I've played daily since beta, and stopped about a year ago. The problem with Hearthstone is that they traded mana RNG for effect RNG. The fate of every match revolves around how well a card randomly targets an enemy. Far too much is decided by a coin toss in that game, because it makes for funny youtube videos.
I also liked in MTG how much more responsive the game was due to instants/interrupts & triggers - was far more complex and nuanced.
In HS it's simplified - with few exceptions, your stuff happens only on your turn, very little targeting of the player (ie, no discard). The strategies are limited. I still like it, but ... it's definitely not up to MTG richness.
The game is probably more "responsive" now. Instants and Interrupts were a mess. Batching and determining which had to be resolved LIFO and which FIFO and the various corner cases were an unnecessary labyrinth to navigate.
The stack is much better and I'd say more nuanced. Now you can target things on the stack specifically. There's more bluffing and playing with the fact that there is incomplete information.
I agree, though I still regret they ended up overpowering counterspells by allowing them to target any previous spell in the stack (interrupts could not do this - they had the interrupt stack).
However Hearthstone has no such interplay - likely because it allows an easier functioning AI and interplay in a normatively turn-based game online is difficult.
Scenario: 1) I cast Armageddon/Wrath of God, 2) in response (instant stack) you cast/trigger effect that allows you to sacrifice (or return to hand) your permanents affected, 3) in response (adding to stack) I counter my own 'geddon/WoG.
How would this be possible when interrupts existed?
The effect or spell that allows you to sacrifice or bounce those things would be in the Instant batch.
The counterspell would be in the Interrupt batch.
The big difference is that once that counterspell is on the stack, you can't cast any more Instants.
So let's say that instead of countering the Wrath, you counter the spell that's bouncing all of the things. With the old system, that's it. If I don't have any Interrupts, we need to resolve our batches. No one can cast an Instant until we resolve both the Interrupt batch, the Instant batch, then the original spell.
Counterspells were even better before. They were effectively the last word. The stack kind of depowered them, but it gave a lot more play to the game.
IIRC, you couldn't counter the wrath once the instant is played (at least as of say 1998-ish rules interpretation).
I play Wrath. I can counter now, or let it resolve. You play instant effect. I can counter, but can't counter the wrath anymore. I'm pretty sure that's how it worked.
They addressed the instants, far too difficult to direct flow of the game online like that. Look at MTG online, it flows like a pig. The game is constantly interrupted for each phase. Their answer was secrets basically.
More often than not the only randomness that affects the outcome of a game is card draw. There are random effects that can flip a game but that happens less frequently than just a bad draw.
