Rank 5 is an immense dust boost! You can do it! I believe in you! =D
Who’d have ever thought it would be priest keeping me from advancing forward?
Raza priest just has too many answers. I build an early board? Shadow word horror (or holy nova). I build a mid-game board? Dragonfire potion. I pull off a big evolve combo? Priest deathknight, all dead. Game goes long? Basically infinite sustain and damage. The only way I can beat them is basically if the 9 or so cards they have that completely destroy me happen to be buried in their last 12 or so cards.
And they are quite common around rank 5.
Bolding mine: yes, well, speaking as someone who played Razakus Priest to rank 5 this season (WOOT WOOT GOLDEN ICE BLOCK), this happens far more often than you might think. It’s always frustrating to draw Shadowreaper Anduin as one of your last cards, because by that point, you’re pretty much out of gas and the game becomes very hard to win.
If you’re struggling against Razakus, try running Coldlight Oracle. You would be shocked how often I get stuck with 8+ cards in hand and no real ability to clear them out (I run so many cantrips, and many of the cards that aren’t cantrips are reactionary, and I’m not wasting my Shadow Word Horror on two totems and a murloc), and if you mill Anduin or Raza it makes the game way, way harder to win. Similarly, if you’re playing Warlock and running into a lot of Razakus, consider using Gnomeferatu as a tech pick - milling either combo piece is a huge deal.
Then again, that might be because of how greedy my deck is. I figured out that most of the games I lose, I lose because I draw Anduin or Raza too late, so I went in hard on card draw. How hard? Curator with Coldlight Oracle and Primordial Drake hard, and I’m still thinking about whether I should cut a card for Stampeding Kodo or Nesting Roc just to be able to have a beast in the deck for the extra thinning.
Best game thus far with the deck: a mirror where I pulled a Frost Lich Jaina off of a Cabal Courier. He got Anduin first, but had to waste so many resources clearing out my Water Elementals that I won on value. Freakin’ Jaina. 
Penguin, obviously.
Honestly it could be worse - there are worse cards to run than a 0-mana anything with Shadowreaper. But I feel like my midrange needs work, and having more fat taunts generally would help with that - which is why the Roc seems so attractive. There just isn’t really a beast that fits into the deck well. Ideally it’d be something that always taunts or always cantrips. Other considerations: Giant Wasp, Ironbeak Owl (fucking paladin), and Mukla, Tyrant of the Vale. I’d have to craft him, though…
Lately when logging in I’ve been getting a pop-up in the lower right corner telling me “You have unread chat messages”. Anybody know where to find these messages?
Follow-up: I shelled out the dust for Prophet Velen and started running his package (Velen+Mind Blast+Holy Smite is 28 damage - 2+4+10+4+4+4) instead of the Curator package. So worth it, holy shit. Being able to just drop nearly 30 damage from hand (32 if you also have a radiant elemental in hand) out of nowhere is completely fucking insane. This deck is incredibly dumb.
Every time I get suckered into arena, I wonder why I wasted my time. Ugh. Arena is so not for me.
But for those that like Arena, but were a bit bored of the current meta this whole double-class Arena thing is hilarious. Horrifically high variance I’m either hitting 2 or 10+ depending on the draft.
Yeah, no doubt. The draft seems really high variance these days, it feels like the cards have been so designed around synergies that if you hit the synergies, you win, and if you don’t, there aren’t really any good standalone minions.
Well, there’s Bonemare.
On a side note: fuck Bonemare. Seriously. Fuck that card. Fuck its ability to singlehandedly move from “I’m barely winning the board” to “If you don’t have dragonfire potion or flamestrike, you just lose the game right here and now”, or from “I’m losing the board” to “I’m winning the board”. It’s like dropping a Dr. Boom in arena, except it’s a common and might actually be better than Dr. Boom. And I’ve gotten exactly zero in my last five arena runs. Certainly run into my fair share.
I’m getting absolutely nowhere with my runs lately. I have no idea how to adopt to this new meta. And none of the decks I draft are actually any good.
Bonemare is powerful. But what is rough in arena is Frostlich Jaina. Ugh. So hard to deal with. Scalebane is something that’s urgent to deal with as well.
I have my thoughts on why Blizzard has such high variance. I think they want to keep win rates near 50% for the vast majority of players. High variance is one way of doing that. Professional players such as Kripp bitch about the high variance but he’s definitely not who they are designing the game for and players such as Kripp, while of utility to Blizzard, are not how they keep the lights on.
Got my first and likely only ever 12-0 arena run during this event, with a Druid-Mage combo (mage hero power). UI + Frost Lich Jaina in the deck was just absurd. Jaina was the real MVP, easily winning out any attrition match.
Curiously, I actually had a tie game (#6), where the opponent managed to kill me with his own UI, but that caused him to overdraw and kill himself on the same turn. I thought in those instances it counts as a loss for both - and I even got a defeat screen. But it actually registered it as a win in-game (though Overwolf failed to register it as anything, so I had to manually record it).
Also had a fun match against a Druid/Priest who made a copy of my Jaina, and we duked it out for quite some time (racked my brain every turn trying to make sure he wouldn’t have any easy pings to get more Frost Elementals).
Love this dual-class arena, but after getting 12-0 I feel like I should just retire from Hearthstone completely, as I’m never gonna have a HS achievement of equal splendor ever again.
I’ve started playing this a week ago and I definitely have a love hate relationship with it. Love the complexity and different possible strategies. Hate that it’s a performance hog, feels slow, and just kills my battery. All for a freaking card game. Hate the cheese Murloc, Pirate, and Jade Golem decks. Hate that I’m a 19/20 and randomly run into decks with a bunch of crazy good cards which I have no chance against.
Ranked is pure net deck at every level, it’s really rather silly. You can occasionally find people playing around with decks in casual, it may be a better place to start.
Also, the time to start playing Hearthstone was a few years ago. It’s not really possible for new players to catch up in any meaningful way without either spending tons of money or an inordinate amount of time grinding as F2P players. I enjoy it because I did start a long time ago and have a good collection, but wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else who hasn’t already been playing a while.
If you want some good F2P decks, though, Zalae just put out some nice budget decks that you can probably build, or work towards. Budget Decks by Zalae
If you’re just starting out, I suggest to just follow deck guides for now, and make substitutions if you don’t have the cards. I can help to suggest replacements if you like, but the main thing is to know that at this level, you are losing because of your skill, not because of your deck - even a top tier deck piloted by a rank 20 player will be so inefficient that you can still win even with an objectively “weaker” deck.
That said, this still a card game. There’s a saying, 20% of games you will lose no matter what, 20% of the games you will win no matter what, and your job is to win as many of the remaining 60% of the games as you can.
If you haven’t seen these, and particularly if you’re new to card games, I recommend watching the Trump’s teachings series. They’re old, but the principles are good.
Hearthstone: Trump’s Basic Teachings
Kelseth Zoo deck that I ran to Rank 5 this month. Netdeck from the Tempostorm Meta Snapshot, which is a very useful resource to see what’s hot out there.
Perhaps Blizzard should add a budget ranked and casual mode where the value of the deck can’t be above a certain dust.
That is a fantastic idea.
But it’d probably make players more content to F2P rather than buy cards to catch up, so seems pretty unlikely.