My humble opinion on Nexon's path.

Correction, new players are missing a lot of health. With the only currect exceptions of MM and Kanna(bosses only), none of the cards directly contribute to your damage. The only reasonable damage is from Pirate Set bonus which many classes can max PDR without it. So no, new players aren't missing much.

3 S cards give 3 attack, 3 magic attack, 700 hp, 700 mp, and 3% boss damage. That's not that bad, actually, considering you just said Kanna's, 3% boss damage was good enough. Hayato is 6% critical damage so on a class with high critical it's almost pure % damage. Then, there's Kanna, Demon avenger, Xenon, the 40 stat trio (Luminous, Kaiser, and Angelic buster), and Mercedes and Mechanic help with cooldown skills.

I just named 9 that could be ideal to boost damage. 7 of them working well when you need it, maybe down to 6. And you have nice efficiency ones, like Evan's, that class that needed NX, with an amazing source of MP. On my NL, I don't even need MP potions at all thanks to that. Warriors could benefit aswell with Aran's, the same but with HP.

But mix that with link skills. You have 2 to pick if you have 3 slots. A card alone is nothing, but refusing all of a sudden 9%boss damage, 6 attack, 1400 hp and mp, several stats, 10% boss damage, 10% critical, 10% ignore defense, 15% hp increase, stance for half the time, and even more to come, yes, it IS a huge gap. And you can't deny that. I'm not even including everything. And these are only lv 1 link skills. At lv 2 this gets even better. And also remember the maplestory live thing is giving stats to the characters in your account too.

Creating a new account just doesn't cut it, most people play for their main. I know I do at least.