Is it required? Well, it depends on how valuable your time is to you. Several experienced HS streamers have done new f2p acct-> legend in a few week’s time, but hearthstone is their full-time job, so I don’t really consider that a fair comparison to normal players.
Now, Blizzard has also done well in eliminating several of the more popular (and powerful) free-to-play decks through the years by nerfing (and rotating) certain key classic and basic cards, and also by introducing new cards that are effectively “hate” cards towards certain builds (like Face Hunter, which was a notoriously inexpensive and brutal deck to craft back in the day). And they’ve bent over backwards to remove powerful neutral legendaries (and other key cards) that used to work in a huge number of diverse decks. They’re trying to do away with the Rag/Dr Boom/Sylvanas’ of the world, by making so f2p players have to craft a much larger number of class legendaries (of which most only work in one specific type of deck anyway (hello legendary quests, and upcoming Death Knight cards), further eliminating their utility) in order to have a variety of viable decks to play.
So, I guess if you’re trying to decide if the money is worth spending, it really just depends on how much time you want to put in the game. I mean, 30 wins a day gets you 100 gold (enough for a pack a day), and that’s on top of daily quests. But 30 wins also takes all freaking day to pull off.
As for me, I pay cash for every adventure, and I pre-order every new expansion when they’re made available. I spent my first year as a strictly free-to-play player, but I am in no way competitive, and simply want to have a lot of fun with a huge variety of cards, and spending what amounts to 12 dollars a month (50x3 expansions a year, used to be less expensive before they eliminated adventures) for instant gratification is certainly worth it to me.
Here’s the thing though, simply pre-ordering the expansion will in no way give you all the cards you want. You still gotta grind if you want all the best epics and legendaries. Epics are the biggest problem here. I typically get every common and rare through the pre-order packs (well, maybe 98% of them), a handful of epics, and typically 3-4 legendaries. But unfortunately (for me, the non-competitive wacky fun-seeking type), the latest expansions are designed in a way where all the funnest and most interesting cards are locked behind Epic rarities.
