And you get a free arena run. 
And they nerfed soulfire, flare, and auctioneer. hmmm
And yet again, they squander an opportunity to make a characterful change to a card in favour of just upping the mana cost by 1.
I probably want the GvG cards because they’re all new to me, but I really don’t like the way they’re forcing you to only gain whatever the latest and greatest deck is from the arena. I have no chance of randomly acquiring a ragnaros or ysera now. But I guess there will probably be some equally desirable GvG cards. Still, choice would be nice.
I liked the idea I saw somewhere of making Tracking only cycle if it eats a secret. That way it’s a strong “tech card” against secrets, but hot garbage against other decks.
Arcane Nullifier is a 2/5 4 mana card that can’t be targeted by hero spells or abilities. That seems like a pretty good tradeoff with the shieldmaster. I wonder if it’ll become super common.
I haven’t played Arena for a few months – just buy packs with gold. It was starting to be fun when I won the first five games – three conceded, two left. Then bam bam bam, lost the next three. I’m not a good arena player.
From this sample of one, I figure luck of the draw increases and aggro players struggle to adapt as many more games run long due to increased card draw mechanics.
I’ll never buy packs with gold. Arena is more fun for me than constructed, you can’t adapt rigidly to your copied deck list, you don’t have an inherent card advantage over other players, you have to adapt on the fly. And I can usually win enough rounds in arena that it brings the cost of playing it down to less than what buying decks would cost, so win/win on that front. Except that they think their player base has an average IQ of 70, and will be confused if given the option of using arena wins to win a card pack of their choice.
I’ll ramble some later on or maybe tomorrow about why I stopped playing Arena, etc.
For right now, I just wanted to alert you guys that the deathrattle Hunter card Webspinner is, for now, drawing beast cards from GvG. It hasn’t happened with Loothoarder so I assume it only the beast card that works.
Have fun until it gets fixed.
So I just played a game that finished with an enemy warrior having 28 hp and 31 armor. And 3 copies of Ragnaros on the board. I suspect this is a control warrior deck.
I actually faced four Ragnaros cards in two games in a row. I’d really like Ragnaros or Ysera and to build a deck like a ramping druid or a freeze control mage. Seems like it’d be fun. But I’m not going to get a crack at him unless I save up 1600 dust I guess, which will be difficult if I want to craft useful GvG cards. And more useful original deck cards for that matter - I haven’t been playing that long.
Pretty much, yeah. There’s a reason why control warrior is sometimes called pay to win warrior.
I myself wanted to play handlock from the beginning, but I just don’t have rag, or double moltens and mountains. So I won’t be playing handlock for some time. I did manage to pull a Ysera from a pack, so I do play some control priest, but Ysera is only really good in the super slow meta.
Loot Hoarder draws a card from your deck. Since your deck doesn’t have any GvG cards in it, Loot Hoarder can’t draw one. Webspinner draws a card from the ether, from a list of all Beast cards in the game. Bane of Doom works the same way, so it might do the same thing.
I used my gold to play Arena for the first month or six weeks or so. I didn’t get to the point of regularly winning the five or six games it takes to make it better than just buying card packs. In the couple hours it takes to play an arena run and win that many games I can play at least two or three times as many games and just use the gold to buy packs.
With the gold from the daily quest and winning some games I can pretty much always buy a pack a day with an hour or two of play. When I was playing arena, some days I didn’t even make enough to pay the entry fee.
Arena may be a better bargain IF you can win enough games. The thing is, it takes a lot of arena runs to get good enough to win that many games. Being F2P, I was only able to play arena about once a day so it was going to take a long time to gain the experience to be able to hold my own against those guys who had a six month head start playing the beta.
It’s possible that now there are enough new players coming into the game and enough experienced players who already have all the cards and have quit playing arena because there is no point for them to make it somewhat easier than it was in the early days – I dunno.
Arena costs 150 (of which, yes, you will get some back) but a pack only costs 100. For me, my card collection built up faster by just buying the packs. Part of that was probably because I was learning to play a small number of decks well rather than just being somewhat befuddled playing classes I didn’t particularly care to play with cards I wasn’t familiar with. (←- Attention grammar nazis)
When I first started this game I was exploring the possibility of playing tournaments for income and the tournaments were based on Ranked play, not on Arena, but I pretty quickly decided that wasn’t going to happen. I don’t want a 60 or more hour a week gig and I have no interest in trying to become a famous streamer.
So I guess I figure the standard advice that playing Arena is a faster way to build your collection than Rank play is … not necessarily an actual fact. I’ve built a pretty good collection going against the standard advice. I sometimes wish I had The Black Knight and Alexstrasza but then again, I play most of the time with very cheap decks containing none of the legendary cards I do have. The big cards just aren’t necessary for climbing the ladder.
Yeah, this is my biggest complaint about Blizzard these days - they want to make everything casual but don’t know what the fuck they’re doing, so they refuse to give the game the options people want to use, but also refuse to actually tell new players whether or not a card picks a random target.
Yeah, I’m not playing arena any more either. I just like constructed better, but then again, I just buy packs with money anyway…
it only takes about 3 wins to break even as you’d only need to win an additional 50 gold worth of stuff. winning six or seven games would means you’ll earn enough for the next arena as well, making it free if you could do so consistently.
that said, i prefer constructed as well, but i still get my packs through the arena.
Yeah, I was talking about the number of games needed to make Arena play self-funding.
You come up against the oddity that the cards and dust you win in arena play are not useful for playing arena. I consider that one of the flaws of the game.
Once you have all the cards, arena play really becomes pointless since there is no ranking system or even stats available so a player can compare his play to that of others – assuming, of course, that a person has that competitive urge and is not just playing for fun with no real desire to win.
Arena tournaments or a ladder system might become popular but they have the problem for Blizzard that they do not contain the hook of thinking they need more cards that will cause some people to spend a lot of money on the game real fast. Blizzard isn’t doing this to entertain us – they are doing it to make money, and us F2P guys are leeches on them.
A trading card game in which you can’t trade cards. A game of seeking and using statistical advantages to dominate opponents, but without stat tracking. A game that is difficult more because it is broad than that it is deep – even more true for Arena than for Rank play.
On a positive note; you do have to think to do well at Hearthstone. I like that.
Like a lot of things, it gets complex when you start to really think about it.
It gets complex when you have competitively equal decks. There are some complexities to building a good deck, learning which cards synergize with which cards and getting incrementally better cards as you gain gold/experience/pay for.
But unless the deck of your competitor is close to the deck of yours, the gameplay simply isn’t that complex. That was (and is) the biggest source of my frustration with this game. If one deck is significantly better than the other, odds are greatly in the favor of the better deck. Take your nice, solid deck up against a deck with nothing lower than rare and a few legendaries, and I don’t care how good you play, unless you get really lucky draws, you’re screwed.
The black knight seems like a really useful card for pretty much all decks. Most decks run with some sort of high value taunt that you can use it against. Last game I just had a guy put a mark of the wild on my 8/8 unit to give it taunt, and then the black knight to kill it.
I used to think this, but there’s also skill in understanding the meta and adjusting. For example, 2 weeks ago, the meta was all about the undertaker hunter with freezing trap and snake trap, and belchers and highmanes to close out. In response I played a death rattle priest, with shadow madness to deal with traps and belchers, and smites and holy nova to stabilize and catch up.
But recently hunters have been switching to a far faster deck, with arcane golems, wolf riders and explosive, instead of highmanes and belchers. I tried to adapt with belchers and senjins of my own, but they were too slow and I often could not stabilize in time. Death lords worked, but against control they were too much of a liability when they pulled big stuff.
In a meta where the main decks are heavy control (mostly warrior) and face hunter, I thought about it. What beats both control warrior and face hunter? Aggro zoo! It’s even faster than face hunter, and unless control warrior has good draws he can’t stabilise in time.
That’s not to say that this deck is the best. I think it might be an auto loss against freeze Mage, and ramp Druid will probably be impossible as well. But, like poker, you just need to win more than you lose and you’re ahead. You won’t win every game, but you can tune your deck to win against the popular decks, which is also a skill.
It’s true that some decks can only really be played one way, like aggro zoo is basically to the face every time. However, control decks rely on good play to do well. For example, when to place the belchers (hint - not on 5 mana. Look for the finisher, 9 mana for force savage and 10 for grommash), when to use your board clear or when to get your opponent to commit more to the board, when to play loatheb, when to trade and when to go for face race.
It depends. Sometimes, it’s just a 6 mana yeti. Against the ace hunter decks, for instance, black knight is just not helpful at all.
Mark of the wild + black knight should only be used for emergencies. You’re spending 1.5 cards to deal with 1 card (motw + battle cry of black knight), so on card effeciency it’s bad. And you have to run motw, which is a poor card in general and is rarely run (it will generally at most 1 for 1, and doesn’t really have immediate impact, and relies on the board. Compare with Druid of the claw in bear form.
Black knight is one of the better cards in tempo style decks, though. It has an immediate effect, and if you have a board (in most cases around turn 6 tempo should have board control, and your opponent might be tempted to drop a belcher or sunwalker and bam!) and your other minions get through and trade favorably.