It isn't designed to prod you into spending much before level 40 precisely because they want you to form the daily habit, the investment first. Whales are harder to create now that awareness of gacha is more mainstream. Make no mistake, you'll feel the pull to swipe soon, do report back about whether you decided to quit or pay in a few weeks.
And my golden rule of thumb, you either spend 0 in microtransaction, or at least 1000$, almost never in between since usually this game is designed with additional content that will dangling your carrot further and further, needing more and more money.
That's silly. I've spent like $40 in Hearthstone over the last 5-6 years. And I know a lot of people like that. It's not "all or nothing", plus there's a sense of fairness when you really like a f2p game, to spend something out of appreciation. (Although in general I'll cap my own spending to the price of a typical AAA game, e.g. $60, because otherwise I feel stupid and taken advantage of.)
Back in the earliest days of Hearthstone, control warrior was more colloquially known as “wallet warrior” due to how expensive it was to craft all the epics and legendaries needed to fill out the meta deck. And yet, it wasn’t the best deck in the game. Depending on when exactly we’re talking about, that title belonged to decks like miracle rogue (two legendaries but only Leeroy was truly core) or combo druid (zero legendaries iirc, possibly Cenarius). And then you had incredibly cheap aggro decks like zoo warlock that could still compete at the highest ranks.
By the time I quit HS at the beginning of this year, the “cheap” aggro decks generally cost about as much as old miracle rogue and nearly all the non-aggro top meta lists were at least in the same ballpark as a deck formerly considered so expensive it was nicknamed wallet warrior.
The game has definitely gotten dramatically more expensive for anyone looking to branch outside the aggro archetype. What turned me off enough to finally quit were the yearly tweaks to monetization that kept being sold as a good thing but were obviously just further efforts at obfuscating the cost of playing.
- played since beta, sunk a couple grand into ranked standard, maintained legend or dad legend (rank 5) every month for years. Idk if I’m a whale, but the predatory practices finally reached a head
