I picked up Hearthstone about 2 weeks ago and so far have really enjoyed my time with it. I grew bored with the advanced CPU's quickly so I decided I wanted to try and climb the ladder. I went ahead and built a pretty standard budget pirate warrior deck (no real reason for picking this I just saw "pirates" and thought "that's for me"). So I've played a fair bit of ranked now and every time I get up to rank 17/18 I get completely bodied by people playing what seem like very refined decks often accompanied by multiple legendary cards. I understand that these people have obviously played (or paid) a lot to get those cards and maybe one day a long way down the line I can scrape together something that does the same thing but for now bouncing between 18 and 19 for hours on end is kind of killing my enjoyment of this game. And despite the interesting card art, playing budget pirates seems to pretty damn boring. So what I would like to know is, what class/deck would give me the best chance at climbing a bit higher (and ideally also be a bit more interesting that pirates) With a rough budget of around 2000 dust, ideally with options to add more to it later time to make it into a more competitive meta deck. I should add I have done a little bit of research into this before asking but with recent changes that have happened I don't know how viable any of the builds I am reading about actually are in the current meta. Your guidance is much appreciated.
(Also included a screen grab of my deck in case anyone had any suggestions on it)
There's a link to an event where people are trying to reach rank 5 with common and basic rarity cards only (and no adventures). You may find it useful starting out. Unfortunately, almost all cheap decks are tempo and curve based (Just vomit your minions on the board and pick up good trades or go face) which is "boring". Decks with different gameplans typically contain tons of irreplaceable legendaries and epics. Finding decks that are both fun and cheap is difficult. One exception I can think of is inner fire/divine spirit priest but it's monstrously hard to play and isn't quite top tier
If you want to keep going with your warrior, you want to craft patches for sure. He's only going to be around for 1 more expansion after KFT but he's been in many top decks ever since he was released and will probably remain that way until he rotates. He's a good craft
...Word of advice, HS isn't very new player friendly but for good reason (No need to woo new players like the small indie card games when you already have tons of paying players already; just get those existing players to pay up). If it's still not working out for you, there's tons of other digital card games under the sun
I picked up Hearthstone about 2 weeks ago and so far have really enjoyed my time with it. I grew bored with the advanced CPU's quickly so I decided I wanted to try and climb the ladder. I went ahead and built a pretty standard budget pirate warrior deck (no real reason for picking this I just saw "pirates" and thought "that's for me"). So I've played a fair bit of ranked now and every time I get up to rank 17/18 I get completely bodied by people playing what seem like very refined decks often accompanied by multiple legendary cards. I understand that these people have obviously played (or paid) a lot to get those cards and maybe one day a long way down the line I can scrape together something that does the same thing but for now bouncing between 18 and 19 for hours on end is kind of killing my enjoyment of this game. And despite the interesting card art, playing budget pirates seems to pretty damn boring. So what I would like to know is, what class/deck would give me the best chance at climbing a bit higher (and ideally also be a bit more interesting that pirates) With a rough budget of around 2000 dust, ideally with options to add more to it later time to make it into a more competitive meta deck. I should add I have done a little bit of research into this before asking but with recent changes that have happened I don't know how viable any of the builds I am reading about actually are in the current meta. Your guidance is much appreciated.
(Also included a screen grab of my deck in case anyone had any suggestions on it)
Many thanks for your time,
Grimm Fandingo
I believe it's still too early for seriously trying to climb the ladder, as at your current level, rank 20 is more than enough. I suggest that you try making a bigger collection so that you can create more decks in the future.
You can also practice arena as it will give you a chance to play a different deck with cards you don't usually own, and make profit if each time you get past 3 victories.
But most important of them all, complete all your beginner quests, as they give you important rewards for pretty easy tasks. You can find them in this page.
I hope this will help renew your hearthstone experience and help you make progress.
Your deck looks pretty good for budget pirate warrior. If you craft patches you will have a deck that should be strong enough to get to rank 5. Added 2 pirate captains and Keleseth and you will have a deck that is capable of legend.
Unfortunately pirate warrior recently met the nerf bat. So even the completed deck is still the hard way to get to legend.
Fortunately the cards you want to craft are also used in tempo rogue, which is arguably the strongest deck currently.
I played on a budget deck after a while at the start of this season, and your observation is fairly accurate: fully refined decks started to show up on rank 17. This boundary may move somewhat over the course of the season, though, because as ranks are reset at the beginning of each month (legend players fall down to 16, for example), the competition is harder in the beginning and easier near the end of the month.
I used this Tempo Rogue build that I brewed to climb to rank 13 on the first week of October, so it should be viable to go a lot higher as well:
It comes in at 1780 dust, so it fits your budget, too. Other than Rogue, Hunter is well-known for being cheap to build, and I suppose some kind of Zoolock should also be possible, but I have not played budget brews of those in the current meta.
Right now, many budget decks use Cobalt Scalebane and Bonemare, two very powerful common cards for board-centric decks. Tar Creeper is another neutral common that can be used in many builds.
As for the rares in the deck, Golakka Crawler is a popular neutral tech choice against all the pirates in the meta, although it does not help against Priest and Jade Druid. Vicious Fledgling is also neutral and usable in several decks, and same goes for Spellbreaker too.
Argent Commander is neutral, not used in that many builds, but it pops up here and there, as does Saronite Chain Gang. Undercity Huckster and SI:7 Agent are Rogue class cards, so they are not as universally usable - SI:7 Agent is used in almost all Rogue decks though, but Undercity Huckster is more rare.
Replacing Plague Scientists with Vilespine Slayers (epics) later on would further increase the power level of the deck. Further upgrades would then require legendary cards.
Overall, crafting the deck gives you a number of multi-purpose neutral cards that you can use in other decks as well without wasting a lot of resources on single-purpose cards.
Thanks for the advice everyone, it is greatly appreciated. Questions up for 25 mins and several helpful responses, so you got a good community here. A lot to take on board. I think the crux of it is I'm just not used to the kind of progression seen in this game. I have always been a target oriented gamer and while HS does have "targets" to reach, but the actual "win state" I have been looking for is so far away it practically doesn't exist yet. I think I need to slow the heck down and just enjoy the games for what they are. Coming from mostly console gaming I felt like I needed to pick one class and specialise only in that, whereas it seems the people that get the most out of HS are the ones who try to build a broad collection, allowing them to try different decks and not get so bored playing the same cards over and over again.
It just occurred to me that if I was somehow forced to play the game properly, making my own scrappy decks and having fun with them instead of net-decking I would have worked out where the fun is a lot quicker.
My cheapest deck (2360 dust needed in total) and fun deck that works up to rank 14 (highest I got with it after it I just played other decks, maybe can climb more idk). Maybe it is of some use to you:
Get your butt on youtube and watch one of those salty streamers with bad health and short temper... It will either teach you how to get really good at arena and you'll make lots of dust and packs or you'll quit HS and save yourself a lot of time, patience, health and money! So a good outcome either way.
on a serious note, hold off ladder and practice arena. Use the overwolf app for hearth arena companion to help you build a decent deck and understand the fundamental concepts of winning such as playing on curve and having tempo.... (or spamming meteor, flamestrike etc..)
with that you'll have the dust to make some decent budget decks if you so wish
I have always been a target oriented gamer and while HS does have "targets" to reach, but the actual "win state" I have been looking for is so far away it practically doesn't exist yet.
Like I and some other commenters on your post cautioned, Hearthstone is not worth spending time/money on as a new player. Mostly because tons of money is required to get competitive fast and stay competitive without insane time investment
The difference in f2p friendliness between HS and other TCGs is night and day. Small indie TCGs are showering their players with packs and gifts to grow their community whereas HS doesn't need to. If you were playing one of these other games, you'd be climbing to your "targets" with real competitive (and even fun!) decks within weeks - a month at most
Again many thanks for all the comments. I have since been playing with a mindset to "learning" hearthstone as opposed to "beating" it and i'm finding it a lot more rewarding. Have been watching videos from Regis Kilbin and Trump in particular. I saw videos of them playing arena and thought it looked like a lot of fun. My first 2 runs in the arena were complete disasters (0/3 both times) I was sure that I was playing as well as I could and just wasn't getting the right cards I needed so I swore off arena entirely. But after doing some homework I figured it was worth 150 gold to see if the arena really did have it out for me or if I was just playing badly (spoiler alert, it's the latter). I got a pretty decent rogue deck in the draft, not much in the way of overall synergy but a lot of interesting minions. Game 1 I actually won, hey maybe the curse is broken. Then I proceed to lose games 2 and 3 and feel like it's over. The next game went on for a very very long time, I won the game but the guy really made me work for it. (I think at this point I was in a bit of a hearth-trance). To the best of my memory I looked at the wins/losses on the menu and went into the 5th game thinking "okay if I can just win this one I will be coming away with at least a 3/3 and I will break even and show that there is some skill to this and more importantly that I have made some improvement. I fought and I fought and I finally won through. At this point I decide to take a break but before I get up my eye catches something, on the arena menu it says "2 losses / 6 wins" and I have no recollection of where those extra 3 wins came from. I was sure it had to be a glitch but the game recordings are all there on Overwolf. I managed to play 3 games against a druid and 2 priests, win them all, and then completely dumped it from my memory.
Moral of the story, either Hearthstone put me into some hypnotic trance like state, or I have a ghost in the house that likes a bit of HS.
Hello everyone,
I picked up Hearthstone about 2 weeks ago and so far have really enjoyed my time with it. I grew bored with the advanced CPU's quickly so I decided I wanted to try and climb the ladder. I went ahead and built a pretty standard budget pirate warrior deck (no real reason for picking this I just saw "pirates" and thought "that's for me"). So I've played a fair bit of ranked now and every time I get up to rank 17/18 I get completely bodied by people playing what seem like very refined decks often accompanied by multiple legendary cards. I understand that these people have obviously played (or paid) a lot to get those cards and maybe one day a long way down the line I can scrape together something that does the same thing but for now bouncing between 18 and 19 for hours on end is kind of killing my enjoyment of this game. And despite the interesting card art, playing budget pirates seems to pretty damn boring. So what I would like to know is, what class/deck would give me the best chance at climbing a bit higher (and ideally also be a bit more interesting that pirates) With a rough budget of around 2000 dust, ideally with options to add more to it later time to make it into a more competitive meta deck. I should add I have done a little bit of research into this before asking but with recent changes that have happened I don't know how viable any of the builds I am reading about actually are in the current meta. Your guidance is much appreciated.
(Also included a screen grab of my deck in case anyone had any suggestions on it)
Many thanks for your time,
Grimm Fandingo
Stop playing and don t spend money!
Well, Pirates is still viable if refined, but since Ungoro, it's not so easy to play Aggro.
I think you should have tried Hunter, which is more versatile, and equally cheap.
Either way, you should be able to reach at least r15 even with unrefined decks.
You should also account for some skill requirement, which you might miss at the moment.
Check videos of games played with decks similar to yours.
http://www.hearthpwn.com/news/3414-up-for-a-challenge-free-to-play-or-new-to
There's a link to an event where people are trying to reach rank 5 with common and basic rarity cards only (and no adventures). You may find it useful starting out. Unfortunately, almost all cheap decks are tempo and curve based (Just vomit your minions on the board and pick up good trades or go face) which is "boring". Decks with different gameplans typically contain tons of irreplaceable legendaries and epics. Finding decks that are both fun and cheap is difficult. One exception I can think of is inner fire/divine spirit priest but it's monstrously hard to play and isn't quite top tier
If you want to keep going with your warrior, you want to craft patches for sure. He's only going to be around for 1 more expansion after KFT but he's been in many top decks ever since he was released and will probably remain that way until he rotates. He's a good craft
...Word of advice, HS isn't very new player friendly but for good reason (No need to woo new players like the small indie card games when you already have tons of paying players already; just get those existing players to pay up). If it's still not working out for you, there's tons of other digital card games under the sun
Legend with : S65 Freeze Mage, S57 Maly Gonk Druid, S57 "Okay" Shaman, S53 Boom-zooka Hunter, S53 Maly Tog Druid, S52 Wild Tog Druid ft.Blingtron, S50 Quest Rogue, S49 Dead Man's Warrior, S41 Wild Clown Fiesta Druid, S41 Hadronox Jade Druid, S40 Wild OTK Dragon Druid, S35 SMOrc Shaman, S33 Jade Druid, S22 Control Priest, S19 Control Priest
Arena experiences:
Your deck looks pretty good for budget pirate warrior. If you craft patches you will have a deck that should be strong enough to get to rank 5. Added 2 pirate captains and Keleseth and you will have a deck that is capable of legend.
Unfortunately pirate warrior recently met the nerf bat. So even the completed deck is still the hard way to get to legend.
Fortunately the cards you want to craft are also used in tempo rogue, which is arguably the strongest deck currently.
I played on a budget deck after a while at the start of this season, and your observation is fairly accurate: fully refined decks started to show up on rank 17. This boundary may move somewhat over the course of the season, though, because as ranks are reset at the beginning of each month (legend players fall down to 16, for example), the competition is harder in the beginning and easier near the end of the month.
I used this Tempo Rogue build that I brewed to climb to rank 13 on the first week of October, so it should be viable to go a lot higher as well:
It comes in at 1780 dust, so it fits your budget, too. Other than Rogue, Hunter is well-known for being cheap to build, and I suppose some kind of Zoolock should also be possible, but I have not played budget brews of those in the current meta.
Right now, many budget decks use Cobalt Scalebane and Bonemare, two very powerful common cards for board-centric decks. Tar Creeper is another neutral common that can be used in many builds.
As for the rares in the deck, Golakka Crawler is a popular neutral tech choice against all the pirates in the meta, although it does not help against Priest and Jade Druid. Vicious Fledgling is also neutral and usable in several decks, and same goes for Spellbreaker too.
Argent Commander is neutral, not used in that many builds, but it pops up here and there, as does Saronite Chain Gang. Undercity Huckster and SI:7 Agent are Rogue class cards, so they are not as universally usable - SI:7 Agent is used in almost all Rogue decks though, but Undercity Huckster is more rare.
Replacing Plague Scientists with Vilespine Slayers (epics) later on would further increase the power level of the deck. Further upgrades would then require legendary cards.
Overall, crafting the deck gives you a number of multi-purpose neutral cards that you can use in other decks as well without wasting a lot of resources on single-purpose cards.
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/OldGuardian
Twitch: http://www.twitch.tv/old_guardian
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Old_GuardianHS
Blog: http://www.kilkku.com/oldguardian/
Thanks for the advice everyone, it is greatly appreciated. Questions up for 25 mins and several helpful responses, so you got a good community here. A lot to take on board. I think the crux of it is I'm just not used to the kind of progression seen in this game. I have always been a target oriented gamer and while HS does have "targets" to reach, but the actual "win state" I have been looking for is so far away it practically doesn't exist yet. I think I need to slow the heck down and just enjoy the games for what they are. Coming from mostly console gaming I felt like I needed to pick one class and specialise only in that, whereas it seems the people that get the most out of HS are the ones who try to build a broad collection, allowing them to try different decks and not get so bored playing the same cards over and over again.
Thanks for the knowledge.
It just occurred to me that if I was somehow forced to play the game properly, making my own scrappy decks and having fun with them instead of net-decking I would have worked out where the fun is a lot quicker.
My cheapest deck (2360 dust needed in total) and fun deck that works up to rank 14 (highest I got with it after it I just played other decks, maybe can climb more idk). Maybe it is of some use to you:
"Finding decks that are both fun and cheap is difficult" <- I think this alone is why this game makes so much money lol.
Get your butt on youtube and watch one of those salty streamers with bad health and short temper... It will either teach you how to get really good at arena and you'll make lots of dust and packs or you'll quit HS and save yourself a lot of time, patience, health and money! So a good outcome either way.
on a serious note, hold off ladder and practice arena. Use the overwolf app for hearth arena companion to help you build a decent deck and understand the fundamental concepts of winning such as playing on curve and having tempo.... (or spamming meteor, flamestrike etc..)
with that you'll have the dust to make some decent budget decks if you so wish
Legend with : S65 Freeze Mage, S57 Maly Gonk Druid, S57 "Okay" Shaman, S53 Boom-zooka Hunter, S53 Maly Tog Druid, S52 Wild Tog Druid ft.Blingtron, S50 Quest Rogue, S49 Dead Man's Warrior, S41 Wild Clown Fiesta Druid, S41 Hadronox Jade Druid, S40 Wild OTK Dragon Druid, S35 SMOrc Shaman, S33 Jade Druid, S22 Control Priest, S19 Control Priest
Again many thanks for all the comments. I have since been playing with a mindset to "learning" hearthstone as opposed to "beating" it and i'm finding it a lot more rewarding. Have been watching videos from Regis Kilbin and Trump in particular. I saw videos of them playing arena and thought it looked like a lot of fun. My first 2 runs in the arena were complete disasters (0/3 both times) I was sure that I was playing as well as I could and just wasn't getting the right cards I needed so I swore off arena entirely. But after doing some homework I figured it was worth 150 gold to see if the arena really did have it out for me or if I was just playing badly (spoiler alert, it's the latter). I got a pretty decent rogue deck in the draft, not much in the way of overall synergy but a lot of interesting minions. Game 1 I actually won, hey maybe the curse is broken. Then I proceed to lose games 2 and 3 and feel like it's over. The next game went on for a very very long time, I won the game but the guy really made me work for it. (I think at this point I was in a bit of a hearth-trance). To the best of my memory I looked at the wins/losses on the menu and went into the 5th game thinking "okay if I can just win this one I will be coming away with at least a 3/3 and I will break even and show that there is some skill to this and more importantly that I have made some improvement. I fought and I fought and I finally won through. At this point I decide to take a break but before I get up my eye catches something, on the arena menu it says "2 losses / 6 wins" and I have no recollection of where those extra 3 wins came from. I was sure it had to be a glitch but the game recordings are all there on Overwolf. I managed to play 3 games against a druid and 2 priests, win them all, and then completely dumped it from my memory.
Moral of the story, either Hearthstone put me into some hypnotic trance like state, or I have a ghost in the house that likes a bit of HS.
So yeah, I guess arena's not so bad after all...
You'll get there eventually man!!
Lemme just topdeck that real quick.