Was just at Rank 1 with 5 stars and got the worst fucking mulligan and early card draw in history, and lost to Hunter. Then was winning against another Hunter until he brought out Dreadscale, which is anathema to Zoo. Back down to 3 stars. Ugh, this is nerve-wracking.
I still haven’t had a 12 win run since Whispers has released.
I feel your pain. Good news for me though, I’m apparently the 2484th best ranked player in the Americas this season! (Legend! Wooo!) I am also now obligated to preface any Hearthstone statements with the phrase "As as Legend player … ".
Looking back at my trackers it took an ungodly 327 games for R5 - Legend (That drop from half-way through 2 back to R5 hurt) and I managed an overall winrate of about 54%. I held my own v Warriors and Hunters, got stomped at a 2:3 w/l ratio v Warlocks and crushed Shaman at 2:1. Other class matchups were basically noise in the data.
Now that I’ve proven to myself that I can do it I doubt I’ll go hard for legend again. The time:reward ratio of going past R5 just isn’t there once you have the cardback (unless you really want Blizzcon points or something). I know Ben Brode commented on his stream recently that they’re looking at maybe changing the laddering experience, and I hope they do. I liked the competitiveness that needing to maintain an over-unity W:L ratio engenders, but the time commitment required with the one-month seasons is a bit much.
I’m rooting for you! Go go legend!
EDIT: Woo! Now it’s just you left Rigamarole! Time to join the Legend club 
And this is why I get to 15 and quit playing ladder. I figured out the amount of games it would take to get to 10, 5, and legend and it’s way more than I can budget playing in a month.
Indeed, I wouldn’t be that upset if seasons were 3 months long. Maybe with reward chests every month so new players aren’t waiting 3 months before their first golden. Or reward chests every 5 ranks and you unlock em when you hit that rank for the first time in a season (obviously they’d have to be smaller chests).
And some kind of displayable ‘best rank’ or ‘rank last season’ so friends/opponents could see how well you did before a rank reset.
I think the highest rank I’ve ever achieved was 6. The 5->Legend grind is so ridiculous I’ve never even considered doing it. Monthly resets plus an insane grind is just a silly way to run a ladder.
Their original plans for Overwatch had something very similar to the Hearthstone ladder for the competitive mode, which sounded incredibly stupid. Fortunately they got away from that, and it’s just now stupid instead of incredibly stupid.
Hm. 2x Tunnel Trog into Totem Golem into random 2 drop into Flamewreathed. I think I’ll just stop playing arena for the day now, anything else is going to feel sad.
Well I’ve bounced up and down a bit within Rank 1, between 1-4 stars but haven’t been able to push enough momentum yet. But I did achieve another huge milestone, finally:
I didn’t even like that deck too much, even though I got some awesome high-value cards (Flamestrike, 3x Bomb Lobbers, 2x Faceless Summoners etc.) that put in serious work. But I had a few utterly terrible draft choices as well (Picks # 10, 25, 26) and a weird mana curve.
That brings my overall arena win average to 4.51 / 60.26% win rate. Guess after a year and change I’m finally starting to get halfway semi-decent at this game. At least I can join the 12-win club. Gonna keep working on the Legend club.
Oh, and the rewards for 12 wins were 435 gold and 2 packs (1 WOG, 1 Classic). Didn’t you used to get guaranteed a legendary card for getting that many wins? Even though I never achieved it before, I remember reading that. That would be pretty nice but oh well, still happy.
I think 12 wins was(is?) the earliest a Legendary could be a reward. Not guarenteed.
Grats on the 12 win! I almost hoped I could round out the month with a 12-win but I only ended up with a 10-win. On one hand I managed to get off the dream coin-ringleader opener three times. On the downside I only managed the taunt spare part-Black Knight kill once, when I already had more than enough lethal on the board.
On the plus side that run finally brought my OG arena average up to 5 wins (in 46 runs). I’ve finally been able to dilute all those horrible early runs when I was playing a purely tempo style And spending all that time in ranked this month means I’ve built my gold up so high that I can probably buy the next adventure with gold and still have enough for an arena binge.
Thanks.
Nice run - I know Rogue is “top tier” for arena but I hate playing it. Something about all the running your face into minions makes me uneasy. I only pick it if Mage, Paladin, or Warlock is not available, as those are my favorite classes for arena (and the ones I have the best stats on).
I got the sickest shaman draft in arena today. Not gonna write out the whole decklist but i managed to draft doomhammer, flamewreathed faceless, totem golem, tunnel trogg, basically all the op shaman cards. Somehow i ended up 0-3, probably because i faced 3 of the sickest decks i have ever faced. Still feels bad though, thought it would be 12 wins for sure.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure everyone has had an awesome Arena deck stomped hard. I know I have. I take solace in the meh to bad decks that go unexpectedly far.
I just took a Warrior deck, with 4 real 2 drops and an Alarm-o-Bot to 8. It turns out that 3 Death’s Bite is preeeety good 
Yeah that deck definetly looks like it could struggle a bit in the very early game. Can you manage to get through early game though it looks like a nice mid game control deck with some big taunts for survivability. Best of luck in your future runs!
I don’t know why, but I’m constantly astounded by some of the amazing decks that I see in Arena. Just played (and lost), to a Mage who had an almost perfect freeze mage deck, complete with Cabalistic tomes, portals, blizzards, and flamestrike. I can’t imagine ever being able to get the draws to put together a fully formed deck like that.
Yeah that’s arena skill right there :rolleyes:. Honestly though just draft control, control, control and you should be set. Early game aggression with cheap minions and mid/lategame board clears is the best setup in arena. One key thing to remember is that big minions that are too slow for constructed such as boulderfist ogre and force tank max are gold in arena since your opponent most of the time will have to use several cards to get rid of them in arena. You probably already know this, just putting it out there. 
Heartharena has released some stats (through Kripp) about winrates going first and going second in arena. Going first has always been advantage, but stats say it’s actually getting (a lot) worse.
I had recently noticed that my winrate going second was getting relatively worse this expansion, and after struggling to bring it a 5-8% difference in that last couple of releases I was getting worried. I’m at a 70.1% first/55.3% second so I still have a problem compared to the general arena community. But at least I can blame some of my increasing disparity on the game itself.
Anyone know any good resources for improving the going-second mulligan? I’m betting that’s where my problem is.
I hear trying to aim for X-2-4-4 (where X is 1 or nothing) instead of 2-2-3 helps - the extra value from an early 4 drop compared to the extra value from an early 2 drop can be a lot more game-swinging. But that may be completely off.
Also, this tavern brawl.
Holy shit this most recent tavern brawl.
I do not miss GVG or Naxxramus at all!
Okay, sure, it was a little fun for a while to get perfect Avenge->Shieldbot->Muster->Truesilver/Shredder->Loatheb/Belcher->MC->Boom->Tirion, but holy shit was it ever demoralizing to play literally any other deck and run into a curve like that. And you can’t even run midrange druid any more to counter it because midrange druid didn’t rotate out, it got nerfed out of existence. Every time I see that guy I am just so glad that Doctor Boom is no longer in standard. That card is everything wrong with RNG in hearthstone.
New Shaman hero skin and it’s a Murloc. Acquired by recruiting a ‘friend’ (99% will probably be new smurf accounts…) Free classic packs acquired by recruiting even more ‘friends’.
Also a new quest to play against someone on your friends list, and both players get 80 gold. So I guess those smurf accounts will still be useful later ;).