And yet, there's Hearthstone

This game by contrast, is designed with a very specific intention by a team of people that are clearly dedicated and LOVE their product.

The card design is flavourful and mostly balanced (I suppose Flamestrike comes to mind as one card that is a tad overpowered compared to others).

The game feels well tuned, the experience is enjoyable almost indefinitely. The game is damn good.

While there is a not insignificant potion of luck involved, there is a good amount of skill as well. In fact it could be argued that this game has a better luck/skill ratio than Magic the Gathering, by virtue of the simple fact that in Magic you have to roll a dice every turn to EITHER draw something you can use to affect the board and outcome of the game, OR you draw a land and do little to nothing that turn. In person you can bluff that you just drew a good card, but online this is not so. Furthermore, because players have access to hero powers, and because cards are very well balanced in Hearthstone (not all the case in Magic), games tend to be much more interactive with a healthy back and forth before someone claims victory.

Time will tell if Hearthstone is able to maintain this without resorting to power creep to keep people engaged. This is extremely telling in Magic the Gathering. Once upon a time a 2/2 for 2 passed the vanilla test. Then it became a 3/2 for 2, then a 3/3 for 2, then it gets haste or some other plus ability etc.

Cards in MTG have gotten so swingy that I wonder whether the starting hands need to be smaller and the starting life needs to be higher (perhaps 30 or 25).

Regardless, lets shift our focus back to Hearthstone. Another reason it kicks solid ass is that the micro-transaction system they have is basically perfect, that you can do a draft (arena) for just 2 bucks and if you are a busy kind of person, you can do one or two drafts a week off of daily quest rewards alone and never have to invest any money. BUT you can always splurge on a few packs or binge on arena if you so choose by spending very modest amounts of cash.

Furthermore, the Arena system is much much better than MTG drafting. You can pause picks at any time, play as many games as you want in one sitting. Overall this product while casual friendly, still appeals to the hardcore because of the very real optimization and perfection of decision making in a game and the tactical challenges in both picking cards and playing the games.

Now it does have its faults, but those are perfectly acceptable and make the experience better overall. One glaring fault is that you may get very unlucky during arena drafting and be presented with mediocre cards and might face off against someone who was very fortunate during their draft. Your chances in this sort of match up are usually marginal at best, regardless of player skill and decisions. But of course, if you have the exact same quality of draft deck every time, it would get stale pretty fast, so this perceived weakness is in actuality a strength.

I must admit I can find no actual obvious flaw in this game.