Back when I had a lot of free time, I spent most of my time playing 2 PC games, League of Legends and Hearthstone. I still love League and was pretty good at it during my peak (got platinum in two seasons, which is pretty good for someone with pretty poor reflexes), but I simply lack the time to play now. Devoting 40 minutes to a game with kids, a wife, and things to do is simply impossible, especially when you can't pause or save it, and the real time outcome not only affects your stats, but also the experience of 9 other people. Anyway, I still play a few matches every few months with my brother-in-law, but my days of 2 League games a day are long gone.
But I have continued to play Hearthstone most days. Hearthstone is an online, digital only collectible card game very similar to Magic: The Gathering. While I never played Magic, I did get pretty into Pokemon cards, and very into Yu-Gi-Oh, so I am familiar with and really enjoy the game. At this point, I'd say that I like Hearthstone more than any of the other two card games mentioned, for a few main reasons.
First, Hearthstone is a mouse only game, meaning I can play it on my laptop, without the computer in my lap, while watching TV. It's a wonderful casual competitive experience that I can enjoy while also spending time with my family. Your opponent gets a turn that typically lasts a minute or so, so you can easily jump in and out of conversations and TV shows with ease.
Second, Hearthstone has a big player base that enables you to play against real humans in an evolving meta game each and every day. If Yu-Gi-Oh had an online experience like Hearthstone, I would probably play it frequently, but every attempt to do this has been a miserable failure. Since there are real humans participating, strategies are constantly changing, as people attempt to optimize their decks to succeed against the dominant decks in the current metagame. This makes for a fun and always fresh experience driven by players as much as the designers of the game.
Third, Hearthstone's purely digital existence opens it to an enormous universe of possibilities that other card games can't measure up to. Randomization is now possible, making way for some of my favorite cards, including Flamewalker, Arcane Missiles, Yogg-Saron, etc. Changing cards is now possible as well, enabling the company to tone down once dominant cards, or give tune-ups to poor cards (although they rarely do the latter). This keeps any particular card, hero, or archetype from becoming too dominant, and the designers can react a lot quicker to emergent strategies with this tactic than by the ban lists seen in other card games. I also like that the designers are not too reliant on these changes, preferring to wait and see whether or not players can "figure out" a deck before knocking it down a bit. Sometimes, as was the case with archetypes like secret paladin and patron warrior, they wait a bit too long, but I'd rather they wait too long than start changing things very quickly without a clear plan and enough data to substantiate the changes.
Fourth, it's completely free! The client is free to download, and the cards are all unlockable simply by playing the game enough.
Fifth, the two methods of playing the games are really fun and distinct. In arena, you draft cards from a random pool, while in constructed you pick a deck from your own cards, and play with that one. Arena is wonderful because you get rewards based on how well you do, and it really scratches my itch for randomness and probability, but both represent a fun and unique take on the game that gives a breath of fresh are when one mode becomes stale.
Hearthstone does have a few things about it that I don't much like, but they're far overbalanced by the things I do. The client is at times buggy (although it may be my old computer's fault, so I won't hold them to this too much), resulting in disconnects and long load times.
The business model of Hearthstone results in a long curve of difficulty for me, as I am too cheap to buy card packs, so I have to earn them with in game gold and arena runs. When a new set of cards is released, I am typically left adapting to new strategies and cards with outdated cards and strategies, which always makes the first few months of a release challenging. I usually spend most of the first few months playing Arena, so I can build up my card collection, and then shift into playing constructed later on once my collection is sufficient. But I do have to say that they aren't cheap about giving out rewards to dedicated players, so it doesn't feel as much of a play to win game as other free to play games.
I'd give Hearthstone a 9.7/10. It's supremely fun, and I'd recommend you check it out!
-TRO
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