So, aside from "happy xmas" and all that, I play Hearthstone as well..... of course, without paying a single cent ;p
Arena is 100% fair (no bought cards etc) and gets you MAJOR rewards even with just 1 win, so your goal should always be to go for Arena (150 gold) If you want to full 150 gold back, you gotta win 7 times though, but normally you get a card pack, gold, and dust from the first win (which is more important than gold, as you can craft the cards you *need* to have a good deck in normal ranked play ;p)
Secondly, you want to first get all the Achievement stuff. Each of em are worth 100 gold...
Thirdly, dailies.. you can stack up to 3 of them, and you should do that if you are not feeling like grinding... also you can "cancel and reroll" a daily you got once per day. With 3 stacked dailies, and a few wins in unranked you will have those 150 gold for Arena, which is the main drive of the game for me. Arena is insanely fun 
So basically, this game is not pay to win. The only thing money defines here is how much you can play Arena.
In ranked mode decks are very predictable, in Arena they aren't. The 2 limit for a card is not active in Arena, so you can have 5 of one of card, if you draw them in the random draw that is
Basically, Hearthstone is my "an hour a day" fun game atm. Even though it's from Blizzard... the micro payment is nearly irrelevant. And unlike MTG you can craft cards here, which is a HUGE boon to compliment a deck in unranked/ranked or create new tactics.
So, this game is better than MTG, and has none of it's absurd randomness. You can redraw the first draw (And if you don't get a 1/2 card out of 4 in the first draw, your deck is badly balanced)
Rare thing to hear from me so.. this is fun.
I gotta say, I dont understand the bit about less randomness VS Magic.... if anything, it's about the same. It's still a card game, so your draws each turn are random, you still have the random opening hand, and yes, you can redraw the opening hand in Magic, the difference being that in Magic you redraw the entire hand minus one card, but you also have a larger starting hand in that one and can actually redraw more than once if need be.... lessee.... Hearthstone has actual card effects that have randomness within them, which as far as I know is pretty much non-existent in Magic, or at least has been nonexistent in all the years Iv'e been into it.... One way or another randomness is a huge part of TCGs as a whole, and constructing a deck in such a way as to reduce the effects of that randomness is always part of the challenge. In all honesty, I personally find that this game has MORE randomness than Magic most of the time. Random effects on cards themselves just bug the hell outta me, always have, always will. When I'm looking at cards to add to a deck, I want to know what that card WILL do and what options I WILL have with it when I use it.... I dont want to know just what it MIGHT do. There's a huge difference there.
As for Arena mode, yes, it's less expensive than something like a sealed deck tournament (or whatever) in Magic..... buuuuut, in one of those, you KEEP the cards you get out of the packs that you use in the tournament. And of course there are assorted variations of that theme, as well as other tournament types. In Arena, rewards are comparatively small and a bad run can leave you with not much at all. Winning 7 games is necessary to recoup the cost required for entry. If the player isnt doing that regularly, they'll either need to farm gold in constructed, or pay money. And on the note of randomness, Arena itself has a monstrous amount of it (just like any TCG event of this sort), which is pretty much what the mode is designed around.
Now that's not to say that Hearthstone isnt good, because it is. But as a longtime fan of M:TG, I had to say something there, heh.
While Magic still remains my favorite game of this type, I've been heartily enjoying Hearthstone and finding it quite great myself. .....particularly on nights when my dying modem is being an ass, as a bit of lag isnt going to wreck a match in a card game! But overall, it's very fun. I love the mechanics and how everything works, building decks for normal mode is fun, Arena is good too.... and for now at least, it's not terribly unbalanced, though there's a few issues in there.
I personally will end up playing a probably-equal combination of constructed and Arena. One problem I have with the game though: The absolutely dirt-slow pace of earning gold to buy packs with, combined with the absolute lack of any form of trading whatsoever.... this can make it really damn annoying to get cards that you want, for constructed. Yeah, there's the crafting, but it's screwy and making cards often takes about a bazillion Dust, while disenchanting them often gives you like .000000000001 Dust. Not fond of the crafting bit. And I'm not exactly the patient sort. So if I want to have more cards sometime this millennium, I do have to shell out some cash.
.....which for me isnt even a remote problem, but still, for those wanting to play constructed but on a tough budget, their card collection is going to grow VERY SLOWLY.
One way or another though, overall this game was totally worth the very aggravating wait for a beta invite. Been playing it for, hmm, 3 weeks now I think? Much to learn yet, but it's been a blast so far, and I like the class system. I love TCGs as a whole, and this is a darned good one.
