“Keep updated” is very subjective. In terms of keeping one meta deck up to date, pretty sure this is comfortably possible for f2p even if the deck occasionally dies off and you need to rebuild from scratch. (Getting started on a legendary-heavy paladin or warrior deck is another story…)
You can also easily keep up with most/all of Stonekeep’s budget decks. Some of them are really quite strong.
But if your goal is having X meta decks with perfect lists, the cost is going to go up depending what X is. The preorders should be enough to keep most players comfortably competitive but you need complete collections to play any deck you want whenever you feel like it, and as this article shows, that is quite expensive. (But as other comments note, even paying players still get gold so I think if you do all the quests it’s more like $600-700 per year)
“Keep updated” is very subjective. In terms of keeping one meta deck up to date, pretty sure this is comfortably possible for f2p even if the deck occasionally dies off and you need to rebuild from scratch. (Getting started on a legendary-heavy paladin or warrior deck is another story…)
You can also easily keep up with most/all of Stonekeep’s budget decks. Some of them are really quite strong.
But if your goal is having X meta decks with perfect lists, the cost is going to go up depending what X is. The preorders should be enough to keep most players comfortably competitive but you need complete collections to play any deck you want whenever you feel like it, and as this article shows, that is quite expensive. (But as other comments note, even paying players still get gold so I think if you do all the quests it’s more like $600-700 per year)