Hearthpwn

Another quality thread by Unbaited.

I've tried to get both of those cards to work in serious, ladder climbing decks.
While both of them provided sub-par results compared to how "awesome" their card-text sounds, I found that Baron Rivendare was the one that worked the best. Simply because he is cheaper and more consistent than K.T.

The flaw with K.T. is that you HAVE to be ahead to get value out of the card text. Otherwise he is nothing but an overpriced big minion.
Baron on the other hand is a decent card, even if the card text does nothing. (Which with Baron actually is rare, assuming you put it in a deck that supports it.)

Most decks run Sludge Belcher these days. Even a lot of the aggro decks, due to it being a deathrattle card.
Thus TBK is pretty much always going to be value.

Grats!
If you're not accustom to other decks and want to climb higher in legendary rankings I'd advise you to stick to that deck.
However, this IS an ideal time to experiment with other decks too (if you're not afraid of losing ranks).

If you feel comfortable with switching decks though, now is the ideal time to go for a slower deck that can maintain a HIGH win%.

To get more cards you should simply play more. Do your daily quests and reroll all 40 gold quests that you get.
Once you're good enough to "go infinite" in arena (win more gold than you pay to enter), then that is going to be your best source of packs. However, since you're new, it'll probably be a while until you are that good.

If you want to learn to play better I suggest watching streams. A good streamer for "beginners" would be Trump. He's good at explaining the reasons behind the way he plays and he is great at teaching you how to properly value your cards. And he has a youtube channel where you can watch both arena and constructed 'on demand'.

Apart from that, the only advice I have is: Dont give up. You WILL hit a wall eventually. At that point it will seem like everyone has better decks than you and every good card/deck you face is OP. But dont get discouraged at that point. Eventually you'll break through the 'wall' and start winning more.

No, not really.
He's a good card in a lot of decks but he is far from mandatory right now.

This is NOT a good deck in any way. It is a MASSIVE gimmick deck and NOT something that someone that hasnt at least reached legend consistently a few seasons in a row should bother playing.

If you want a good deck to learn druid with, go with something more standard like token or ramp druid.

As you said it might be possible that sylvanas stole the taskmaster before the mirror entity triggered, thus rendering the mirror entity unable to trigger and just acting like no minions were played.

I do agree that it sounds weird. Its probably not intentional and a mechanics bug.
You should submit it to the bug report forum on the official website.

I dont think you actually *need* Ysera at rank 11.
She is mainly there to combat other control decks. But around that rank you should be facing mostly hunter/zoo anyways.

When you say "growl" I guess you mean Gorehowl? In which case that is another card that you absolutely dont need.
Its another control-vs-control ONLY card and will do more harm than help when you face mostly aggro.

In all honesty, you should go with the build that you feel suits you best (and one that doesnt require you to pay all your life-savings to get) until you are at the point where you can manage to get to rank 5.
After that is when you should start thinking about adapting to "the meta".

Ladder has always been like this.
Its that thing called "meta" that everyone talks about.

Before aggro hunters/zoo it was miracle rogue/freezemage. Before that it was midrange hunter. Before midrange hunter it was control warrior. Before control warrior it was aggro in any shape and/or form. Before that it was OTK decks such as the giants otk or the alexstrasza-charge-gorehowl otk. Before that it was control druid.
I could go on and on but I think you get my point.

The ladder has ALWAYS had one/two decks that were dominant. The reason why some people do consistently well on ladder is because they spend time finding ways to beat said dominant decks.
It has been exactly this way since closed beta.

Edit: Since the "hate" posts that I originally replied to has been removed, I've edited my post to be a bit more 'friendly' :)

Quote from Lellstjithole »

This is EU ranked from 15-8. All day everyday. I thought Blizzard wanted to make money... apparently I was wrong. Why would anyone spend money on a game to buy cards when the 2 cheapest decks are the strongest and easiest to play? Makes no freakin' sense whatsoever.

Half a year ago everyone complained about that you couldnt do well in constructed without spending tonnes of money on card packs to get legendaries and epics.
Now you dont actually have to do that to do well and people are still complaining?

...sigh :P

Quote from teinfein »

What's popular here doesn't seem to be what I see on the ladder or in tournament play for that matter too and I'm sure I see netdecks, but that's based on my lazy recollections. Have you determined what sorts of decks achieve popularity here? Just want to confirm.

The tournament meta is completely different from what you will see in the ladder. And everyone participating in tournaments constructs their decks on their own, so you wont find people running the exact same decks there.

As for hearthpwn, if there recently was a meta-shift it might take a while before hearthpwn gets "up to speed" because it takes a while for the newest uploaded decks to reach the front page.
To get the VERY freshest decks, one option is to go to different streamers on twitch and copy the decks they use in the ladder.
Those decks can usually be acquired by going to their channel and typing "!deck" in chat or something.

Quote from Leaga »

I think the biggest problems people overlook when discussing an in game chat are that this game is both cross platform (I don't know on the backend how difficult making a chat system work for both PC and iPad would be but the user experiences for iPad would surely suffer) and that the game servers have multiple languages per region. An emote system bridges the gap in Asia between Japanese and Chinese players. How many different language clients are there? I know I've seen Chinese, Japenese, Russian, Spanish, Portugese, and English on twitch and yet there only 4 regions! The emote system is there for more reasons than just to stop flaming. It is a way to make the game client extremely adaptable. In game chat would compromise that design decision.

My thoughts exactly.
I think blizzard saved themselves a lot of coding, trouble and further delays/bugs when they skipped out on the chat option.

And while I would LOVE a chat option very very much I can see (and somewhat even agree with) their choice to not implement it because of this.

The problem is that zoo is not (contrary to popular belief) a deck that plays itself.
You actually have to think AROUND enemy AoE.
Since you mention that it seems the opponents "always" has AoE it's likely that you dont actually play around it properly.

As for having a bad start: It is possible, but it should rarely happen. Your deck does consist mainly of 1, 2 and 3 drops after all.

It is unusual indeed. Seems to have a few weird choices though and lack a bit of direction.
There are a few things that I personally would consider a must in pretty much any mage deck:
Run 2x Fireball.
Cut the Arcane Explosion.
Run 2x Water Elementals.
Run 1 Flamestrike.

Apart from that I would cut the Cult Master + another card and run 2x Azure Drakes instead.
Cult Master just doesnt cut it most of the time. Its just too expensive for its stats and effect. Azure Drake is just better overall.
And I would probably play Ragnaros the Firelord instead of Ysera. Just because it is a better card overall.
Also, since you say it is a control deck I would probably up the curve a bit. You are quite heavy on 2 drops.

But those are my 2 cents. Feel free to disagree ;)