Question for those who have played Magic too: which kinds of cards in Hearthstone haven't been (or couldn't have been) done in Magic? For example, if I didn't know better, I would have thought cards that summon auxiliary minions, like Violet Teacher, would be impractical in a physical game. But of course, Magic has those. Same goes for minions that stack self-buffs, like Scavenging Hyena (e.g. Primordial Hydra), and copying minions, Faceless Manipulator (e.g. Clone).
My current guesses about cards that Magic couldn't do practically are:
- Cards that do random selection among minions or characters, like Mad Bomber, seem impractical in a physical game. I guess you could represent each minion/character with a card, shuffle that, and select that way.
- Cards that can chain complex buffs on minions, like Crazed Alchemist, seem annoying to track physically.
- Any healing ability seems inapplicable to Magic, which doesn't persist damage across turns (right?).
Closest to Mad Bomber is Capricious Efreet (6/4 for six, red, at the start of your turn, choose two enemy targets and a friendly target, destroy one at random). Players have to use a coin or a die or come up with their own way of making it work. It's overcosted so that it doesn't actually get used much.
Magic actually DOES have -1/-0 tokens and stuff back in the early history, but they abandoned the idea because it was fiddly. Their new policy is that each block only has -1/-1 counters or +1/+1 counters, but not both, so that in drafts and sealeds only one kind of counter is needed. Ultimately toughness instead of HP really is a tradeoff where magic has to cut corners to be a good physical game.
Sense Demons is a card that is a pain for magic, but works in Hearthstone. Polymorph and Telemin Performance show how you randomly select a card with a certain quality, but doing that twice on a cheap spell would be a pain. Polymorph costs four, but you gotta kill your own dude, so it's not super common (in actual play if you resolved Polymorph you were more likely to win than stealthing Auctioneer).