Reporting back after a couple days of playing. Either I'm really darn lucky (probably not), or the booster packs gained by leveling up are very generous. I've got a lot of powerful cards which are capable of having a deck built around it and/or serve as win conditions, a brief explanation for people not playing the game:
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Call the Warpath: 14 mana epic ability, puts ALL the beasts characters you have in your deck into play. All of them. Personal record is 273 damage to the enemy fort in one attack (max fort health is 100), although people without answer cards usually just concede on the spot.
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Veroria, the Lone Keep: 6 mana rare location, only one enemy character without flying may attack you each turn. You lose 4 morale each turn. Except for specific cases, this means that you can just ignore the attacking enemy cards or toss a chump blocker to stop almost all of the damage from the enemy. I use this with a bunch of flying cards so that they can't hit me, and they can't stop me from hitting them either. Super annoying and extremely fun.
Now I admit I'm making the cards sound a lot better than they actually are, but I hope people can see the combo potential and silly hijinks you can pull with these. There are some hilarious stuff you can do even just with the starter cards - Weld a robot into a infectious zombie, stick him in the defense zone and watch as the entire enemy attacking force become yours the next turn! Although they'll be a bit messed up due to minor things like, well, getting their brains eaten by rampaging nanobots and replaced with HIVEMIND CPU.
I'm at around 50% winrate in constructed, and I've just played for something like a week or so right now. No real world money spent as of yet either (although I'm considering it as soon as Steam wallet gets fixed), so I guess I take back my initial comments on the game being a hard grind and PvP for newbies being a complete mess. It may seem like I'm praising the game a lot, and I'm in no way affiliated with IW or anything, but I strongly recommend people interested in TCGs and especially those who find Hearthstone not complex enough to give this game a try. Its a lot better once one sits down and studies the game for a while.
Finally a tip from noob me to other newbies: Although you start out with basically none of the power cards, finishing the campaigns will give you a handful of factionless answer cards: Graveyard destruction, land destruction, creaturekill, targeted direct damage, AoE damage. Pack a LOT of these into your early decks, and you can easily capitalize on overconfident and overextending opponents. I'm not saying that you'll be on equal footing with the other guy, but you can often give them quite a run for their money by just playing carefully, and remembering the classic TCG principles like card advantage and board control. Worked for me.