Is Hearthstone really Pay 2 Win ? Decide for yourself.

[Seminko]

I feel like I have to strenghten my point by saying that Pay2Win, does not mean that if you pay a certain amount of money you win every game against a person who did not pay. Pay2Win is, at least for me, an advantage that COULD (not will, but could) help you win against a player of the same skill level if you pay. And that's exactly what HearthStone is.

Back to my point with Arena in WoW. If you could buy all the gear by real money, it would be considered pay to win, even though you could get ALL THE ITEMS without paying the money and skilled players would still beat unskilled players who bought stuff for dollars, it is still pay to win as it's giving you an advantage over other players if you spend money.

And I feel I have to write this over and over again, but I'm not saying that is a bad thing, or an unusual thing or a thing that needs to be changed.

[PresentS]

Your usage of pay2win is pretty hilarious. It means you get an advantage which you can ONLY buy, and NEVER EVER obtain. There's no point saying things such as buying powerleveling, buying gear is pay2win, because it's not something that is within the game; it is an external purchase. Pay2win doesn't exist here either, you can still obtain everything, just slower... and also skill will always be worth more than 'gear' (cards in this case - take a look at any high rank raiding guild, if you were in a top guild last expansion or w/e, they WILL take you because you have skill, even if you were in quest greens)

I refer to these kind of games as pay2enjoy, but anyway, if you're good at the game via arena, it pays for itself and then some. Whoever will call this pay2win obviously never wants to play arena, and has never played another card game, hell, you can spend 10x that on MTG or Yu-Gi-Oh cards just to get a deck that is tournament worthy. Here there isn't so many things that makes each card more op than others, sure in certain cases there is, but not to the extent of Magic or Yu-Gi-Oh (like for example in Yu-Gi-Oh you can easily get 400 atk/200 def monsters with no effect, making them really really useless, here even 1/1 creatures are effective, albeit not so much but early pressure is good)

[Forinris]

This game is not pay to win at all, It's more like, Pay early game, get an advantage, But after a few months paying money will not equal auto rape.. Since free players will have all the cards for an awesome deck that can counter people who bought cards.

[monkeyjoe]

I am not sure HS is really pay to win. I accept your point about buying a full set of heroic raid gear making things easier. But even in a full set of heroic raid gear you're not going to instantly win... certainly not an end of tier boss. If Blizzard sold a full set of end game pvp gear / gems / enchants, there's no way in hell you could faceroll a Glad title. You're speeding up the process of getting to the hard part.

I play a cool little game on my cell phone called Arcane Legends. Perfect smoke break entertainment. It is 100% P2W. You can buy their coins to buy better gear and so on which speeds up the gearing process but doesn't buy you the win. What makes it pay to win are the potions you can buy. You can spam health pots and beat any mob or boss in the game. If you somehow screw that up, you can buy their version of a battle rez. The quantities of the pot and rezzes you would require to make this a viable strategy are only going to be obtainable by buying them. That's pay to win.

[TommyT]

you could have every single card in the game and build a solid deck
then lose to a murlock deck with 1 legendary

[GrgoljBlaster]

It always depends on luck of the draw and (more likely) on player's ability to use those card properly. If a player flashes the cards just in sake of showing off, he probably won't get too far.