Game is also extremely hard as fuck to follow for a spectator. I had no idea what the hell was going on or who was winning in that video posted above.
This, combined with the extremely pay-heavy pricing scheme will ensure the game remains a niche game with only a cult following, like Hex, shadowverse, gwent, elder scrolls, and magic online. No way will it ever see hearthstone numbers.
I was interested in trying it out until i watched that video and saw how needlessly complicated it is, and that its completely pay to win (fuck whoever above said it isnt).
Pay to win definition varies from people to people based on how much of an advantage you get, and how much you have to pay. For many people, HS is pay to win because you sure can't get all the legendaries you need to make most of the meta decks and have a good shot without paying some money or playing arena a fucking long time, while being good at it. For others it isn't because you can play the arena, or just do the daillies and eventually buy shit slowly until you get that one deck and while you can't play all the other decks, it's fine, or they play the cheapest available deck in the current meta instead(although the old zoo decks that used to cost jackshit aren't nearly as strong atm so not sure what they play).
Fact is, you have to pay to even play at all in this, so to an extent, you'll always have to pay to win. You could in theory sell all your shit you don't need, then buy all the shit you need with the money and play the deck. Works like dusts in HS, but if the economy isn't fucked, at a much more advantageous rate(sell an epic card, buy an epic card at roughly the same price, so 1:1, minus the steam tax, while HS is like, 4:1 or 8:1 I forgot). But you'll probably have to put in some money to start with for a decent base of cards to sell to buy the shit you want, so yeah. But starting HS fresh nowadays sounds like fucking shit too, you'd be better off playing one of the other card games that are a lot better about giving free shit(Eternal and Shadowverse iirc are the 2 decent ones).
As for the spectator thing, I don't know, it's just something to get used to? I mean the popularity of the game will determine if it makes a good game to watch. It didn't seem that complicated for the basics, 3boards, bunch of hp, take the hp down to 0 by playing cards. The actual details are going to be arcane to anyone who hasn't played the game, because that's the nature of watching games. If you watch HS without knowing the cards, you don't know what the fuck is going on half the time because people spend like 1min doing nothing, then play 1-5cards in a row quickly as they're roping, and a bunch of shit happens at once. The only thing you can really tell if you don't know the cards is how many cards are on the board/in their hands and how much hp they have, and any insight the casters might give.
Ultimately, I'm not feeling like this'll be any good, but I'll keep an open mind for now. Need to see a few people play this shit before I say never.