2923

I don’t play much Ranked either. I just don’t enjoy it that much, and I find Arena much more fun and unpredictable, so I do that instead.

I like the Brawls, but some are certainly better than others. I had a lot of success with the Deathrattle Brawl by including lots of silence, something I normally don’t do. In general, I like to use Brawls to do my daily quests. They’re more fun to me than Ranked, and I feel more relaxed, as less is at stake.

2924

I’ve been having same bad times in arena lately with decks I thought would be pretty good. I was sad that a druid deck with tons of cool mech synergy (clockwork knight, mechwarper, 2x spider tank, piloted shredder, mech yeti) went only 2 wins yesterday. I feel like I’m generally playing well but just constantly running into insanely good decks and perfect answers to my plays. It’s frustrating. I think I may start recording my game and taking a closer look at my losses to determine if I’m making a lot of mistakes or just having a run of bad luck. I haven’t had much success at all in arena since the TGT expansion came out, so probably the former.

2925

I play as much Arena as I can, but at 150 gold a pop, I can only get in one every 1-2 days. My win rate is almost never such that it pays for itself. Casual… meh. If I’m playing constructed I may as well play ranked, and if I’m playing ranked I want to improve. It’s the same reason I stopped playing StarCraft II, I suppose… I just realized at some point that I wasn’t very good, and went back to single player games.

2926

Tried my variation on that token Druid and went 2-2 in Casual play, winning my daily quest pretty quickly. Kind of a fun deck! I don’t have the Keepers or the Ancients of Lore, so I swapped in a couple silencers and a big taunt in their stead.

My favorite thing was playing the Violet Teacher, then casting Innervate, then Power of the Wild; that produced two students, both of whom got the Power buff. (I guess the Teacher’s summoning ability procs before the Power buff takes effect.) I already had a Haunted Creeper on board, so the result was a pretty fearsome board on around turn 4, I think it was.

And I beat a Patron Warrior with it. Satisfying. :)

2927

After all the horrible arena runs I had despite drafting lots of high quality cards, I’m suddenly doing pretty well with what I thought were going to be crap decks. I went 6 wins yesterday with a priest deck that had only five 2-drops of average quality, and for removal just one Ligthbomb and 2 Shadow Word: Death. Somehow I curved out perfectly in many of my games, which allowed me reach my trusty gang of solid 6 cost minions and take control (Frost Elemental, Drakonoid Crusher, Boulderfist Ogre, Master Jouster).

Today I have a rogue deck currently at 3-0. I have a single minion in the 4 slot and zero minions in the 6+ slot. I have eleven 2-drops and just a couple decent removals (an eviscerate, a backstab, a sabotage, and a blade flurry [one perditions blade]). I do have a sprint, which is totally essential in a deck like this.

2928

Played some Brawl games to get the weekly pack. It’s the lots-of-unstable-portals one again, and man, it’s a whole lot worse now that TGT is out. Any Joust is an auto-fail since none of the decks have any minions. Glad I got a win after three tries so now I don’t have to play it again this week.

2929

Yes, Joust is usually auto-fail. It actually worked for me once when I summoned a Malorne, and he died and was shuffled into my deck. But just that once.

I still like this Brawl. It’s so RNG-dominated that I don’t mind losing, and mostly I’ve been winning.

2930

I don’t know if it’s something about my new computer or I’m just having bad luck lately, probably the former, but I’m getting disconnects constantly now; just lost an arena game where I was 8-0 going in and had a great play but got disconnected twice in one turn. Then the ?!@#$!@# gives me a “well played” when I reconnect the second time, see I’ve run out of time and the play is lost and he has total domination so I concede.

It’s times like these I want to be able to reach through electronic cables to strangle people, fortunately I don’t have that ability and calm down after a bit :D

2931

OK, now I’m hating this Tavern Brawl. I have just gone 1-8, trying to finish a stupid Priest quest, including 6 losses in a row. I draw Target Dummies, the other guys draw legendaries. I’m done with this.

2932

I got the win 5 brawls quest, and went 5-1 with Warlock (only losing to bad draws in a mirror match). The tapping power is insane when your opponent has no card draw.

2933

I’m really doubtful the new Ranked rewards were a good idea. I felt compelled to get to rank 5 because it’s such a large jump in value, but it took a big time and dust investment and felt really grindy and boring at times. On the other hand, I don’t think I would have delved into the strategies as deeply without the external motivation. Secret Paladin can be surprisingly complex, when you look at it from both sides.

2934

I just can’t bring myself to do it; I think I hit rank 3 or 2 one month and decided there was no way I was going to ever bother grinding to legend and the annoyance with ranked has just grown since then.

I top out around rank 10 or 11 now before I get bored with winning 55-60% of my games whilst slowly climbing the ladder and bust out something fun like mill druid. Win % drops to 30 or so but I have so much more fun losing the ranks.

2935

I don’t know if it’s coincidence, but I’ve also been getting regular disconnects since about last Tuesday/Wednesday, costing me matches as well. This was a non-issue for me only a couple weeks ago.

Nothing has changed for me on my end, not as far as hardware or service is concerned anyway. I can’t speak to any games my ISP might be playing.

2936

I just hit rank 10 for the first time and I’m pretty stoked about it. I flew down the ladder to rank 12 early on in the month and then treaded water for a while around there before a horrible streak last week dropped me back to rank 16. I thought my quest for rank 10 might be over for the month, but then last night all the knuckleheads were out in force and I had a nice streak of easier wins to reach rank 11. This morning I took 3 hard-fought wins for rank 10.

I’d like to make an attempt for rank 5, but I have a feeling I’m going to be seeing a lot of dragon priest in those ranks. That’s a pretty bad matchup for the token druid deck I’m using. I’ll see how it goes, but if things start looking bleak I’ll probably just dink around with sillier decks for the rest of the month.

2937

Just played 5 face hunters in a row…so over it.

I like playing different decks, and trying out different things. I’m never too concerned with my rankings etc, but being continually dead by round 5 gets a little old unless you are playing something specific to deal with face decks.

There seems to be so much low mana minion garbage going on right now, I get the feeling most people don’t even have a card in their deck with more than 3 mana cost.

2938

I confess to my guilty pleasure last night. I played a modified face hunter for half an hour or so. The last person I played was a secret paladin. He makes it to turn 6 and plays his mysterious challenger. He was sat opposite me with a board full of minions PLUS all of his secrets but on about 8 or so health.

My modified face Hunter runs Flare… I didn’t event get a chance to play unleash the hounds as he rage quit. :)

2939

I’ve been since release and often work down to rank 16 or 17. Would like to get to under 10 - I believe my play is decent, but my deck building is weak. Do those of you that get below 10 often do it with a specific deck? Only one particular class? Or do you have 2 or 3 strong decks and rotate between them?

2940

To climb the ladder like that the only way I could do it was by using an existing deck that was doing well in the meta. I tried a few then hit upon one that just felt like I had an unfair advantage and played it for a few days straight to learn the correct plays. In my case it was tempo mage.

Unfortunately I have found no real way for me to get below rank 10 with a deck of my own making.

2941

Yeah, I piloted a pretty close list to an uncommon but strong midrange Priest that some streamer/pro or another published. It was good enough against the meta at the time that I was able to consistently climb the ladder without switching.

That was a fun deck to play. You really had to understand it and how it handled various common opponents to be successful. Much more engaging to play than Zoo or face hunter or whatever.

2942

I feel like you need to either be very good at deck building or netdeck to reach 10. I know it is somewhat of a dirty word around here, but I don’t think there’s any shame in netdecking in Hearthstone if you intend to play the ladder because everyone does it. I also don’t think there’s any shame in crafting a Dr. Boom if you don’t have one, since so many decks use it to great effect.

I’ve only been tryharding on ladder for about 2 months now, but my strategy has been to focus on playing one deck a month and try to learn that deck as best as I can. The decks I’ve been choosing will usually depend on new cards I have collected during the previous month or the classes for which I already have a good collection of key cards. In July, I opened a Malygos so I played a Dragonlock in August. Among my 50 pre-order TGT packs, I got a couple of Astral Communions so I crafted some Ancient of Lores to mess around with that deck for funsies, and then discovered Token Druid so I went with it this month. In September, I opened a Tirion and also a Twilight Guardian so I’m kind of torn between Midrange Paladin and Dragon Priest for October. Now after a few months, I have a bit of flexibility in strong decks I feel comfortable playing so I can kind of rotate if I want to or need to -if one isn’t working due to the meta.