I’ve been mainly playing pirate warrior myself since the expansion after playing around with the old gods, and it’s been wrecking. Winning about 80% of games thus far, with the main problem I’ve had being dragon priest. I do think I’ve gotten some pretty fortunate draws vs shamans though, usually having the answer for the totem golem on 2 which could be a problem.
I am extremely pirate-themed though so we clearly have some differences; I think I’m probably trying to go much faster than you. I’m not running much hard removal, just one execute and one mortal strike mainly to finish in case they get a well-timed taunt up near the end. My deck does get wrecked if it doesn’t get a weapon by turn 3 though, and really turn 2 is much better. Bloodsail Cultist is the clear MVP of the deck.
So I’ve started playing a little bit again, but I’m beyond casual. Basically, I have a few free packs from the various ways free packs have been offered, but I’ve never bought more than that. Looking for suggestions on what to purchase: I have 2700 gold, and ~$25 in Google Opinion Award money potentially available.
Really, the only reason I play is to earn more gold via quests - I don’t care about rank. No adventures to my name, etc. I’m not against playing arena, I just won’t do better than 0-3 (which is fine! maybe someday I’ll win one or two!), as the reward is a pack regardless. I don’t expect to ever put “real” money in - if I use the google money, when it is gone that’s it. Rest will likely only be via in-game gold.
Thus, I believe my options are generally Explorers, arena, or random packs… not sure Explorers is worth it, unless it would be useful for Tavern. Considering I have so few cards, pretty much anything is a gain at this point.
EDIT: Answering my own question - after reading up a bit more on the current state of things, it sounds like Explorers is the way to go - a number of really good (and still relevant) guaranteed legendaries, for a lower price than the other expansions. This should flesh out a few more deck possibilities to allow better success at getting through the daily quests. Then I have a heap of gold to tinker with arenas and/or classic packs.
Agreed on Bloodsail Cultist. Your aggro is probably faster than mine, because I’m bad at aggro and just can’t handle the idea of relying on pure speed rather than having specific answers for specific situations. I also tend to run some store versions of decks because I don’t like spending dust despite having over 3k thanks to the full refunds on the recent nerfs.
So, I’m doing lots of suboptimal things like an ogrimmar aspirant (because I happened to have one) and only one frothing berserker (because I only have one). Also, I should probably just drop Malorkok, but he’s my warrior Legendary so he stays in.
I’m running 0 abusive sergeants and 2 cruel taskmasters, for example, because I hate dropping abusive sergeants on an empty board.
Keeping in mind, my idea of a good rank is low teens, so there’s that.
Well, I tried to pick this thing up again. Lasted nearly one match. Nearly.
Oh look I lose because your cards are straight up better than mine in every way. Great. Fun times.
It’s like playing a game of Magic only you only have commons. Meanwhile your opponent has every card ever made. Only back in Alpha when the concept of balance didn’t remotely exist. Every card might as well be a Mox/Lotus while I’m over here with Wild Growths and Grizzly Bears pretending it’s fun.
Starting at the beginning of the month is rough for anyone, but especially for new players. I wish Blizzard would rework their ladder approach so that the people who get legendary every month are not starting in the same pool as people who just started playing.
Not sure what game you were playing, but it didn’t sound like Hearthstone.
Now that standard is out, I expect you will see streamers go legendary with new accounts and no money purchases again.
I highly recommend playing ranked rather than casual, as those early levels will pitch you against players with equally basic decks and make completing quests and earning gold easier.
Also, 1 game is kind of a bad sample size to evaluate anything.
Sounded exactly like my experience of Hearthstone, and I have never played in Casual, only Ranked (and a little Arena, which was admittedly a bit better).
I don’t really know what you expect. Hearthstone is one of the most forgiving f2p games out there. You are walking into a mature game with neither cards or knowledge. A few minutes of googling will present you with a plethora of viable relatively inexpensive decks. In addition, super competitive decks piloted by experts are pleased to have a 60% win rate. Your choice of cards and likely a lack of a refined strategy is the reason not because of the “suitcase” players.
I just discovered that some folks over at HearthPwn are running a create-a-card competition. I’m a sucker for that sort of thing in just about any TCG that I play, online or otherwise. Only one more day to submit your own entry, but even if you’re not feeling creative, it’s still kinda fun to browse the stuff other people came up with.
This game is so much like golf for me. Every time I think I’m getting better, some stuff happens to remind me how much I suck at it. Ran two arenas in a row. First one as warlock, where I went 1 - 3, second as Paladin, where I went 2 - 3. The occasional sub-3 win happens, but twice in a row was humbling. And they weren’t even close losses. I got my ass handed to me in most cases. The real kick to the balls was that, both times, I got dust instead of gold. I hate that so much. If I had gotten gold, I would have enough to run another arena. Instead I’m below 150 gold now, meaning that I need to grind out quests to run another arena.
I kinda wish they had arena packs you could buy. Instead of $2 per arena, you could pre-buy arena passes for a bulk discount. Something like 10 passes for $15.99 or something along those lines. I can see me impulse buying something like that. 15 packs costs $19.99, so it would still be more expensive on a per-pack basis, making it economical for Blizzard still ($1.59 per pack vs $1.33 per pack)
After my bitching about those terrible runs, I had a few more mediocre attempts, but then The Lady smiled on me. Last 5 attempts have been Priest 5, Shaman 5, Shaman 5, Mage 8, Shaman 9. It wasn’t all those giant 4-cost 7/7 guys in the Shaman runs, either - had one in the 9-win and I think one in the second 5. The first 5-win run was a crazy good deck without that guy: 3 (!) Fire Elementals, a couple of big taunt guys at the high end, and a really good curve leading up to them. Actually thought it underperformed a bit at 5 wins. And that Mage had board clear out the wazzo: 2 Flame Strikes, that new guy with the 1-damage-to-enemies battlecry, Fireball, two Flame Lances. I drew no Flamestrikes in 2 of the 3 losses (and just one in the other), and in all three cases I’m confident drawing one more would have won the game. Moral of the story: The RNG giveth, and the RNG taketh away.
If your card collection is unimpressive like mine, here is a cheap Token Druid deck. I just replaced the two legendaries with whatever aggro-ish cards I had lying around, so there is nothing Epic or higher.
It basically exploits Savage Roar still being broken, and card draw from Mark of Y’Shaarj. Plus most are playing slower C’thun decks which you can rush down. I had moderate success so far - win-streaked to rank 16, lost 4 games in a row, won 4 games in a row.
Likewise. I’m not sure the guy I played had a card in his deck that wasn’t at least Rare.
As far as a forgiving F2P game, not at all. There are tons of them that don’t start you off significantly weaker than everyone else. I can play HotS without paying anything perfectly fine, there is usually a decent pool of free heroes and a ton of fairly cheap ones. They also throw gold at you early on so you can get a fairly reliable stable very quickly. At no point is your ETC weaker than the other guy’s. He might have more skins and mounts, but when you play you’re all equal. I can pay zero dollars in World of Tanks and do fine. I can’t sling gold ammo at will every match, but I can buy it with silver and if I build up my cash reserves I can sling with the best of them when I want to.
It’s like starting out in Magic without Rares against people playing tourney decks. Your gameplay is basically irrelevant because they’ll just play bomb after bomb until you lose. Oh look a 7/9 guy with an insane ability, I’ll counter that with… nothing. I literally have nothing that can stop that. And it’s not like my vanilla 2/3 guy beats out their 2/4 guy with some insane ability for the same cost, like, ever.
Arena was fairly fun as I remember it, but you aren’t allowed to play that without a pile of gold, which you have to try to earn while playing your Starter crap against entire decks of the best cards. It doesn’t matter if they’re bad players (which is why your noob ass is playing them) they’ll just win with better stuff. Your options are basically nil and you’ll get facerolled. I get that it’s a CCG so there needs to be incentive to buy cards and the like, but there really should be allowances for one’s card pool in the matchmaking or something. And winning is what matters as I recall, though that might have changed, I didn’t inspect my quests too closely.
Edit: Yeah research shows you have to win, which is a Catch 22. You can’t win because your cards suck, but to get good cards you have to win, but you can’t because you have shit cards, repeat ad nauseam. I get they can’t just give you cards for playing X matches or you’d just conceded immediately every time, but there needs to be an option for people without a card pool to get a workable pool of cards that doesn’t require them to win matches they can’t actually ever win.
I think my quests were the Expansion one, win with a Paladin 3 times and win with Paladin or Warrior 5 times. Great, only I can’t win one time, much less fucking 5. Meanwhile I’m playing people with the entire expansion in their deck and I’m using over costed junk that was bad back at release.
I strongly suspect that people who think Hearthstone’s F2P model is forgiving or reasonable either started back whenever the game first started retaining your collection (whether that was launch or beta I couldn’t tell you), when there were still plenty of people to get matched against who were equally card-poor, or put in a bunch of money first.
I don’t know that the model is “forgiving” per se, but it does seem “reasonable” especially right now. You can build a really good Cthun deck pretty cheaply. It’s not a perfect system, and I can see why some players might get frustrated when they are starting out, yet Hearthstone’s player base continues to grow to absurdly high numbers. They must be doing something right to retain new players.
Everybody and their dog is playing a C’Thun deck right now. If you need to grind fast wins, you can just play aggro, which is even cheaper. The face is the place!
As for me, I played a little bit in the beta and built up a small, unimpressive collection. Basically it was just a handful of good rares. I quit for a while, and about a year ago I bought BRM and Naxx with the intention of just playing the single player stuff, but ended up getting pulled into the multiplayer. The $50 initial investment was enough to get some good cards and build reasonable decks, and I got interested in the multiplayer which could hold me over until I opened/crafted a few of the top tier legendary cards. $50 is less than the cost of a retail game these days, and I’ve gotten way more hours out of HS than all the other games I’ve bought in the past year combined.
Since you can’t trade or buy specific cards as far as I know, cheap still implies having enough of a card pool to dust and craft into the relevant cards, no? Which means spending money or winning a whole bunch of games.
And I think the iOS app store is conclusive proof that millions of people will cheerfully put up with F2P models much more utterly gross and exploitative than Hearthstone’s, so that’s not really evidence to suggest that it’s reasonable.
And face hunter isn’t the only deck you can play. There are lots of players out there who enjoy the challenge of building really good decks out of basic cards, and there are lots of resources out there to find and copy them. IMO it’s worth spending the $20-$50 up front to expand your options early if you enjoy the gameplay, but you should be able to get by without it.
I’m somewhat interested in trying out a new F2P account just to see how it really is.
