020
Those are great changes and I am happy they were implemented. Because of the last duplicate protection change, I was able to finish my classic set without crafting epics and legendaries I don't need after playing since beta. Yay!
But looking at this whole list, I feel they aren't nearly enough. Hearthstone has been in need of an economy overhaul for years and I hoped the new reward structure was gonna be just that. Well, it was some kind of overhaul, but certainly not for the better. In fact it has been so bad, some players wish for the old system to return which was already atrocious.
Kibler also mentioned the free decks for new players which I don't think you can use in an argument about the general cost of the game. Those have literally no effect on the consistently active user. As for the "free" Demon Hunter cards, they didn't really have much of a choice when introducing a new class to the game. Imagine if you had to pay to have access to those.
Anyways, thank you for reading through this wall of text. If you have anything to add or correct me on, feel free to do so!
