During the F2P challenge many players impersonated noobs trying to climb top score and get as much gold/cards as possible... That was not an easy challenge, and I don't really know if Shadow Era now is a very welcoming environment for newcomers.
I couldn't play against the AI because it was banned from F2P. But I have a good grasp of where to spend my starting gold and SC, although I almost never played during the last year, and I totally missed recent balance and meta changes.
New cards were out of reach anyway because of limited budget, so it wasn't a big deal for me.
I picked Boris, sold some garbage, bought 4x of Blood Frenzy and Crippling Blow and I was good to go. Even if I still played my initial games with Rain Delay and Valiant Defender, otherwise I couldn't reach a minimum of 40 cards
Could I do this operation if I just discovered Shadow Era last month? My guess is a no 99.9% of the times, even if I had the chance to play the campaign.
That's because, aside balance/scoring changes happened during last years, I believe that there're 3 flaws into the game.

1) There's nothing to win if you lose
Ok, this may sound odd, but if I am a weak player I will lose more often than not. And Shadow Era as of now punishes me with the gain of little to no gold and SC, while winners become even more winners.
So if I am starting to play and I want to try to get gold to buy new cards, the best option is already having those cards; because with the crappy starting ones I can be at stall and not being able to win enough to upgrade my deck.
I don't know if this situation motivates new players to quit or spend money on a game where they just can't win.

2) You can't pick a Shadow hero at the start of your career
Not gamebreaking, but you see a meta full of human heroes because F2P players couldn't afford shadow ones.
I don't get why you can't choose any hero you like, even if you keep the restriction for CotC because they have cheaper starting decks.

3) There're too many cards
People complain because there aren't enough new cards, but if you start from zero there a lot of cards to buy and learn now. I still have problems learning cards and combos from Shattered Fates and Lost Lands, I guess the game can be overwhelming for a noob.
I also felt at disadvantage against normal accounts, because I was almost limited to cheap/CotC cards, while they normally had access to tribes and cards they wanted.

I don't know if new players really feel these issues, but I found those problems during the F2P period.
Maybe a different TCG approach like the one from Epic Card Game could give a boost to the starting experience and still force people to spend real money onto this game. I mean selling expansions in block, rather than passing through deck melting and going to the merchant to buy single cards.
CotC coul be free for anybody, and CotC players can only play rated against other CotC players. This way at least I can really enjoy the game when I am a young player.
Then if you want to play tournaments or enjoy new cards you must spend money or grind a huge amount of games to buy DP, then SF, then LL, excetera.