What I mean is that with the way combat works, and with the game so focused on minions, your opponent will probably have a way of killing a minion if he really wants to, unless he's completely out of options. He might not be able to do it efficiently, but there's usually a way. The reason I brought this up, is that this makes it difficulty to rely on anything actually staying in play. So it's worthless to have, say, a 1/1 minion costing 3 mana with some interesting global or activated effect (something quite common in MtG), because it'll die instantly. I suppose one way would be to make it like 0/7 like Doomsayer, but that's kind of a clunky solution.
The point is, you can actually put a lot of interesting effects on minions (or on weapons, for that matter), but the high lethality of the game makes it difficult to actually build decks around these.
Yes in the Heartstone you shouldn't build a deck, that would depend on some creature staying on the board more than one turn. That is just asking for a disaster. And that is the reason why minions, which ability you could properly make use of on the same turn as you played them, are popular. But some creature are better at surviving than others. It is as you said high amount of HP for the turn they supposed to be played or stealth ability. And Warlock actually had 1/1 minion with stealth that gave every minion one the board 1 HP. But since the effect was too powerful, especially when Warlock drawn both of them at the start, it was nerfed and now has 0 attack and buff an other minion on 1 HP at the end of the turn. It still used, but Warlocks sometimes prefer neutral minion with the same effect, but with 2 attack and without stealth.
Also by choosing when to play particular minion you could maximize the chances, that it would survive, by playing it when it is unlikely for your enemy to have a way to kill it or forcing him to use his means to kill this minion on your other minions before playing it.
There is one interesting exception of it, which is 0/4 legendary for 2 mana. Having 4 health on turn 1 or 2 helps it to survive longer. But also enemy could decide not to kill it on purpose and make use of this card himself. Still this card is mostly for fun, than for practical purpose.
Really? So they're allright with, say, Warlocks having lower representation at higher levels than Rogues? That would be a departure from their typical policies.
Not if Blizzard decide, that Rogues are way to strong and nerf them or Auctioneer.
Warlocks actually were much more popular than Rogue until very recently, but were replaced by them without any help from Blizzard.
Priests were very strong way back then. If you look at the posts on this thread in October or November, you see people saying that they rather concede right away than would play with this fuckers, but after they were nerfed more than half year ago, they almost dissapeared from the top ranks as very few people plays there with them. And these people do it for fun, since Priest has some interesting combos and Shadow Priest deck is pretty unique, and not because they care to be in the top 5/10/15 players. Still this could change, since new Priest card is quite strong and with new cards some Priest's spells like Silence or Mass Silence could turn out to be useful.
Paladins died out several months ago without any nerfs from Blizzard. And since then Blizzard nerfed them even more by making their secrets completely useless.
Frost Mages were also nerfed half year ago and weren't played for a long time. But now it looks like they regain popularity without any help from Blizzard, since now plenty of people playing as Miracle Rogue and Frost Mage is a best counter to this deck.
The only time on my memory, when they buffed someone, was the buff of HUnters. But they did it after overnerfing the whole class. Also with this buff they managed to make it even more powerfull than before, so they nerfed them again.
It won't be developed further, because it needs to stay as casual as possible, so more people play it. Unlike paid CCGs, which survive on each fan spending (a lot of) money on the game, Hearthstone needs a large playerbase, so the 1% of paying players are able to sustain its existence.
But in the same time Heartstone have nothing for tieing players to itself and force them to play it, when they already lost most of interest to the game. Even the ones, who spent money on it, most likely didn't spent them enough for regreting about stopping playing it. At least I can't imagine on what you could spent more than few hundreds $, since with that money one should already had all the cards that he nee. So it should or constantly adding a new players or offering something new when things would became too static.
With spare mana, I summon a totem. Happens to be the Air Totem that boosts spell damage.
