Hearthpwn

I got a 12-1 shaman in, but I really want to talk about one of the most fun druids I have ever played (12-2):

• 2x loot hoarder, bright eyed scout, cult master, nourish and UI for draw.
• Chromie, Twilight Drake, temporal anomaly and 2x Timebound Giant to capitalize on that draw.
• Infinite Murloc to prevent fatigue and for infinite value when I draw through my entire deck (which happened in 3 games).
• Naturalize, 2x starfall and spreading plague to stop or punish aggression.

It rarely felt truly unfair, but it always felt like I was a bit ahead of where I was supposed to be.

Did I mention mage is a bit too powerful this event? Here's another pair of 12 win mages. The first one is insane with triple cavern dreamer, two leylines and a vex crow (also, two Onyxia's). The second doesn't even have a Cavern Dreamer, but is still pretty crazy.

Can confirm Both mage and Cavern Dreamer are insane. two 12-2 mages with a bunch of Cavern Dreamers and some good synergy to go with that.

It turns out 8 Lesser Mithril Spellstones with 7 weapons is slightly too much. :-)

Just for people wondering about the math, say you have a one in three chance of drawing a dragon (7 out of 21 remaining cards) your expected number of draws is not 1.33 but rather:

1 (chance of drawing first card)

+ 7/21 (chance of drawing second card)

+ 7/21 * 6/20 (third card)

+ 7/21 * 6/20 * 5/19 (fourth card)

+ 7/21 * 6/20 * 5/19 * 4/18 (and so on...)

+ 7/21 * 6/20 * 5/19 * 4/18 * 3/17

+ 7/21 * 6/20 * 5/19 * 4/18 * 3/17 * 2/16

+ 7/21 * 6/20 * 5/19 * 4/18 * 3/17 * 2/16 * 1/15

or 1.47 cards on average. Still not terribly impressive, but certainly a bit better than just considering the 1 or 2 card scenario.

zammE, you would be right if Tentacles for Arms read:

Deathrattle: re-equip this weapon

but the way it reads now, you need to pay 5 mana every time you re-equip it. Imagine how worthless Dreadsteed would be if it said:

Deathrattle: add a Dreadsteed to your hand

We all agree this card is horrible, and would still be horrible at 4 mana. The interesting question for me is:

How strong would this card have been at 3 mana?

I've heard some people say that would have made it insane, but I doubt it. We've seen plenty of cards before that have potentially infinite value:

Anub'arak
Malorne
The Skeleton Knight
Explorer's Hat

It was argued for all of these that in slow enough control matches, they would be insane. It didn't pay off for any of them, even Malorne which has good stats for it's mana without the effect is unplayable.

This weapon at 3 mana has terrible 'normal' stats for it's mana, compared to Fiery War Axe or even the unplayed King's Defender. So for Tentacles for Arms to be worth it, the replay-value at 3 mana would have to be so insane that you would want to play a crappy card for 3 mana over and over again. The problem is that the further along you get in the game, the weaker 2 attack becomes. If you replay this card for the first time at 6 or 7 mana, you're already facing either an aggro board that makes taking face damage very painful indeed and a tempo loss even more so, or a fellow control board that has no reason to be full of 2 HP targets. Everyone who has played rogue without weapon buffs knows how weak a low attack weapon is in a control match-up. On top of that, equipping this weapon stops you from playing stronger ones, since unlike the infinite value minions mentioned above, you can only have one weapon equipped at a time.

In short, at 3-mana this stronger but more expensive rogue hero power for a class that has little synergy with it and indeed has anti-synergy because of the other weapons it uses, would still be too weak to become a staple card.

At 4 mana, it would just be stupidly useless.

At 5 mana, I doubt this will get an arena rating of over 10/100.

Twelve 12-win decks

I had a lot of time to play this month and did 100 runs aiming for a 70% record over that amount of runs. I barely made it with a 70.4% winrate. Here are all twelve 12-win decks that I got in those 100 runs since december 30th: 2 rogues (including a 12-0); 2 paladins; 5 mages (including a 12-0); 2 warlocks and a druid.

Some things to note across those decks:

• Most of them had 2 to 4 one-drops.
• Most of them had 7 or 8 two-drops, the ones that had less contained more one-drops.
• All these decks contained at least 2 big threats (except for the 4 Flamestrike, 3 Frostbolt, 3 Fireball mage, but come on...), with North Sea Kraken being by far the most common, appearing 7 times.
• All these decks contained card draw engines (like Cult Master) or multiple regular card draws.
• A surprising amount of the decks lacked hard removal (including the 12-0 rogue which just had an Emperor Cobra, a 12-2 mage that didn't even have Fireball to clear, the 12-2 druid with one Starfire and a 12-2 warlock that had a single Soulfire as its biggest damage from hand).

Both decks can be powerful, both decks play for the late game and have long games and both decks involve having a fairly large hand size and managing your resources well. I would say the three main differences are:

• As much as it has powerful removal spells and weapons, control warrior still plays on the board. A lot of your power comes from playing strong minions (especially in the late game) and actually beating your opponent with them. Freeze mage on the other hand basically has you loosing from turn one, with an incredibly impressive array of tools to delay that inevitable death while you cycle your decks into specific finishers like Alexstrasza with spells to kill them before they break through all of your defenses. In particular, this means that control warrior will feel more similar to midrange paladin and freeze mage will feel completely different.
• Freeze mage is a deck that can be countered. Cards like Reno Jackson, Kezan Mystic and Flare as well as abilities that grant armor can truly break its main strategy and force you to go for a fatigue game, which is incredibly hard to pull off. This means in a bad meta, freeze mage can be hopeless, while control warrior has bad match-ups, but nothing that truly break the deck. This might change if Blizzard ever releases an anti-armor tech card.
• Freeze mage is a very stable deck, while control warrior is a more flexible one. Ultimately, almost every card in freeze mage gives you something you absolutely need. You cannot take out Alexstrasza, Doomsayer, Frost Nova, Ice Block or really almost any of its cards, because the deck fundamentally doesn't work without them. You really can't play the deck well until your card collection is virtually complete. Control warrior meanwhile has many powerful cards, but few of them are essential. I wouldn't want to play the deck without Slam, Shieldmaiden, Sylvanas Windrunner or Dr. Boom, but missing any one of those cards still allows the deck to function with a reasonable replacement. This also means that control warrior has more room for tech cards like Big Game Hunter, Harrison Jones or Whirlwind.

In summary, I would say that control warrior is a more reliable and flexible deck that has remained a strong force in almost any meta because of its powerful defensive and removal tools and fairly straightforward power plays. Freeze mage meanwhile is a deck that has a more unconventional playstyle and the potential to be more overwhelmingly powerful in the right meta, but one that has more counters and less consistent match-ups, making it more of a meta call. If you're looking for something new and interesting to play that is a truly different experience from midrange paladin, then freeze mage is the deck for you. If you're looking for a second reliable high quality control deck that is closer to what you know, control warrior is the deck of choice.

Cairne feels to me like he is in the same place as a lot of legendaries: he's just barely on the cusp of playability. In that sense he's like Deathwing, Sneed's Old Shredder, Troggzor the Earthinator, Hogger, Toshley and King Mukla, just to name a few. All good cards that just don't fit well enough in most current decks.

That cusp of playability actually is a good place for many legendaries to be. It means you don't have to fill your decks with tons of required legendaries, but you have tech options. If one of these legendaries fills a hole in your decks, you can slot it in; which is why all of these cards still see some occasional play.

An essential thing to understand about cards that are 'just stats' is how important the stat distributions are. Chillwind Yeti hasn't just gotten weaker because other cards are better in a vaccuum (although Piloted Shredder certainly is pretty crazy). It has also gotten weaker with the use of of 5/5s like Loatheb, Emperor Thaurissan and Shieldmaiden that contest it well, while 4-health cards that were common have fallen out of favor. Gadgetzan Auctioneer, Azure Drake, Dark Iron Dwarf and Gnomish Inventor all used to be beautifully contested by yeti, but are now hardly ever seen anymore.

Am I predicting that Cairne Bloodhoof will make a major comeback without a stat boost? Probably not. But there will be meta's and decks where he fills that one spot you're missing and he'll be a solid choice. With almost a hundred legendaries out at this point, that's really all you can hope for from most of them, and it still beats out cards like Millhouse Manastorm, Hemet Nesingwary and The Skeleton Knight that are likely never to seen play except in some weird tavern brawl or heroic encounter scenarios.

It happened: a 12-win warrior. Have been snap-picking the class since the last wing came out, because it's the last class I was missing 12-wins on.

The expansion really helped me a lot, with both Fierce Monkey and Obsidian Destroyer helping a lot. I was expecting Gorehowl to carry, but it did surprisingly little. Summoning Stone was a dead drop in almost every run, because of my lack of spells, but the high card quality compensated. Only loss was against a paladin that had a Cult Master out I couldn't deal with because I didn't draw any of my weapons.

Obvious quality cards include Zombie Chow, the weapons, Knife Juggler + Haunted Creeper and my solid 5-drops. Surprise value came from Raging Worgen and Axe Flinger because of the activators that gave me the reach I needed to compensate for the lack of draws. Finally, Tomb Spider is insane, both because of the chance to draw Fierce Monkey and because stealth or charge beasts Jungle Panther, Stranglethorn Tiger, Stonetusk Boar can give the reach needed.

The style that got me to win was simple on most games: go for control until about my 5-drop with high quality minions, then switch to face, with the taunts from Master Jouster and Obsidian Destroyer, as well as the boost from Stormwind Champion protecting my minions.

Quote from EchelonHD >>

Tunnel Trogg has more ability to spiral out of control than Mana Wyrm, though, since you need a separate spell card for each of Mana Wyrm's +1 attack but one Earth Elemental can boost Tunnel Trogg to 4/3 proportions. 

Tunnel Trogg is a much better late game card than Mana Wyrm but even early game you have an opportunity to drop cards like Lightning Bolt, Crackle, Stormforged Axe, and Totem Golem to boost it to Zombie Chow stats.

Overall, I think Tunnel Trogg > Mana Wyrm. This is an easy 1, IMO, even when we're talking about Arena.

• Fireball, Flamestrike, Flamecannon, Frostbolt and Polymorph. Flame Lance is also quite playable and Spellslinger is a common card that gives you a spell.
• In the rare slot, we have Blizzard and Unstable Portal to help out.
• On top of that, you have The Coin in half the games and the new discover cards have a good chance of giving you a spell option, as well as having our new torch which can give 2 spells.

Meanwhile, shaman overload cards give:

• in the common slot Stormforged Axe(1), Fireguard Destroyer(1), Lightning Bolt(1), Totem Golem(1) and Crackle(2). You might also include Ancestral Knowledge(2) if you value that highly enough to draft regularly.
• Rare has Lightning Storm(2), Feral Spirit(2) and Lava Burst(2).

In short, both 1-drops are pretty close in terms of card choices and most of those cards will give comparable value too, with the most popular common cards overloading for only 1. On top of that, both sets of cards work well for protecting the 1-mana minion (being removal or taunts), and both are mostly fairly cheap cards that can follow directly after a turn 1 play of your minion. In short, it looks like Tunnel Trogg may indeed be a worthy competitor to Mana Wyrm.

The main attitude shift for me was this: I'm not playing ranked to rank up, I'm playing ranked to learn how to play ranked. The goal of any match is not to win, it's to learn how to get better at the match; it's to find out how I lost if I did; it's to figure out how I could have played even better on a win.

At the end of the day, getting slightly better at the game and improving your win rate by 1 or 2% is worth way more than any one win or loss. The goal is to improve that learning curve. At the end of any game you lost, ask yourself: is there something I can take away from this. If there is, it wasn't really a loss.

Haven't been posting my (mostly boring paladin) 12 wins, but this 12-0 hunter deck deserves a post. This deck wasn't just insanely fast and able to go face, but the blood knight and big game hunter tech did a lot of work and my high quality big drops allowed me to go the distance if I was just short on damage.

The only game that gave me any trouble at all was one paladin run where I missed my 1- and 2-drops, the others I finished with over 15 health and reach to spare.

Ryan, you definitely make a fair point that priest is one of the weaker constructed classes right now and it deserves some help.

I believe the only new shadow card is Spawn of Shadows, but with things like Confuse and Convert, they might as well be shadow cards for how unplayable they are.

I don't believe the problem for priest is lacking a big scary card with a powerful effect though (which is what 26 out of 28 of the current class legendaries are). Priests lack independently good 2-drops like Haunted Creeper in beast classes, Shielded Minibot in paladin and just about every 2-mana mech for a mech deck. Priests also lack end-game reach like Force of Nature + Savage Roar in druid, the Frothing Berserker combo in patron warrior and just about every card in hunter.

So I hope that priest can climb back up with cards like Wyrmrest Agent (possibly independently good 2-drop) and Holy Champion (possible win condition). But if they don't, it won't be the lack of a big scary legendary that is holding them back.