Hearthstone – Program That Generates Hearthstone Cards Overview

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.

The community over at Hearthpwn has compiled a list of Leveling System Rewards (which is too long to enumerate here). Additionally the article on leveling in Hearthstone at Gamepedia provides insight.

Here are some interesting points to take away from the articles:

• Gold Cards are earned one at a time. Unlike the basic cards, which are earned in pairs.
• Heroes also earn golden versions of the basic set of Neutral cards.
• Class specific gold cards are earned between levels 11 - 49.
• Above level 50 golden basic neutral minion cards are awarded.
• To earn all gold neutral cards a player will have to level every hero to 60.
• Gold cards are earned at levels: 15, 20, 23, 26, 28, 30, 32, 34, 36, 40, 42, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59 and 60.