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I agree, mages are retarded in the arena. Not saying I don't play them because when mage is an option, I'll ALWAYS pick mage because I know how fucking OP that class is. I just played a mage in the arena, got polymorphed three turns in a row. Then flamestriked twice. Nothing I can do about it.
Wut? Seems most of the 'arena pros' disagree with you...
Yup, how can I argue with CaptainAwesome?
By providing data to the contrary, or by presenting a reasonable argument for warlocks and against mages. The warlock hero power isn't as powerful in arena for 2 reasons:
1. The zoo/zerg/rush style of play depend on you emptying your hand, then using your soulfire/discard demons. You have no guarantee of playing this style of rush in arena.
2. The handlock style requires that you have molten giants and alexstrasza/jaraxxus/taunt buff minions, none of which you can count on in an arena draft.
The mage hero power, on the other hand works with everything, including getting perfect value for control/removal via ping. Mage hero power is also perfectly suited to enrage effects cards, which no other hero power can activate (the closest you safely get is an elven archer which is a very poor substitute as a ping, for what would likely be a much better card).
On top of that the person who said "draft" is also correct, mage basic cards are generally more powerful for the mana on the whole than anyone else, and don't require combos. A 3/6 minion with freeze effect for 4 mana? That guy is the sheriff of valuetown. And if the welly is the sheriff, then flamestrike is the riot police. Not to mention how plain good frostbolt and fireball are. These are all basic cards, too, not rares/epics.
So, if you would like to argue for warlock > mage, you'd have to contend with the above observations to bring a sufficiently useful argument to the table.
It should be pointed out that the "zoo" is not the only way to do Warlock rush, you could just do a standard weenie rush without relying on divine shield, young priestess, or "card loss" mechanics.
The down side to this approach in Arena is that your opponents are not limited to just 2 versions of their class AoE card. This in turn means that you need to at least consider trades, something which is generally the bane of a rush deck.
I'm not aware of anything beyond zoo and murloc variants, and if we are talking about mages in general and in the arena, a weenie rush for warlocks seems like about the worst possible strategy, considering not just the mage hero power, but the rogue and druid one as well.
One of these days I'm gonna pick warlock and just pray for a set of murloc rush cards, I feel like if you luck out and get a nearly constructed murloc rush type deck you could go 12-0 (otherwise it might just be an automatic 0-3 :P).
I guess a zoo type hybrid strategy could work, if you get defenders of argus and knife juggler and lots of decent 1 and 2 drops, but either way, if you don't get good synergy as a warlock you can't manufacture it like a mage can.
Sure - but the problem is if you get a nearly constructed deck for any class you're going to go 12-0 - with a constructed deck for a Mage I guess it might be slightly less powerful than a Hunter or Warlock - but in the average case you're going to do so much better with Mage that it still makes Mage a no-brainer. Unless you're just in it for the fun and don't care about the losses, in which case you should go 1. Warlock, 2. Hunter, 3. Priest fo sho! :D
I largely agree with you Pilleri - except Hex is IMO way better than all other removal - 3 mana to remove their body and stop any effects and leave something that can't even attack! However, Mage has way more options - Fireball and Frostbolt and Arcane Explosion and Flamestrike are all common.
Warlock has great common removal in Hellfire and Soulfire.
I just got 4x Flamestike and Blizzard to my face in the arena. I died a little inside with every flamestrike.
Hellfire damage your minions and Soulfire is always a 2 for 1. They're not as good as any removal that mages have.
So for shits and giggles I decided to do a warlock run last night, where I picked murlocs every chance I got. I also lucked out and got 4 flame imps. Ended up going 5-3... not having the +health murloc buffers makes it pretty crappy, but because I had so many powerful low cost minions, I was able to run over a bunch of people by turn 5/6. Almost beat a druid but he got enough taunts and heals off to where he survived and bursted me down from 15 on one turn on like turn 8. The one kinda bad/stupid thing though was I got Jaraxxus and he was pretty much a dead card in this type of aggro/rush deck.
Still, the fact that I got 5 wins out of a warlock deck in arena gives me hope enough that warlock can at least be viable in a total rush/aggro sense.
Edit: I followed that up with a paladin draft that included exactly zero weapons, zero argent protectors, one consecrate, no chillwind yetis, no harvest golems... just an all around putrid draft, ended up going 0-3. Just goes to show you sometimes the draft RNG just can really screw you over even with a hero class that normally is pretty good in arena.
Nice - as Trump says, sure if you build the perfect rush deck in arena, you'll go 12 - but what are the chances of that happening? I think actually, Hunter might be pretty good - I've lost to a couple more and I've realised that the current set of common minions has a lot of beasts in it that aren't terrible. If you can get 2 UtH and a buzzard then you've actually got a better deck than an average Mage one - and because there's so many minions around in arena UtH works even better there than it does in constructed (also people never expect the Spanish Inquisition/2+ UtH). The traps are pretty much amazingly good, too. But I do still think the average / bad case Hunter deck (read: 0 UtH) is way worse than an average Mage deck - just because Mage WILL get a Fireball, Poly or Flamestrike - the odds of having NONE of ANY are tiny.
Blizzard could have fixed this a year ago by changing flamestrike from a basic to a common, but they didn't.
If it hasn't happened by now it never will.
To be honest I have more problems with Paladin than Mage.
Results VS mage:
Paladin: 4-0
Warlock: 1-2
Rogue: 0-1
Results VS Paladin:
Mage: 0-4
Warlock: 1-0
Rogue : 1-0
All in all I won 4 times with paladin against mage and lost 0 games, while I lost 4 games with mage against paladin and won 0.
so the results are 8 wins for paladin, 0 wins for mage.
Mage is strong in spells but rather weak in minions.
Bu... But that would've made no difference? Commons and basic have the same effective rarity in arena, don't they!?
I didn't think so, but after checking I guess you're right.
Still, the problem is a huge one. Arena is so mage favored and so flamestrike favored that it needs to be addressed.
Sadly, I think hearthstone has a lot of huge balance problems, but blizzard's hearthstone team either doesn't care or is incompetent. I'm guessing it's the former.
Mage is only okayish in arena now. Even with flamestrike, it's very difficult to recover from an annoying board full of death rattle minions. Nowadays I see more Paladins, Warlock and Rogue at 8+ wins.
It should really be a rare. Blizzard being a common is good enough!
Just got my second 12 win arena. First one was a Paladin and this one with a Mage. Got crap for rewards though. Oh well. Still excited!