Hearthstone – Major Differences Between Metas of Different Servers

Wojtek addressed most of your questions, but I'm just going to add details to this one question.

**Are there certain cards that are more cost effective to DE? ** There are two things that affect how much dust you get when you disenchant a card.

• Card rarity
• Foil/non-foil

Card rarity can be found by looking at the gem in the center of the card. Common cards have a white gem and give 5 dust when you disenchant them. The colors match the colors in World of Warcraft, with the highest being orange (legendary). Cards that are more rare will disenchant into more dust (you can see how much as Wojtek explained). Also, the cards you get as you level your hero to 10 are considered "basic" cards and don't have a rarity gem. They can't be disenchanted.

-          Normal           Gold    
-          Craft    DE      Craft   DE  
Common      40      5       400     50  
Rare        100     20      800     100  
Epic        400     100     1600    400  
Legendary   1600    400     3200    1600  

If you go through the math to complete a complete set of 2 copies of every card (leaving all of the disenchanting and crafting until last), you're much more likely to need to disenchant commons and craft legendaries. source

Sometimes you can find gold (foil) versions of cards when you open packs. These cards functionally play exactly the same, but if you disenchant them (and keep the non-gold versions of the card) then you'll get more dust. On the other hand, gold versions are animated (some are QUITE nice) and a nice thing to show off.

So, to answer your question, it is generally more cost effective to disenchant the gold cards, if you don't care about the aesthetics and status of using the gold cards.

Another fact to note, if you use the "disenchant extra cards" button, it will automatically keep 2 regular and 2 gold copies of each card (for a total of 4 copies of the card). You have to manually decide which cards you want to keep and disenchant the others.

I did some research of my own instead of waiting for another answer. I played 4 games with my Level 5 Mage (leveling her up to level 8 in the process). In none of the games did I manage to use the whole deck, but I wrote down all the cards that I drew throughout all 4 games.

First, to confirm Resorath's answer, none of the Level 2, 4, and 6 cards of the Mage ever showed up in the deck, but the original 5 cards that the Mage starts with all showed up in at least 3 games out of 4. So I can conclude that none of the later Mage cards are included into the basic deck as you level up.

Second, exactly ten other cards showed up in 2 to 4 games each out of 4, while no other cards ever showed up. So, only 15 different cards ever showed up for the Mage, some twice, making up the deck of 30. That means, it's not random, and the cards are set in for each basic deck. Most likely, they are tailored to each class. (For the curious, for Mage they are: Murloc Raider, Bloodfen Raptor, Novice Engineer, River Crocolisk, Raid Leader, Wolfrider, Oasis Snapjaw, Sen'jin Shieldmasta, Nightblade, and Boulderfist Ogre, plus the original 5 Mage cards)

Both of those conclusions could be very good coincidences, but, eyeballing the probabilities of these coincidences, I firmly believe that those conclusions are correct.

So, I did not experiment with all 9 classes, but I found my answer: The basic decks were pre-made by the creators of the game, and they do not change as you level up. I guess the results for the other 8 can be found the same way.