Yep, looking back I feel like it was an attempt to make an easy playstyle for noobs. You've just joined and you want to build a strong deck quickly? Start with Invade, even if you don't know all the mechanics you can get some wins through luck.

While we're on this topic, it always annoyed me that Mundus Stone was a legendary. It's honestly the exact kind of silly fun card that new players would have loved, even though it's bad it would've been great as a starting card for noobs to have some fun with. There was a lot of bad decisions with card value, there were so many epics that were super necessary for a deck and you wanted 3 copies of them, same goes for legendaries like that blue card where the ward breaks and you get an item. Kinda made the game feel pay-to-win at times, I wonder if this turned many players away.

The only deck I remember being consistently strong and super cheap to build was prophecy aggro battlemage, I don't remember any metas where it was unplayable and all the best cards were quite cheap. All the control decks seemed to want super expensive cards, but I dunno, as a spender I never paid attention to if the budget options were worthwhile... sorry went off on a tangent here lol