i have yet to download this game. can a person get good at this game as a free player or does it require purchses to compete ? can you enjoy the game as a free player, or is it simply not possible w/out investing some $$

and is it fun ? seems like its been around for awile

`It depends on what you want to get out of it and how much time you want to put into it.

You can grind arena and the daily quests and accumulate gold and probably put together a competitive deck in a reasonably short amount of time.

Doing this is a lot of fun and might be all you want from it. There are tons of people who never get much past this stage and still play almost every day.

There are a couple of competitive decks-- midrange hunter, quest rogue -- that don't require too many expensive cards (Quest Rogue requires 2 legendaries). Pirate Warrior only requires 1 legendary; Token Druid can basically be built for free (you'll need a wing of Karazhan).

If you want to grind to legend then you'll probably have to put some money into the game at some point.

txs, might give it a try

I've played for free ever since I started. Have a good time playing it too fiww.

If you want to put like $50 into it might help you make a competitive deck faster.

You can go the free to play route but it is a bit of a grind. I am free to play and have all the cards for all competitive decks and a lot of dust left.
I did start to play in the late beta and grinded a lot of arena though.

First 6 months I just collected while trying to get as high rank as possible. It was at least a month before I could play anything good, but I made a lot of really, really stupid decisions.

Leveling up all classes gets you some crazy amount of gold, plus a few other easy quests. Playing arena I think you could get 1 viable deck in a few weeks if you're willing to dust a lot of things.

From there just hit rank 5 every month and you get a lot of dust from dailies. Hitting rank 5 is just a function of time and effort and having a decent deck (at first, but you'll learn that r5 is trivially easy with just about any deck in the game). That's how I did it. It wasn't until I started playing seriously that I spent a lot of money on this game. It's not really necessary (except the adventures, buy that for sure) unless you want to get things fast. Like, for me, I want to be competitively viable in the first week of an expansion. That usually involves dumping some money. If I wait, I can probably go a few weeks and collect dust and see what's good and spend more efficiently.

oh yea, and you get a lot of value early on from the classic set. get classic packs first. then dust the garbage (this will be hard to gauge at first, do some research)

yeah, same here, arena used to be super easy in beta, you could easily avarege 6-7 wins if you were not completely terrible. These days I probably wouldn't bother with trying to build f2p collection, too much of a grind.

This hunter deck has a 54%+ win rate and costs only 960 (!!!) dust: https://hsreplay.net/decks/650AcJIp5lOgn8zU41qFif/

The only card from an adventure in there is kindly grandmother, which going by the stats is one of the better cards in the deck but can pretty easily be replaced by another 2-drop beast like golakka crawler/dire wolf alpha/ ravasaur

Yeah that embodies the simple core a hunter needs to be successful. Hunter is easily the best choice to grind if you are just starting out and are f2p.

I pay to play and I'm not any good

Ive hit legend a few times and Im free 2 play. It is a huge grind though, but for the right price, it doesnt have to be.

Spend enough to make a pirate warrior deck and you can get legend without knowing what you are doing.

Watch disguisedtoast on Twitch. This month he started a new account and is playing a hunter deck from 0. He's reached lvl 2 last night and is trying to hit legend.

yup

he did it

I played casuals and to lvl20 or so about six months. I had some 1k dust by then, and cards of course (and I could have dusted many no duplicates also to get more dust, but I have enough for now), that I added to my character decks one by one when I got something better.

The path to there was somewhat a frustration, but as I got better cards, decks, I won more often in casual games. The rated/ranked games even at lvl23 and so, usually face too strong decks to be but to a lvl20 grind, using the best decks one has.

Soon after that, I built a Hunter deck to the direction as recommended, e.g. at metastats.net (though the Druid deck try, as I had most of the cards it seems, was a complete loser with too many small minions without enough supports to make it to work; it seems to be number 1 deck at this time at the top level meta, but I am sure it is complete junk that never works for me even if it works for others when I don't get any taunts, any removal cards and overall draw the long shot wrong cards from the deck during the whole game, then it runs me over, as it is a fast deck). The Hearthpwn.com is a well known site and you will also see what decks the top players use in the next big competition if you follow the news or so there as they will give the deck list.

Hunter did the best even when I was just buying mostly expert packs with gold (and the 10 welcome packs that I bought with 5 e - after 20 or 30 packs one rarely gets a useful expert card, just getting dust), but it had some expansion packs' cards also. Plus a couple of strong finishers, as one needs to have something harder to remove in one way or the other if one is to finish the games with a win.

During times of the new expansion packs, one gets some free packs by logging in, like 11th this month. Different kind of promotions or so and one gets all kinds of things next to free, that helps in getting cards and dust. I got at least half of my dust like that.

I don't play Arena, and won't, but they just forced me to, so I played all regions and got 3 packs each, plus 3 more a day ago by logging on (6 total, about no useful cards though, but one legendary, and one might now get one after the 10th pack latest, from these new expansions, though the 1st Gods pack will have one legendary, that is worth getting as one gets 400 dust per legenday, and yes, I have many legendaries but haven't so far dusted any of them).

The top players don't seem to play Hunter, so I haven't made it fully a top deck, just to that direction (with a little more dust I could make it maybe near top level, needing to double some cards I have and see if that already close to covers it), but I might have it as one of my competitive decks in the future, like the 3rd or 4th deck, or even higher if it becomes more competitive in the future.

The good about Hunter, Mage, Warlock is that there is a shot at winning with them without superior decks, and this could stay so more likely than with other characters. But I don't have enough cards of them yet and not exactly sure how I should build the Warlock. They just do okay in casual games, needing a major upgrade of cards to make them top level, and not sure if they in the current or future meta will be among the top decks that one should rather be using.

Warrior, Pirate warrior and its variations, that I build to about a complete top deck, counting out just a couple of cards (at this time, and they are mostly not that much better than what I have instead), as I had a lot of the cards and the rest didn't cost me too much (e.g. my Hunter and Warrior builds cost me some 450 dust, to the top of the cards I already had).

Pirate warrior is a fast deck and is used also by top players (seems to be the top 4 even at this time, and even a bit better lower and medioum levels, it seems). It is not true that it is a brainless deck, as I had more trouble to play it IN than with Hunter. The most learning I needed with Priest, but it also became mainly routine with little experience.