Hearthstone - Blizzard's F2P Digital Card Game

[JoshL]

Hey, didn’t they say that the pack you got from arena was going to be from a random set? I’ve done three arenas this week (yeah, I’m not very good), and I got a goblin pack each time, just like before. Am I just unlucky? Is anyone getting packs other than goblins?

[delirium]

I got a TGT pack in my arena run the other day.

[Spock]

I got a TGT pack from my first post-TGT arena run today.

I played poorly and went 2-3 as a Mage. I hadn’t done an Arena in a week or so, and I definitely was rusty. I could have won a couple of the lost games had I not made silly mistakes. E.g., on one turn 2, I inexplicably chose Novice Engineer over Knife Juggler, and I promptly lost the board. (And I probably shouldn’t have drafted the Novice in the first place, though the other choices weren’t much better.) In another game, I planned my turn around having one of my minions attack something on the board, when I forgot that the first thing I did at turn start was attack something else with that very minion! Plus, I don’t know the new TGT cards very well, and I was caught off-balance by new stuff (including new Secrets) more than once.

I do wonder whether the Mage will come down a notch in this new TGT Arena meta. I really disliked my deck. I did draft a Flamestrike and two Fireballs, but no Frostbolt or Polymorph, a card that might have helped me win a game or two more. More importantly, I was offered a lot more mediocre commons. Plus, I had to draft two Spellslingers (the competing choices being awful), and those cards consistently gave my opponents better spells than I received.

[Eric_Majkut]

I recently started playing Hearthstone again just randomly, had no idea about the Tournament stuff until I reinstalled it. You guys with all your strategies! How do you have fun?! :P I just try to build a deck I think is good and perfect it as I go along. But now when I lose I feel like it’s to someone cheesing the system and min/maxing the crap out of everything. Ugh :(

The only pack of new cards I have came from some gold I had stored up. First pack I got a gold rare Mogor’s Champion, so I guess that’s lucky :) Haven’t had much chance to use the card yet though. Haven’t decided how useful it is.

[Spock]

Update on Arena rewards: Blizzard says you can get any one of the three packs, but (at least for now) the RNG is biased toward TGT packs.

Players will now have a chance to receive any of the current Hearthstone card packs (which include the Classic Hearthstone set, Goblins vs Gnomes, and The Grand Tournament) whenever a card pack is awarded, with a greater chance to receive The Grand Tournament card packs.

The Grand Tournament™ - Now Available!

[Spock]

I just try to build a deck I think is good and perfect it as I go along. But now when I lose I feel like it’s to someone cheesing the system and min/maxing the crap out of everything. Ugh :(

Mostly that’s what I do in Constructed, too. I’ve tried one or two netdecks, but I’m never happy doing it. I prefer to brew my own. Then again, I don’t play Constructed as much as Arena, which I prefer.

And I prefer Arena for precisely the reason you state: you’re not up against optimized netdecks. Everyone’s cobbling together a Frankenstein of mismatched cards, half-baked synergies, imperfect mana curves, and the occasional awful card that has to be picked. I love it. :)

[Eric_Majkut]

Mostly that’s what I do in Constructed, too. I’ve tried one or two netdecks, but I’m never happy doing it. I prefer to brew my own. Then again, I don’t play Constructed as much as Arena, which I prefer.

And I prefer Arena for precisely the reason you state: you’re not up against optimized netdecks. Everyone’s cobbling together a Frankenstein of mismatched cards, half-baked synergies, imperfect mana curves, and the occasional awful card that has to be picked. I love it. :)

I guess I just don’t “get” Arena. I mean, I understand the part about decks being randomized and how that equalizes things somewhat, but that’s about it. I’ve only played Arena once since I came back to the game. I think it was like a year ago or so the last time I played. Was Arena changed since then? I seem to remember decks back then being completely randomized, where as now you seem to get a choice between 3 cards to build your deck out.

I’ve never gotten more than 2-3 wins in Arena before being eliminated. It sucks! :( You have to pay to get in, you risk getting stuck with crappy cards, and then you’re locked into playing at least 3 rounds with that crappy hand and wasting your gold/money when you get eliminated. I don’t think I’m an amazing Hearthstone player or anything, but I don’t think I’m bad. Yet I still get beat down in Arena, it seems. But in Ranked games I tend to hold my own alright unless I come up against someone with a really good deck.

The time investment to reward ratio feels higher if I spend 100 gold on a pack and then take my chances in Ranked as opposed to saving up 150 and risking it in the Arena. I could be wrong!

[JoshL]

Update on Arena rewards: Blizzard says you can get any one of the three packs, but (at least for now) the RNG is biased toward TGT packs.

Well, RNG just hates me as usual I guess, I’m 0 for 3.

[Brakara]

I think it was like a year ago or so the last time I played. Was Arena changed since then? I seem to remember decks back then being completely randomized, where as now you seem to get a choice between 3 cards to build your deck out.

It’s always been a choice of 3 cards.

The time investment to reward ratio feels higher if I spend 100 gold on a pack and then take my chances in Ranked as opposed to saving up 150 and risking it in the Arena. I could be wrong!

The rewards can be much higher in arena, especially if you get to 6-7 or more wins. But even 3 wins normally gets you a pack and ~50 gold.

Arena is often fun when you’re tired of seeing the same decks over and over again in constructed, since here you never play with the same deck twice, not to mention you rarely know what the opponent is playing. What I don’t like, though, is the lack of class balance, which means you run into mages and paladins much more often than other classes.

[Clanan]

Arena is nice for newbies (like me) since it levels the card-collecting playing field. So I can play a Fel Reaver and quickly learn that card exhaustion is a thing. And will kill you.

[Spock]

Yes, Arena is a great way to try out cards you don’t have in your collection.

The only downside to Arena is that it costs gold to enter, and you won’t get all that gold back unless you average 6 or 7 wins per run, which is an extraordinarily high win rate, achieved only by a tiny minority of players. Still, if you win 2-3 games, you’ll get back 40 or 50 gold plus a pack, which is sort of like breaking even; you get a pack worth 100 gold plus the 40-50 gold you earn.

I “fund” my Arena habit by doing the daily quests religiously. I earn on average 50 gold a day from them, plus maybe 20-30 gold for 6-9 wins a day. So I can play Arena every other day even if I go 0-3 in every Arena run. As it happens, I average about 4.2 wins per Arena, and I make on average about 70 gold per run, so my daily quests plus gold-for-3-wins is enough to support one Arena run a day, which is all I have time for anyway.

[ineffablebob]

I “fund” my Arena habit by doing the daily quests religiously. I earn on average 50 gold a day from them, plus maybe 20-30 gold for 6-9 wins a day. So I can play Arena every other day even if I go 0-3 in every Arena run. As it happens, I average about 4.2 wins per Arena, and I make on average about 70 gold per run, so my daily quests plus gold-for-3-wins is enough to support one Arena run a day, which is all I have time for anyway.

This is more or less what I do, although I tend to do Arena runs even less than every other day, and thus have some gold build-up which is nice for when new stuff comes out. Hearthstone has really hit the sweet spot for a F2P game, at least for me, in terms of always feeling like you can keep on playing without needing to spend money. Which, in turn, makes me more likely to actually spend some money, which I have in fact done.

[ineffablebob]

Played my first post-TGT arena today and went 3-3. Chose Paladin in large part because I had a quest for Paladin wins. I got a decent number of the new cards: Argent Lance, Warhorse Trainer, Competitive Spirit, Lance Carrier, Silver Hand Regent. Unfortunately what I didn’t get was any of the really good stuff: Consecration, Truesilver Champion, anything with Divine Shield, Blessing of Kings. My one decent Paladin card was Lay on Hands, but that won’t win you a lot of games when you’re playing it in desperation with no board control, which was the case both times I drew it.

First loss was to a Mage with an incredible deck. Saw Flamecannon, Frostbolt, Coldarra Drake, two Flamestrikes…turn 6-7-8 was Drake, Flamestrike, Flamestrike. Not a lot you can do about that. Second loss to a Hunter who got a crazy fast draw and killed me on turn 7, destroying everything I put on the board in the process. (Fast for arena. Probably would still look slow in constructed!) Third loss to a Priest who didn’t really have great cards, but basic stuff like Holy Nova, Dark Cultist, and Temple Enforcer is good enough against the crap I had.

So, disappointing arena, but it was pretty obvious where it was going from the card selection. I’m not a big fan of any of the new cards that I saw except for Lance Carrier. Maybe Silver Hand Regent, but she never lived long enough to be useful for more than one turn. Warhorse Trainer isn’t great unless you can get a lot of recruits out (like with Muster for Battle, another one I didn’t get) and Competitive Spirit relies on stuff staying out for a turn, which rarely happens unless you’re already winning. I did get a TGT pack out of it, but sadly it had the same freakin’ Warlock rare that I’ve already gotten 4 times. That’s 5 of the same rare out of a total of 13 packs. At least I get some dust out of it!

[Spock]

Hey, Ineffablebob, you did one win better than I did in my first post-TGT run. Your comments make me wonder whether the Paladin will slip in this new TGT Arena meta. ADWCTA, of HearthArena.com, thinks so. He thinks the Paladin’s good cards have been diluted, and that for the most part the TGT cards don’t make up for it. E.g., he likes Murloc Knight, but says it’s not really a 4-drop, and it competes for slots with the Paladin’s pre-existing four-mana awesomeness (the sword, Consecrate, etc).

ADWCTA has a multi-part series predicting how the new Arena will go, but if you don’t want to sit through all that, you might at least be interested in his video on Paladin, Mage, Rogue, the first third of which is on the Paladin:

[Ultrazen]

Prior to TGT the meta was overwhelming in favor of aggro. The ladder was dominated by various stripes of aggro hunter, aggro warlock, aggro paladin and aggro rouge. The only really viable control deck was Grim Patron Warrior and that was due to a completely overpowered and broken mechanic.

For more than the last year as everyone has fine tuned their decks the only solution to beating an aggro deck was just making an even more aggressive deck. It’s a big disappointment because it pretty much means that cards with mana costs 6 or greater can’t be put into a ladder deck. Well, you can put them in there – but it’s usually a mistake. Ragnaros is awesome, but at 8 mana, the game is already decided by the time you play him, and he’s a good legendary. Those 6+ mana cards are just too slow to make a difference. The only exception was, again, for completely broken and overpowered cards like Dr. Boom. Prior to TGT, most ladder games you know who was going to win by the end of turn four.

I’m skeptical that TGT is changing this. I think it did a good job at trying to avoid giving aggro decks even better cards to hit face. But, I don’t think there is much in the way of effective punishment for aggro decks because there isn’t anything that slows them down. TGT introduced two new mechanics and they are both pretty slow.

1. Inspire - It takes two mana to trigger these effects and while some of them are powerful this effectively raises the price of these cards. Two quick examples: Silver Hand regent, 3/3 creature with 3 mana cost. Inspire effect summons a 1/1 minion. So that’s five mana for effectively 4/4 in stats. That’s horrid. There is a lot better ways to spend 5 mana. Sludge Belcher for one. Other example: Kvaldir Raider, 4/4 creature with 5 mana cost, inspire gives +2/+2. So for seven mana for 6/6 stats. Or for seven mana - you can have Dr. Boom.

To make it into a decent constructed deck these days the cards have to very powerful if not outright overpowered.

2. Joust mechanic. This would in theory punish aggro decks which rely on low cost minions as those decks should consistently lose a joust. The problem is that even a control deck needs some low cost minions to establish some board control in the early game and those low cost minions will lose a joust. The other problem is that there aren’t that many joust cards - so it’s difficult to build a deck with them.

I have a pretty big collection of neat cards with cool effects – a lot of them legendaries – not only are they aren’t viable in most decks, they aren’t viable in anyway. That just seems like a sad waste.

As a consequence of this, I despise Hunter and Warlock players in the same way that I hate the New York Yankees.

I don’t hate the Yankees, but I agree with the rest of this lol.

[Squee]

Here’s a control paladin deck I threw together. First version of it since I haven’t played enough games with it to start heavily tweaking, and also just using the TGT cards I’ve gotten from packs and not crafting anything. http://i.imgur.com/O0MPpIz.jpg

Kicking butt at the moment, but since the metagame’s in turmoil with all the new cards it’s hard to say if it’ll remain viable. I also haven’t come up against one of those horrendous shaman decks that make unbeatably huge minions every turn until you die, either, but that’s partially what the double avenging wrath is to help against. I still bet that would put too much pressure on this but I’m not entirely sure how to combat that. 2 mana 3/4 is rough.

The murloc knights are excellent and can steal games if unchecked. Ideally you’d like to wait to play it on 6 mana so you can get the inspire off once, but depending on your opponent you may just want to drop it on 4 mana. Also an extremely high pressure 4 mana card, your opponent really wants to answer it immediately which can mean unfavorable trades or burning removal early which is good for you.

Refreshment vendor I waffled on when I was throwing the deck together since I thought the meta might be slow enough where they wouldn’t help, but it turns out I was wrong. Haven’t had a game yet where I was sad to play/have a refreshment vendor. In control vs control you might heal a few points of 1/1 weenie slapping which is no big deal since a 3/5 for 4 is still tolerable anyway, and against aggro it’s fantastic. Think the drawback of a zombie chow (Hint, you don’t care about it for this deck) with the added benefit of healing you. Slower than chow but you’ve got 4 sweepers, 3 guaranteed taunts, 2 truesilvers, etc.

Kvaldir raider is another incredibly high pressure cheap minion that can run away with a game and demands an answer. He’s not as useful against aggro, but against midrange and control he’s great.

Tuskarr jouster is a cool dude. Only have one so I only put one in the deck, but a 5/5 for 5 mana is perfectly ok to begin with, and if you win the joust then you get a pile of health too. Not sure I’d run two unless aggro picks up anyway, but one’s nice.

Double avenging wrath isn’t TGT but bares mentioning. Not entirely sure running two would be correct, but it does help take take board control in the mid game and maintain it later. With the tuskarr and the refreshment vendors you can heal up after the initial few turns and then start avenging wrathing the board away. Seems ok so far.

Master jouster is the TGT card I’m most unsure of in the deck. If you win the joust it’s basically a sunwalker with +1/+1, and if you lose the joust it’s just a 5/6 for 6. Unlike tuskarr jouster that IS on the weak side for the mana. Probably first on the chopping block when I start tinkering with the deck more. I’ve been winning the jousts fairly consistently so far since the deck is fairly heavy, but I’m still not sure.

Black knight is another non-TGT card that’s on the chopping block. Useful if your master jouster or Tirion get stolen via mind control/MC tech/Sylvanas, useful against most druids, alright against a lot of other decks since the game is slowing down a bit, but I’m still not entirely sure.

And finally the frost giant. The only card in the deck (Except for runaway kvaldir raiders) within BGH range. Overall I’d like to stay under the BGH radar to prevent cheap tempo swings to my opponent because of it, but with control paladin (Especially with these inspire cards) you’ll be pressing the weenie button a lot during a game, and dropping a 5 mana 8/8 late game with another card or two is fairly swingy. If I was to replace him (And I still might) I’d probably go for something like Ysera. Well under BGH range and awkward to remove.

[delirium]

Here’s a control paladin deck I threw together. First version of it since I haven’t played enough games with it to start heavily tweaking, and also just using the TGT cards I’ve gotten from packs and not crafting anything. http://i.imgur.com/O0MPpIz.jpg

I put together a kind of similar deck as yours last night, but mine is a much more low budget version since I don’t have any of those legendaries or epics. I’m running Knife Jugglers and Silver Hand Regents. I was just messing around with it in Casual but I won 3/3 so far, but I need to tweak some stuff too (fencing coach probably needs to go). Murloc Knight is so fun.

[CLWheeljack]

Is it just me, or did Floating Watcher get significantly devalued with TGT? Kvaldir Raider and Fearsome Doomguard are both very viable alternatives.

I faced an opponent last night with a Knife Juggler / Dreadsteed deck. Very interesting, especially given it making Sacrificial Pact viable. It would be pretty entertaining with Kel-Thuzad or Mal Ganis. I guess that it even gives Light’s Champion a purpose if Dreadsteed becomes significant in the meta.

It wasn’t a very good deck. But it was interesting!

Aside from that, a whole lot of Paladins.

But with all the inspires, etc it really looks like 2x Ironbeak Owl are going to be basically required for any deck from now on. sigh.

[prolix]

Given how importance silence is in constructed, I was really surprised that they didn’t release any TGT cards with it. Ironbeak 4EVA.

[Squee]

I put together a kind of similar deck as yours last night, but mine is a much more low budget version since I don’t have any of those legendaries or epics. I’m running Knife Jugglers and Silver Hand Regents. I was just messing around with it in Casual but I won 3/3 so far, but I need to tweak some stuff too (fencing coach probably needs to go). Murloc Knight is so fun.

Yeah, fencing coach sounds like he’d be iffy in constructed, although if he was going to work a deck along the lines of what it sounds like you’re playing is probably his best bet, fairly heavily inspire focused (Especially if you’re aiming for more midrange/aggro to put the pressure on). If you’ve got almost any other inspire/silverhand buffing minion out already, dropping the coach and hero powering at 3 mana sounds pretty good.

Given how importance silence is in constructed, I was really surprised that they didn’t release any TGT cards with it. Ironbeak 4EVA.

I was pretty disappointed by that too. They haven’t really added to silence at all in 2 new sets of cards and 2 adventures, and yet the abilities on minions are getting more and more powerful which makes silence more valuable. IIRC the only cards they’ve added are wailing soul (Or something like that, 3/5 and battlecry silences all your minions) and the 4/3 silence a demon dude in TGT, neither of which are silences you particularly care about for the most part.