Mage is something I want to try because unstable portal seems like a lot of fun. Are unstable portal decks viable? Of course I’d have to spend all the dust I’m saving up for Rag to have any hope of crafting it. so that sets back that quite a long time. It’s frustratingly long to acquire the cards needed to build viable decks. I’ve been playing regularly (enough to always get my daily quests at least) for 4 months now and the only decks I can really build are the cheapie aggro decks that are taking a bit hit with the undertaker nerf.
I managed to use all 5 of those truesilvers and still lose the match - Rag never came up and I eventually whittled myself down from killing all those minions from my heroes. Next game the other guy and I dropped Ragnaros on the same turn. It’s sort of like battleships exchanging broadsides, missing, and taking out a random ship.
On second thought, Vol’jin might be fun. Combining him with holy smite could be really powerful and swing the board heavily in your favor against a high HP target like any giant, rag, ysera, etc. Unfortunately I’m lacking a whole lot of cards for control priest and a lot are epics.
Control priest is one of the cheaper control decks. Your “finisher” is basically to exhaust his removal and damage, and hold the board and bash his face in. So, things like Mind Control,shadow word death/pain, shadow madness, thoughtsteal, holy nova, holy fire are the staples. Canal shadow priest has gotten very good lately, it’s a swing like no other, but if you don’t have the dust for it, any fat/sticky high mana minion will do.
You can replace a death with voljin, it’s certainly one of the better gvg legendaries. They have the same function, take out a biggish minion and keep tempo, but you have to know what the biggest minion in your opponents deck is going to be and whether it’s better to keep or spend voljin. Especially good if you have a loot hoarder or something on the board, it might be worth just spending voljin and taking tempo now rather than waiting for dr boom.
I actually have most of that deck. I’d have to craft another zombie chow, holy fire, and and two wild pyromancers, and a shadow madness. Are any of those easily substituted? I would guess not, since there aren’t much in the way of similar functions.
I’ve been playing more Arena recently, even though I’m only slightly better than average. (4.13 wins per Arena and a 58.5% win rate, according to my stat tracker.)
One thing that most Arena players probably notice is the over-representation of Mages and Paladins. In a perfect world, each class would be played about 11% of the time, but in my 506 games, my opponents’ breakdown looks like this:
That makes Arena less interesting than it should/could be, IMHO.
Blizzard could look to the world of board game design to solve this imbalance: they could slightly reduce the gold/dust rewards overall, but offer up-front loot to players who choose the less popular classes. (For instance, if you choose to play a Warrior, you get 10 gold and 5 dust right off the bat, even if you win zero games.) Board games like Puerto Rico and Small World use a similar mechanism to get people to choose unpopular options: load up those options with increasing incentives until they’re chosen.
I’m sure Blizzard keeps constant tallies on Arena play stats; they’d just have to come up with a dynamic incentive formula that adds and subtracts bonus gold/dust to the classes until an equilibrium is reached, where each class is chosen as close to 11.1 percent of the time as possible.
I don’t think they’d ever actually do this, since it goes against their goals of keeping the interface simple enough for simpletons, but I think it would improve the Arena experience immensely.
I agree, your solution works as a way of making the arena more interesting without trying to create some sort of different ruleset which works in arena which would be a complicated and unsatisfying solution. I suspect the rewards would have to be higher than 10 gold/5 dust, maybe on the order of 25/15 for the worst classes. But dynamic balancing could find the right number.
I guess if you really had to, a farseer could substitute for a holy fire (anti aggro, heal + removal/body), but holy fire is generally better late game. 5 damage deals with things like fire elemental, shield maiden, and 4 health things like goblin blastmage, that farseer can’t deal with. Pyro is for early game AOE to deal with hunter floods and things comboed with coin and PW: shield, chow eats one drops, shadow madness in particular is a 2 for 1 most times. Look out for deathrattles that you can steal and kill to gain the benefit like loot hoarders, belchers etc. all these cards are priest staples (some other classes also use chow and pyro), so if you want to play priest I would reccomend you craft these. Also, since they’re classic cards, and you’re F2P, you won’t get them from Arena rewards. So go ahead and craft, I think.
What makes the mage the best mech class? Is it just the snow chuggers and blastmage? I’m not sure the class ability is particularly synergistic with mechs. I’ve actually really been thinking of trying an unstable portal deck though, so I may give mech mage a try. I like decks with random effects. I know it’s not consistent enough for high level play, generally, but it’s fun, which is more what I’m concerned with.
I got the druid card Tree of Life. Is that useful for anything, or should I turn it into dust and craft a blue out of it?
Blastmage is super good. Chugger is super good vs weapons classes. That’s really all there is to it. It also helps that spare parts synergise well with Antonidas.
ToL is only really used in one deck, the mill/fatigue Druid. It’s a fun deck (maybe) but not super competitive. As a card, it’s basically super anti aggro, if they ignore your board and go face, suddenly boop you’re back at 30 with a full board of angry trees and they’ve spent their resources. That’s the idea, anyway, in practice it’s not really working at the moment. I’d dust it if I were you, especially if you’re workif towards rag or other viable decks.
Is it worth running the duplicate secret on my unstable portal mage mech deck? In the event that I get some great draw from the unstable portal, it’d be funny to end up having it duplicated. Plus I have a lot of low cost minions, so card draw is a concern - duplicate is card draw too. I fit echo of medivh into that deck for that reason.
Gave up my dream of saving for Rag. Figured it’d take me at least 2 months to save up the dust, and in that time, I’d have very few decks that were fun/playable, so the game would be boring for that long. Decided I’d split my dust trying to make a usable priest control deck and a fun unstable portal mage deck.
Pulled my first turn 6 ysera with an unstable portal. What a silly and great mechanic. Got it killed by a brawl card. Now that card is kind of ridiculous
I was just playing against a priest that had 9hp. I had 15hp. I had 4 good minions on the board and 2 with taunt. He had none. He had 3 cards in his hand. Those cards? Mind blast. Mind Blast. Holy Fire.
Unstable portal seems to be summoning a whole lot of legendaries, more than I would think intuitively. I suppose because it only summons minions, and all legendaries are minions, they’re a greater portion of the pool than you’d think.
Control deck games take a whole lot of time. The only deck I’ve tried to play competitively is the zoo deck, where games tend to be over fairly quickly. And even then, it would’ve taken a whole lot of time to get past rank 5 or so. To reach legend with a control deck, you’d have to invest a whole shitload of time into the game, wouldn’t you?
Either the seasons are too short, or the game needs a better system for determining rank that isn’t so dependent on being able to play 4 hours a day.
Duplicate is kind of like card draw, with conditions. Pay 3 mana draw 2 cards is basically arcane intellect, except that with duplicate you kind of get a chance to choose the cards that you get. Or rather, your opponent does.
mech Mage tends to run out of steam, so card draw could be useful, but let’s consider what you would like to draw. Best card would probably be goblin blastmage, but blastmage requires that you have a mech already on the board, and you can’t play blastmage and secret on the same turn until turn 7, which is very late for mech Mage, and blastmage probably isn’t as effective on turn 7 as turn 4, where the board is likely to have more 1 health minions.
Worst case, you draw 2 clockwork gnomes. Disaster.
On top of that, you need to pay 3 mana and skip a turn, essentially. For a tempo deck like blastmage, this is terrible. You’re falling behind and have to catchup mechanism. You need to be control of the board at all times. Given the choice between playibg spider tank and any secret, I think spider tabk wins every time.
Most people only switch to control decks after rank 10 or so, for the same reason you state - it takes too long to rank up otherwise.
Unstable portal has the hidden text: randomly wins you the game.
Worst worst case with duplicate is 2 sheep or 2 taunt frogs, and people DO play around the card (at least in arena) so you need to be pretty far ahead to force them to kill your best dude first.
Anyway I ran a deck that consisted of nothing but fatties and duplicate once it worked reasonably well, nobody has enough removal for that many Giants or belchers, and these days with echo of medivh that kind of deck got even better. Check out day9’s Echo of medivh deck for ideas.
And, as an aside, as annoying as it is that some players flash their deck and play extra cards while you wait for the killing blow (I’ve taken to sitting on the concede button for those jerks), I hate the ones who flash their deck and then immediately concede before I can finish them off.
I also find myself being kinda a jerk a lot more than any other game I’ve played. I wonder if I’m just an ass, or if there is something about the game that brings it out in me.
