Last night I finally broke my Arena record of 8 wins and went all the way to 12-1 (with a pretty nice Shaman deck)! I haven’t been keeping any stats, but the in-game stats say I’ve got 283 arena wins (since the beta wipe), and I would guess that I probably average about 4-5 wins per arena, so that’s somewhere between 60-70 arena runs, I would guess. Man, that felt good!
Also, the reward was a pure 560 gold (plus the pack).
Wolff
1564
I ran mostly rogue pirate Aggro to rank 6 last season. You can definitely build a cheap effective deck - granted zoo is probably a bit better, but people see rogue and mulligan against miracle which has netted me several turn 7ish wins.
So I haven’t had a chance to listen to the podcast yet, so I apologize if you discuss this more there, but I went through the bullet points at the link and one of them stuck out to me:
Under the section about building an aggro deck it says “silence = removal”. This makes sense to me intuitively - the main thing you want removal for in aggro is to clear the way for your creatures to attack, so kill the taunt on a guy is basically the same as killing the guy. However, I don’t see a lot of aggro decklists that include sources of silence (or other removal unless it’s also burn). Is that just because there are no efficient ways to silence?
garin
1566
If aggro decks are omitting silence it’s probably partly because big taunts like Sunwalker and Ancient of War have fallen out of favour a bit. A Senjin or Argus’d Something you can just kill your way through.
Having said that, I don’t think it’s uncommon to see Ironbeak Owl being used.
slantz
1567
I think so, yeah. I can tell you I’ve gone back and forth as to whether to include an Owl or Spellbreaker in my aggro decks, but always settled on not using them for the reason you cited.
That said, I just started toying around with a new Druid aggro deck today, and Keeper of the Grove is something I’m trying because it can either silence or deal 2 direct damage, which isn’t bad either. Its body isn’t typical aggro, but the theory is that it will often life to attack a second turn, or if the board state dictates it, I can use one of the druid buff+taunt cards on it to protect my weaker charge guys so they can attack again.
For some reason I’m really hooked on Druid and have tried aggro, tokens, ramp and spell damage builds. 2x Keeper of the Grove has been in every one of them, I just can’t seem to take it out.
It goes at least 2 for 1 against most aggro decks, and silences important targets like twilight drakes and van cleef. I almost never even mulligan the thing except vs druids when I don’t want it until the ancients of war drop; regardless of what I’m facing I can generally find a use for it from turn 3-5 somewhere.
Quaro
1569
I don’t skip a Keeper of the Grove in any Druid deck. So versatile.
Oh yeah, Keeper is a total boss. I cut Yeti before him.
Man, I had 2 different priests kill me with Divine Spirit->Crazed Alchemist yesterday. Weird luck.
Mormech
1572
When playing in casual, does the matchmaker look at how much you’ve played overall, or does it just look at how advanced you are in the class you want to play with? For instance, if I have a Mage at level 15 and a Shaman at level 3, and if I want to play a casual game with my Shaman, will I be matched up against a player with a level 15 character or a level 3 character?
slantz
1573
My understanding is that it’s just using a hidden player ELO that crosses classes. So I don’t think it’s tied to level, but rather overall player success and win history. But I’m not sure anyone knows for sure.
Yeah…now that I think about it, I guess it has to take overall success into account, since the player could have acquired numerous neutral cards that he can play with lower level classes.
Tony_M
1575
Hey Scott I enjoyed your most recent Happy Hearthstone podcast.
I just won my first 12 win arena run! (33rd attempt). My deck had great spells (Flamestrike and Fireball) which helps alot. My minions were a light on hit points (no fatties like Yeti, Water Elemental or Boulderfist) but the 4 Dark Iron Dwarves were the kings of the battlefield, allowing my 2 or 3 drop to trade up while putting a solid 4/4 on the table.
To add another data point to my question from earlier: I’ve using a self-crafted Aggro-y Rogue deck and using only cards I’ve gotten for free from HearthBux / Arena wins, I’ve managed to bounce up into rank 14 so far. I have a couple of SI7 agents and a handful of commons, but that’s about it in terms of rarity.
I spent a bit of time stalling around 18 before really thinking about my deck and re-evaluating based on what was working and what wasn’t. It seems like that’s around when you start to see identifiably constructed / themed decks rather than just combinations of random basic cards.
I slowly skewed the deck more and more aggro over time. I also realized that while I had a lot of low-mana spells, success was really reliant on my opening hand luck since I didn’t have enough low cost minions, so I removed some 5 cost minions I was never using and replaced them with 1s and 2s, which upped my success significantly.
Emos
1578
Yeah I found out that the core of any Druid deck worth it’s salt ALWAYS contains the following 12 cards:
2x Inneverate
2x Wrath
2x Keeper of the Grove
2x Swipe
2x Druid of the Claw
2x Ancient of Lore
I see that Wild Growth had made a major comeback in the current meta.
Kadath
1579
I’m still a relatively noobish player and just started watching streams a few days ago to try to get outside my self taught bubble and make a run at getting better at ranked and arena. Was watching Trump play two nights ago and he was dominating pretty hard, had like a 12 win run and then out of nowhere he got absolutely housed on 4th move, he literally gasped.
Starts at 8:15:45, other player is a Tier 12 at the time nik2203. “What are you dooooing” =)
My point is that it is comforting knowing that even the Legends can get absolutely smashed on round 4 sometimes =)
Update info on theCurse of Naxxramas. First wing is free for the first month, then 700g after that and for each other section, not bad really. I just wish I was better at making gold lol.
As someone who’s hoarded almost 5000 gold, the price is certainly cheaper than I expected.
slantz
1582
For any Happy Hearthstone podcast fans here, we’ll be streaming a fairly quick King-of-the-Hill deck battle tonight between the reigning champion, a charge warrior deck, and my challenger, a novelty ‘survival’ paladin deck (filled with divine shield, deathrattle, and redemption.)
We’ll be recording audio before and after the streamed games for our next episode. But the games themselves will be streamed live today on my twitch.tv channel probably starting at 7:15-7:30 PT tonight.
