Wow, guess I’m just lucky as hell, my first 3 legendaries were Thalnos, Gruul, Leeerrroooooy! After that, I opened The Beast. Eh. Can’t win everything.
I’ve only spent $15(?) for the 15 packs so far, and those only got me Thalnos and Gruul. Been doing arenas to fill out the rest of my collection, I only really play Rogue, and have everything I need for Miracle Rogue, but… I just don’t like playing Miracle. Every game is a pull at the slot machine, it seems. Mostly playing Tempo Rogue on ranked, up to Rank 11 this Season, but I’m not pushing for any higher - just happy to arena at this point. Maybe I’ll try for rank 5 next season.
My arenas have been utter rubbish though, I’ve got 1-3 twice now. Last draft I had Mage (yay!) with not a single Fireball offered, bad 4 drops, only 1 frostbolt, had flamestrike offered but couldn’t take it due to having to take water elemental to round out my 4 drops (otherwise my sole 4 drop would be violet teacher, with my only spells being arcane knowledge and 1 frostbolt)… Bad. And then to add salt to the wound, my reward was dust, not even gold. Here’s for thread luck! =D
Jaraxxus is super awesomely fun. I crafted a Leroy a while ago for an aggro deck then opened a golden Leroy shortly thereafter; I’d disenchant the golden one for the dust, but I’m waiting to see if he is going to get nerfed
Well, I totally cashed out our gold, our dust, and concentrated on one single deck. Put together a nice deck with a few whites, a few blues, and a purple.
And we promptly got our ass (asses) handed to us three games in a row. At level 19.
What the hell is it with super powered decks (decks with like an epic, 2 or 3 purples, 4 blues, and like 10 whites) at the lower levels? It seems like a waste of time to try and put together a nice deck and play well, just to get steamrolled by an idiot with an overwhelmingly powerful deck who can’t seem to get out of the 20, 19, 18 level? It’s frustrating as hell.
like i said, there is little incentive for people to rise in rank. considering that it resets every month, a lot of people just mill around the lower ranks doing quests. as it is now, the best way to meet people of your own skill is through the Arena or Casual.
True enough, but some cards *are *just flat-out “fuck you, I win now”. Or just “fuck you, I now have a colossal advantage over you scrub”. Leeroy, Defender of Argus, Argent Commander are all very powerful cards that can’t really be answered adequately with a noob deck. Same goes for that Demonist deck with the lava & earth giants. “Oh, you’ve got two removal spells in your deck ? How cute ! Here, have four 8/8s in a row before I turn into Jaraxxus to heal myself back. Then I’ll nuke *your *creatures and heal myself with them too. GG.”
I mean, I always try to keep one assassinate/sheep/execute in hand even though it could help immediately, just because I assume my opponent is going to slam down a busted Legendary to finish the game (Yllasera is another “do you have removal in hand, yes/no ? If no, gg”). What are you supposed to do about 4 8/8s turn 6 or 7 ?
Cairne Bloodhoof is also stupid good - “yo, dawg, I heard you like the single best common card in the game, so I put a yeti in your yeti so you can yeti after you yeti”.
I agree that an absolutely basic card deck will stall out quickly. But last night I used this aggro warrior deck to go from rank 20 to rank 14 in about 2 to 3 hours.
The only ‘blue’ cards are upgrade, mortal strike and frothing berserker, which are easily obtainable by spending a few hours with the game. You could probably replace the upgrade and frothing berserker and still do alright. There are no ‘purple’ cards. I beat plenty of decks with legendary(orange) cards, including Ragnaros and Cairne. I still haven’t stalled out. Simply stuffing your deck with rares or legendaries or epics is definitely not a sufficient condition for it being good, but more importantly, I would say it isn’t even necessary. The absolute top level decks will obviously need some of the good cards that are rarer, but that is usually a function of the deck philosophy, not the card rarity. A common card can also be really powerful - the Yeti or the Harvest Golem for example are common cards, but are found in many top level decks. Hamlet thinking in terms of ‘my deck has a blue and a purple, but it’s still getting beaten by people with orange, that sucks!’ is just going to get in the way of their becoming better at the game and perhaps even enjoying it.
I think when it comes down to it, skill levels being equal, a legendary or rare will give the player an advantage over a player without them (excepting maybe cards like Nozdormu or Cho). This is definitely exacerbated at lower skill levels where, even if a card isn’t particularly good from a top level perspective, it can be devastating against a player who doesn’t know to save removal, or how to use taunt correctly, or whatever.
So Hamlet is probably seeing a real thing, the rares and legendaries probably are giving him and his daughter trouble. If you’re Trump, you can probably steamroll those same players and decks, but at Hamlet’s skill level the more powerful rares are a real potential danger.
I really do recommend playing a cookie cutter deck for a bit though, go to LiquidHearth and look up the Free <Class of your Choice> decks, they can get your pretty far, and you can very easily convert them to the budget decks which can probably get you to the low single digit ranks (with practice).
I’ve gathered enough of the game, and read enough about it, to get the basics, and to understand the value of some cards over others. But I’m also not invested enough to actually play someone else’s deck recommendation. That may be the next step.
Perhaps it was lack of detail in my complaint, but the biggest problem is that those high powered cards really do matter in a close game. And most of the games I play are close. Occasionally I’ll lose the board control early and be fighting from behind, or I’ll just get steamrolled by a plethora of huge cards. But the game gets so frustrating when it seems almost every battle is close, I’m right in it despite fighting a bit uphill and then BAM! here comes Yllasera, Jaaraxus, a faceless manipulator, big game hunter, Leroy, or the Black Knight and it’s all over. It’s the investment of the early part of the game and the attempting to overcome when, in point of fact, I didn’t really stand a chance at all from the beginning. And it’s especially bad when the person has been playing poorly.
It’s those games, the ones where the huge cards do matter, that piss me off more than anything. I don’t mind losing, or even losing close games, if I’m being outplayed, I make mistakes, or the luck of the draw doesn’t work out for me. I just hate being beat by better cards and not better card players. And that seems to be happening way too frequently for my taste.
Sure enough, but its important to recognise that it’s not simply a function of ‘card power’, or you’ll end up getting frustrated and won’t enjoy yourself. Don’t think about your deck in terms of card rarity. That’s all I’m suggesting.
Like other posters, I suggest you switch to playing Arena. It’s a great way to play decks that are (in theory) balanced in terms of power. Constructed play relies on your deck being built around some principle(for e.g the deck I posted above basically relies on beating down the opponent before they have a chance to play a Ysera or Jaraxxus). This often requires the whole deck to be synergised, and can be difficult to achieve for very new players. Arena on the other hand starts you off on a level playing field. I know I enjoy building new random decks each time. Its fun to sometimes get to pick and play legendaries that you don’t have!
Disclaimer - VERY rough guidelines. There are few absolutes in the game.
Use the pick lists I linked earlier and your mana curve to choose your deck. What that means is when you start picking your deck the first five to ten picks will almost always be the best card of the three that are presented to you. After that, start looking at the mana cost of the cards. If you have too many cards above 6 mana for instance, you may want to pick lower cost cards over higher cost.
A typical good arena deck(varies a little by class) would have a mix of at least 4-5 spells for removal, 5-7 good 2 cost minions, 5-10 good 5 cost and above minions and the rest in the middle. You play by balancing good trades(between minions on the board), damage to the opponent and board control. This is usually more intuitive in Arena than constructed IMO. When I started playing, I thought that you typically look for a way to have your minions trade and still stay alive. I learnt as I went that good trades are more complicated than that, but that’s a decent starting point.
I spend all my gold on packs instead of arena. It isn’t something you need to do if you don’t want to.
If I had mostly starting cards, I’d work toward something like this: mid-range shaman deck. I don’t know where it says how much dust it costs, but I’m sure it’s under 1600. That wouldn’t take too long to get and it uses a lot of strong neutral minions that you’d want to work towards anyway. The idea behind it would be to go crazy trying to get board control early in the game and then tramp on the gas so you beat them to death before they can remove everything.
I am loving the Arena. I read the advice, and it’s really quite good. I won 4 before going out, which isn’t great, but better than the luck I was having, and I feel much more in control over whether I win or not. I really need more experience with building a deck, but it’s eye opening to the fun of the game.
Oh absolutely - you do need a deck that makes sense with synergy between the cards, you need to know what the hell you’re doing, and knowing what the hell the other guy is doing is possibly even more important.
But when you’ve got a working Deck Concept that can work with common card A, it’s almost a given that it will work even better with blue or purple card B that does the same thing only better in every way. E.g. you could put a TAZDINGO! in your deck for a decent 4 mana wall, or you could drop a Defender of Argus for two decent walls AND a creature on top of that. You could use the Goblin Rocketeer as your Rogue finisher (with Shadowstep goodness) for 10 points of cool surprise damage by turn 8. Or you could do it with Leeroy for 12 damage, as early as turn 6 (16 on turn 7 with the combo buff on top for maximum shenanigans).
Cool. Hope you keep having fun with it. The moment you hit 3 wins, you get some gold back in your rewards, and you always get a pack. Combine that with your daily quests and one or two free arenas a day are easy. If you want to play more arenas with minimal grinding, start a new account. Half an hour spent beating the basic and expert AIs will get you a free arena and enough gold for two more. As long as you don’t abuse this system, I don’t believe its against the ToS either, since many prostreamers have multiple accounts. The only drawback is your effort and packs opened won’t go into building up your collection on your main account, and that may detract from your enjoyment.
ETA: Also, 4 to 7 wins are very respectable in Arena. Going above 7 means you’re doing really well, and that arena will net you above 150 gold.
Not really. Having more rares/epics/legendaries does give you more options, but for instance there’s no rare that’s as good as Harvest Golem, Flame Imp, Lightning Bolt, Fireball, Fire Elemental (lord the complaints Fire Elemental would get if it was legendary), or a lot of other cards for their particular niche.
Epics and Legendaries do tend to have a hammerlock on the high-mana-cost finisher category - you can only go so far with Ogres and you’re definitely not going to be as good. And there are some decks that just need rares/epics/legendaries to work at all, like miracle rogue or warrior control.
