The Hearthstone Thread

The Game Room
561

I mean, you don’t really have to use your taunts. I think use of taunts is a skill that players have to learn on the way to being great (unless you play aggro all the time).

It’s turn 5, you have a belcher and Harvest Golem in hand and nothing on the board, you’re playing against a druid with just a Keeper of the Grove on the board, you have 20 health. Do you play on curve and drop the belcher to stop the keeper from hitting your face, or do you play the harvest golem and hero power?

The correct answer of course is to save the belcher. Until he threatens lethal or there unless the taunt would force him into an unfavorable trade (e.g. if he had a Earthen Ring Farseer and multiple 1/1s on the board), don’t drop your taunts. Let him hit your face and bring you down to 18, that’s fine. It’s far worse if he then drops a Loatheb or Ancient of Lore and kills your Belcher for free, and then you don’t have a taunt to protect against savage roar.

Frankly, with combo druid’s early game, you shouldn’t even be at 20 on turn 5. A typical combo druid list here http://www.liquidhearth.com/forum/constructed-strategy/476259-hear-me-roar-double-combo-druid

For the early minions, I only really see Shade, Senjin, and that’s pretty much it. Innervated, they can pose some problems, but nothing that you want to spend a taunt on. Certainly, they are not going to hit face with the shade. Worst case, they innervate a Lore (or Boom!) on 5, but even then, a 5/5 on turn 5 is nothing special. Boom on 5 is worse, but very rare, as people will not normally keep 7 mana cards during the mulligan, and he needs to also have an innervate in hand. So, going in to turn 5 at 30 health is pretty normal.

Some games, Druid gets the perfect draw, innervates shade on turn 1 and kills all your stuff, innervates druid of the claw and kills all your stuff again, sets up the perfect swipes, and force savage you for the win. Sure. It’s been said that you can’t win 30% of games and can’t lose 30% of games, so work on winning the remaining 60% that you can decide the outcome of, don’t focus on the losses where you couldn’t have done anything.

Here’s an experiment. Each time you meet a druid, and you die to force savage, think about the choices you made in the game. Did you die with a Earthen Ring Farseer in hand? Healbot in hand? Taunt in hand? Did you spend your taunts on something which ultimately wasn’t worth it? Did you not trade your board into his board and tried to push for face damage when you could have cleared his board?

Doing this after each loss will help you improve a lot faster. If there was nothing you could have done, well, chalk it up to the 30% and move on.

You can also add me as a friend, and I’ll let you know when I play a druid and show you how easy it is. :wink:

562

I only have Sludge and Annoyobot, so getting a taunt isn’t easy.

But you’re right in the big picture. I thought it was a fatigue druid (he had naturalized my water elemental and played a grove tender), and went for his face, so I had a nice board, but no taunts. I was one round away from finishing him, when he pulled that crap out of his ass (he drew the savage card on his turn, which pissed me off to no end) to ruin my well played game.

I hate that part. You can play well, think of the strategy, and then boom (usually Dr. Boom, heh) you’re done.

I would, however, love to spectate and learn more. I’ve watched Trump and Amaz, and learned a lot doing it, but as I get better cards, rise in the ranks, and develop a deck, I need to learn to deal with those powerful cards that keep killing me. I’m Moridwon online (and I’ve been kinda cranky) so let me know if I can watch you. Not in a stalker-ey way, but in a learn-ey way.

563

While buddy’s point is right, I think it’s way stronger to play the Belcher on 5 over the Harvest Golem. You’re more likely to win by abusing the Druid’s inability to deal with a strong board than to play defensively the whole game. If you save it until turn 9, it’s probably just going to be TBK’d.

564

And, as an aside, if you play nothing but a few key whites, but mostly blues, purples and oranges, and you’re at level 17, you suck. Not just at Hearthstone, but as a person too.

565

Keep mind that at the start of a season, players move back in ranks. I reached Rank 8 last season, but started at Rank 18 for this one.

I know you’ll hate me, but I decided that I’ll exclusively play the hated “Mech Mage” archetype this whole season and see how far I get. The deck has 4 Legendaries (Sylvanas, Boom, Black Knight and Bloodmage Thalnos), 1 Epic (a Piloted Sky Golem), 5 Rares, and 20 Commons/Basics. I don’t know if that makes me suck as a person or not. :smiley:

Early metagame report: I’ve played 25 ranked games this season, and gone from Rank 18 down to 12. (This is about where I typically hit the Wall of Better Players and stall out; we’ll see.) Of those 25 games, I’ve played vs:

6 Mech Mages
3 Mech Shamans
2 Control Warriors, a.k.a. “Wallet Warriors”
2 Rogues playing the new weapon boosters + Blade Fury + Preparation/Sprint combo
2 Quartermaster/Muster Paladins
2 Face Hunters
1 Warlock Zoo
1 Ramp Druid
1 Freeze Mage
1 Mech Hunter (saw 2 Metaltooth Leapers and 2 Mechwarpers in early game)
…and 4 games vs. decks whose archetypes were not easily identifiable.

So, while Mech Mages are still the most common, the mid- to high-teens metagame has seemed decently varied to me. I’m sure a rich vein of Handlocks is just around the corner, though.

566

Yeah, but we’re now well into the season. If I offend anyone who just happens to have a killer deck, but couldn’t climb the ranks until now, so be it.

If you, with that deck, can’t advance past level 17, then yes, you suck. If, as I suspect, you are at level 12, or even level 10, with that deck, you’re more than fine. It’s the idiots with the stacked decks that play at 20-16 levels that piss me off.

Yes, you have. Because you’re not an idiot and you’re not a jerk. And, as you work your way through us peons without 4 legendaries, you apologize when you trot out Dr. Boom and offer a good game at the end, you’re fine by me.

567

I assume you mean me. :wink:

If you suspect your opponent is playing TBK, Sludge on 5 without any threats on board is almost literally the worst play, including not doing anything and just passing. Sludge on 5 and he can play TBK on 6 immediately, staying on curve and gaining an incredible tempo advantage.

If you Sludge on 9, at least he can’t force savage kill you that turn. He spends 6 on the TBK, leaving you with a slime, and druid doesn’t play cards below 4 mana (;)) so wastes the other 3 mana with hero power or some other irrelevant thing. That leaves you on turn 10, not dead, which is pretty good in my book. Maybe you just needed one more turn to draw your tinkers oil and blast him out of the water, who knows.

Sure! I posted my battletag before, but here it is again - TabbyNat #1285

Feel free to add me anytime, I have no friends. =p

I only really play during my lunch now though, as my daughter was born last tuesday, and sleeptime is at an all time premium. So you might not see me on as much.
That said, I’m going to challenge myself. I’m not going to hit legend or anything this season, so I have nothing to lose. Therefore, I’m going to see if I can hit rank 10 with the budget control priest deck I linked to before, plus naxx (this means practically Zombie Chow, Sludge, maybe loatheb and KT). IF I can do that, all you F2P players have to quit whining. :wink: Let’s see how high I can take it, I’m not confident of rank 5 (maaaaybe by the end of the month) but I’m pretty sure I can do rank 10 with that deck. Control Priest Deck - Hearthstone - Icy Veins

Actually I see it already includes naxx cards, so I’ll option Loatheb and KT and see how it goes. :wink:

568

Ok, so I just made the deck, card for card. I initially thought that pyro wasn’t going to be good enough with mech mage having so many 3 health minions, but the first match I had was against a face Hunter (all charge, all face, all the time) and I beat him but barely. So I’ll keep those pyros in for a few more games, for science!

With one win I’m now at rank 12 1 star, let’s see how this goes.

569

Playing around a 28.6% chance is foolish, which is what it is to be holding a don’t-keep card on turn 6. Virtually every Druid plays the 3-drop: Shade.

I don’t disagree that you’ll get burned on some games on turn 6 or some games you need just one more draw and you’d win. You need to play it for the long run. You don’t play like your opponent it going to have combo on turn 9, since that’s rare even with double combo. You don’t play around TBK on turn 6. In your scenario, you’re probably still at like 28 health. Combo may even be a relevant concern that game. Play the board. That’s how you win.

570

Just had a Rogue get her Assassin’s Blade and put out a Worgen Infiltrator. The next turn, she hits her weapon with poison and Tinker’s sharpsword (another overpowered card), and a Cold Blood for her infiltrator. So she has a weapon with 4 attacks of 8 damage each and a 9 attack I couldn’t get to.

It did not end well.

571

I mean, the way I see it, you have more than a 25% chance of outright losing the game (almost). Terrible. the other 75% of the time, you don’t gain any advantage. Among the minions that Druid plays, Belcher doesn’t trade well against Piloted Shredder, Druid of the Claw, loses to Ancient of Lore, Ancient of War, Shade (shade will be at least 5/5 by the time belcher drops, otherwise, Druid won’t attack). Keeper is mostly irrelevant except when it silences your belcher.

All that, for the advantage of putting 3 power on the board. Is 2 power from a Harvest Golem really so much worse that you’d spend your belcher on that? I’m trying to think of a situation where more power on the board would make sense, and that’s if you play aggro and want to burn druid out before turn 9. But if so, you wouldn’t be playing belchers.

Anyway, on the probability of drawing the combo, Reddit - Dive into anything

Adjusting for the fact that you wouldn’t keep the combo pieces in hand, if druid runs double combo, there is a 25% chance that he has it on turn 9, if he does not have any additional card draw. If he drew 3 cards (say, Ancient of Lore + Wrath), then the chance goes up to 40%. Of course, sometimes you can rely on reading your opponent’s plays, but I think it’s safe to say that if you can, you should play around a 40% chance of losing the game.

So I dunno, if you don’t see the value in holding a taunt until turn 9, I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree. :slight_smile: It may be that we just have different styles, I play mostly Priest and Rogue, so on Priest I’m playing as safe and value as possible, and as Rogue I’m just cycling for the combo and staying alive long enough to pull it off.

That’s the new Oil Rogue, it’s quite powerful! On the recent Magicamy meta report (Tempo Storm), it was billed as the top deck, and I think for good reason. It’s also surprisingly cheap for what isn’t an aggro deck, the most expensive essential card is preparation, but admittedly you probably need 2 of them. The rest of the legendaries can be swapped for cycle or utility.

Personally in my oil deck I used the southsea deckhand (2/1 with charge) because I think the guaranteed hit is worth more than stealth.

572

I think I figured out my frustration with this game. I hate losing. Poker. Fantasy Football. Debates. Board Games. I dislike losing.

In this game, you just have to accept it. You’re going to lose. A lot. Once you and your deck reach a comparable level (and their matchmaking and level divisions still suck), you’re going to lose at least 1 out of 3 games, no matter what you do.

Sometimes, you just have to lie back and think of England.

573

The slow pace of advancement in this game has been sucking my interest. I had a couple of weeks of awful draws in arena and got 1 and 0 win runs. And I’ve had nothing but 40 gold quests. So in two weeks, I’ve basically done nothing at all. Not that it’s unusual, but it’s not usually quite as bad as that. I’ve been doing my dailies and playing a decent bit for, what, 4 months now? And I feel like I’m basically only able to construct 2 viable decks, both of which are incomplete/non-optimal.

So when I get bored of my 2 decks, I basically just do the dailies and do 2 arena runs per week. Meh.

574

At about this point, I would just say, if you like the game and are still playing it, why not drop a few dollars on a couple of packs? ;D

Seriously though, if you want to go this F2P route, unfortunately you have to either grind a lot or be good at arenas. Personally, I don’t have the time or the inclination for grinding, and I just spent the money. It’s not even like this game is pay to win, if I really wanted to grind up the ladder as quick as I could, I’d play the new Xixo face hunter which is super cheap. But spending money gets you cards, and cards, just like in the game, give you options. I find this game fun enough to have dropped over $120 on cards (at least 1x40 on Classic, and 2x40 on GVG), and I still think it’s a good deal.

What really gets me is the matchmaking system. Suffice to say, there’s a reason why I’m playing budget priest now.

Incidentally, my record so far is 5 wins 3 losses. 1 of those losses was to a mech mage with Antonidas, I was super winning, I even SW:Deathed his Goblin Blastmage because I thought that Mechmage topped out at the blastmage… up until he dropped Antonidas. And I didn’t have any answers and I just straight up lost the game.

This is an example of the nuance in playing a control deck, knowing when to get the most value out of your cards. I was at 30 health before antonidas dropped, so I could have taken 3, 4 swings of the blastmage with no problems, but I spent my cards too early and paid for it dearly. Lesson learnt, always keep a death or MC for Antonidas.

575

I paid the $25 for Naxx, that’s enough spent as far as how much I like the game, I think. It also seems like the ways of buying in simply aren’t that great of value. I could spend 40 on cards easily and not get much out of it. I can get a world of games on steam for as much as 3 packs would cost in Hearthstone, and 3 packs is nothing. If Arena runs were .75-1 instead of $2 I’d considering buying a few a week.

576

If you like arena, I’d advise you to get better at them, and try to “go infinite”, i.e. 7 wins. 7 wins means you earn back the gold you spent getting the arena, and get a free pack besides. Even if you miss 7, often times the reward gold you get will be a substantial enough amount that the daily or 10 wins or whatever will get you your next arena anyway. It’s the fastest way for a F2P to gain cards, but you have to like (and be good at) arena.

Again, watch trump. Trump - YouTube He does an arena every day, so he’s pretty good at it, and he explains all of his plays very very well.

577

Cheer up Senor. It will only take five years of dailies to have all the cards … however … word is they will be announcing a new expansion in March … so add a couple more years. And just like you really need some GvG cards to be competitive, the power creep will surely mean you will need some of the new cards.

I pretty much only play the dailies, too. I don’t play every day, but roll them over until I get ones I like – or until I have three I don’t like. Then I play Casual to clear a spot. Today I was stuck with having to play off a Priest deck … took me 13 games to win five. I don’t know how to play Priest and don’t have the cards to make a recent top-rated deck.

This month I have been playing the previously mentioned Xixo Face Hunter deck. It is cheap to make and very effective. I am currently at Rank 9, playing very little.

This month Xixo was first to Legend on EU, made Legend on NA very quickly, and then reached legend on Asia in around 16 hours playing this deck without Leeroy because he didn’t have it on the Asia server (He played a second Glaivezooka instead of Leeroy). He was top 10 Legend on all three servers with this deck. He streams on twitch.tv and is pretty good about explaining his thinking.

So yeah, it is still possible to be competitive with a f2p deck, but the opportunities are very limited.

A few days ago I installed the Hearthstone Deck Tracker. It’s pretty interesting – makes it easy to keep track of the cards the other guy kept and/or mulliganed, among other things. I’d never used the other programs like it because they were closed source and kept an internet connection open – this one is open source, so not likely up to any dirty work.

578

But Priest is so fun! =D

At 6 wins 4 losses, only had time for 2 games today. Mechmage is an auto win from now on, I guarantee it! Priest is a losing match, though. This deck is tilted too anti-aggro to win consistently vs other control decks. Luckily, Handlock, Control Warrior and yes, Priest are all super rare on ladder now, it’s all mech mage/hunter all the time, and I’m currently 100% winrate against hunter! (ok, so that’s only 2 games).

Wild Pyro is MVP so far, I can’t believe I actually wanted to cut him without even trying him out. AOE so good.

579

Well, easier said than done, but yeah, it’s nice when that works out. I’ve hit 7 only 3 times. What’s odd is that I almost always used to hit 3, and hit 4+ a little more than half the time, but something seems to have changed and I often have 0-2 win runs now, which I think I only had maybe 10-15% of the time for my first 50 arena runs or so. I don’t know what changed - I don’t think I’ve gotten worse at arena, so maybe the matchmaking changed? I don’t know.

I can actually make that hunter deck - I think I’d need an extra eaglehorn and arcane golem which is easy enough. But where does the card draw come from? That’s almost a zoo deck (more charge obviously, but in terms of unit cost). I could see it running out of steam pretty fast.

I guess my complaint isn’t that I want to have optimal decks for every style early on, but it would be nice to have viable decks for different styles. Almost all of the low cost decks are aggro decks. That hunter deck isn’t too much different from the cheap zoo deck I’d played a couple of months ago. I’m actually having a little fun with mech mage - not because mechs are that fun, but because I worked two unstable portals into the deck so at least sometimes something interesting happens.

580

Playing against Mechmage, for me, is looking at the cards I draw, then mulligan, and then pretty much knowing if I have a shot or not right then. I just lost one when, after I had drawn Antondias, Flamestrike, polymorph, and soot spewer that I was done. Next one, I had a Frostbolt, an annoyobot, and sludge, so I won. I’d love to think that skill has any part of playing against mechmage, but, with my deck at least, it’s simply fate.