Squee
2903
The goodie box for ranked is murdering me. I normally just putz around a little in ranked and then play a bunch of casual since you get better variety in opponents and thus can play weird decks more reliably. But now that there’s a 500 dust prize for getting rank 5 I feel compelled to climb. Did it last season and I’m already rank 6 now, but holy hell ranked is so much less fun. Still has enjoyable moments (Just killed a patron warrior by cabaling his warsong commander to give charge to two 2 attack weenies for the last 4 points of his life) but it’s mostly just memorizing all of “The Good Decks” and knowing your own deck well enough to know exactly what to play when. And then you still lose because a doomsayer jumps out of a shredder or an implosion gets 2 and/or 4 or a knife juggler hits with unerring accuracy in a board full of targets.
Most enjoyable ranked-viable deck is dragon priest though. Playing my own tweaked version which is working pretty well, but there might still be room for improvement. I haven’t got a Chillmaw which I’m sorely tempted to craft. Completely ruins patron/aggro/combo druid/mostly secret paladin and in control matchups it’ll likely either eat a removal or take out a big guy. Not sure what I’d replace to put it in, though.
Also took out the 3/5 for 3 blackwing techs in favor of making room for double pain and death. Cutting 3/5 for 3 seems crazy, but pain can kill minibots/jugglers/belchers/twilight guardians in other dragon priests/armorsmiths/acolytes of pain etc etc etc, and death can handle blackwing corruptors/most legendaries/9 8 secret box paladin guys/doomguards/etc etc etc, and they’re both cheap enough you can often do something after playing them. On top of that I’m being greedy by playing Rend who has often done good things. Especially when your opponent sees you burn two deaths and then assumes you can’t clear his next legendary. Also strengthens the deck against control/combo which is the weaker area for dragon priest since you already tend to ruin aggro with all your taunts and sweepers.
Harumph.
Spock
2904
What graphics quality do you guys use? I’ve been using High, but I occasionally do get a little stuttering with it. Not a big deal, but I’m curious what others do.
I’m thinking about taking it down a notch so that I can give Hearthstone Deck Tracker another try. I really like the idea of the Deck Tracker, but it caused me lots of lag.
Edit: Oooh, I see there’s a new update to Deck Tracker that purports to eliminate most stuttering and lag. Off to try it now.
Edit, the Sequel: By golly, Deck Tracker now works without any lag at all; he’s changed the way it reads the log file or something. But now that I have it, I’m not sure it’s the be-all and end-all. Nice to have, I guess.
delirium
2905
I’ve been really enjoying my slightly modified version of the hot new token druid deck. It’s a bit of a tricky thing to play, but the games are always exciting because you’re basically constantly riding a fine line between victory and defeat. You have to delicately balance board control and face damage, and the decision is not always obvious. Losing control of the board is dangerous because most of your damage comes from buffing up weaker minions, and your resources for earning it back are fairly meager (Swipe and Wrath… which most of the time will only allow for modest comebacks). On the other hand, the deck has virtually no high damage minions and it will generally stall out as soon as you use up your Force of Nature and Savage Roars, so you need to put the pressure on with face damage as quickly as possible. It’s a beast of a deck when you can get everything clicking and it’s a lot of fun trying to squeeze enough value from each card to set up for a huge final blow.
Squee
2906
WHEW. Finally cracked rank 5. Had an infuriating string of games there at the end but then managed to winstreak from 0 star rank 6 in to rank 5. Now I can probably go back to dicking around in casual/arena since I doubt I’ll get the urge to poopsock to legend without winstreaks.
I also always run on high graphics quality. Oddly enough it seems like it runs worse if I bump it down. Glad the deck tracker doesn’t stutter now. It’s not massively important since I’m pretty good at remembering what cards I’ve got left in my deck as it is, but it’s mostly handy for keeping track of what my opponent has already played. Can sometimes be difficult to keep track of how many patrons got played, for example.
Spock
2907
Grats on rank 5, Squee. I doubt I’ll ever have the patience to play constructed that diligently.
In Arena, on the other hand, it’s not all that useful to track what my opponent has played. He can have 5 Hexes or Polymorphs, after all. I’m debating turning that feature off, at least for Arena games.
Conversely, keeping track of one’s own deck is probably more important in Arena than in Constructed. If you’ve played the same deck to rank 5, you probably have it pretty well memorized. But one plays an Arena deck at most 14 or 15 times, and (in my case) more like 7 or 8 times on average. By the 5th or 6th game, I know the deck pretty well, but even then, it’s great to have the decklist with played cards grayed out.
delirium
2908
It may not be as useful to track your opponent’s cards in arena, but by the mid game you might get a sense of the cost of their remaining cards if you assume they drafted somewhat balanced curve. Also, there’s apparently a bug with joust where the trackers will show you when the opponent draws a card that they previously used in a joust, but I haven’t confirmed that for myself.
Had an epic arena run of craziness with shaman today, just thought I’d share my arena notes for the run:
Loss 1: kodo rider + foe reaper. that’s fair!
Loss 2: dead on turn 5. (not in notes: if I’d played argent squire on turn 1 like a normal person I’d not have had that happen, but he’d played a zombie chow and I didn’t want to squire into it. then he dropped 2 1 health 1 drops the next turn. life total rapidly dwindled.)
Game 6: opponent gets mountain giant from unstable portal. still win.
Game 7: opponent gets earth elemental from effigy. still win.
Game 10: opponent plays mysterious challenger. pulls 3 secrets. later plays another secret from hand. also plays grand crusader. also has tirion. Still win. Granted, the only reason I won is because Tirion popped up in a joust and not on the board as I had no hex or silence and that would have been game ending. Because Tirion showed up in the joust I windfury and flame totemed far earlier than I normally would have as my deck was pretty beefy. Not beefy enough for Tirion though.
Loss 3: Murloc knight. Proving that murloc knight > Tirion. Or something like that.
I played an aggro Paladin today, so intent on going face that s/he ignored the Muster fro Battle I played on turn 3, despite the fact I still had the coin and hit me in the face for 5 damage. Shame about that Quartermaster I had lurking in my hand. Pity all my opponents aren’t that easy, they usually hunt down Silver Hand Recruits like vermin.
I’m trying to decide if it would be insane to run 6x AoE with Warlock (2 each demonwrath, shadowflame and hellfire).
It seems crazy, like at that point I’m just building the entire deck defensively, with no regard for how I’d actually win.
I also added Sylvanas to my demon deck, because, you know, why not?
Sylvanas is the last Legendary I crafted, so of course, I drew a second one in a pack this week
I just tried it. Actually its fun. I went demon synergy.
Not sure Sylvanus fits though.
Yeah, I don’t have him :(
Harkonis
2915
Malygos and Hellfire can certainly be interesting
I’ve been experimenting with a TGT Token Druid and the results so far have been pretty good. It plays a bit like Midrange Hunter in that you only need to exchange to remove threats and take advantage of very favourable trades. So far the results have been promising having gone 10-4 with it. Admittedly the first three wins were in test runs in Casual and the rest in Constructed at ranks 16-14 (EU Server).
Here’s the deck at Hearthstats, if anyone’s interested:
Force of Nature and Dr. Boom are pretty much sweepers if everything else fails, normally you win by buiding a big boarrd and casting Savage Roar. Violet Teacher and Power of the Wild are a pretty effective combo in doing this.
Spock
2917
So that’s token druid; I hadn’t looked into it. The “tokens” are presumably the students, treants, creeper-spawn, saplings, and other little things generated by stuff. I might try it. I don’t have the Keepers or the Ancients of Lore, but I’ve got everything else, so maybe worth a go. It looks fun.
delirium
2918
I run one each of shade of naxxaramus and mind control tech instead of the haunted creepers but otherwise my deck is the same. I just found them to be too low impact in getting board control, though the sticky tokens are nice to have. Mc tech is nice to have around in case I lose the board really bad, but I’m not sure if I need it or not.
Spook - Yes, ‘token’ is an MtG term for creatures summoned by other creatures or spells.
Think I might be burning out on this game. I don’t think I will ever get beyond rank 10, and every game I play, the other guy always seems to have the right move. My Dragon Priest never has dragonkin at the beginning when I hard mulligan, the other guy’s always does; every handlock is auto-concede; every Paladin perfectly sets up his avenge combo; every mage ALWAYS has flamestrike when he needs it; I loathe playing against druid because they ALWAYS have savage roar/force of nature exactly when my life drops low enough; I’ve completely lost my patron warrior mojo. It’s just not fun anymore, and I’m obviously not improving. I have no interest in knocking around rank 17 for the rest of my days.
/sadface
I feel you, Gordon…that’s very much how I feel most of the time when playing ranked. Which is why I rarely do, preferring to stick with Arena or the Brawls. I’ll hop into ranked every once in a while, but eventually it’s going to feel like banging my head against the wall, so I never stay with it for long.
I don’t really put much effort into advancing on the ladder. Lately, I’ve mostly been just trying to see how far my own custom theme decks can get into the ladder rather than actively trying to move up.
Speaking of which, I’ve tried swapping the 2x Mistress of Pain with 2x Antique Healbot in my demon deck. Healbot hits 3-damage with shadowflame, which is nice, and I rarely got more than 6 healing out of the Mistresses. They’re expensive, but I noticed I’d frequently have turn 7-8 where I had to just leave unused mana because I had a hands full of hellfire or power overwhelming, but little or nothing to use them on. So, hopefully they’ll bridge the gap between early plays for Nerubian Egg and turn 9 Mal’ganis. As part of that same trade, I also swapped 2x Mortal Coil with 2x VoidWalker. With the aggro-heavy meta, I frequently had no use for Mortal Coil, other than occasionally popping a divine shield, and void walker does feed Void Terror and worst case scenario, 1 damage shadowflame.
Has anybody else been generally unimpressed with the tavern brawls? It seems like there’s a lot of potential, but their choices have been underwhelming. Basically: more randomness, or compress the mana curve. Deathrattle x2? Turns out, people will make decks with lots of deathrattle in them. Who could have predicted? I don’t know if they’re using it to collect data or test theories or what, but I haven’t been all that excited about the result recently.
