Hearthpwn

The way I got over with rank anxiety is that I just accepted I'm not a great player and that if I lose, it's not because my opponent highrolled but because I misplayed. Whenever I lose a match, I go over a replay of the game and see when I started losing. Sure there is always going to be a turn 3 Barnes into any amount of high-impact garbage and that loses a star for me, but who honestly cares, I can just win it back next time.

Losing is apart of the game, once you come to accept it, you can easily start being able to find out why your losing, find out ways to play around it, and eventually find ways to not lose those games when given the same scenario.

99% of people who reach legend every season put tons of time into the game, a lot of people (me) just don't want to spend hours and hours playing the same decks against the same decks just to get a shiny number at the end of every month.

If you're not having fun with a game, don't play it. There's no point, especially if it makes you unhappy.

I only get to rank 5 for the rewards. I would care about rank if it felt more rewarding to hit legend.

Play casual.

I get around it by looking at it as practice.  I'm looking to improve my game play.  The wins come as a side effect of improving.   So your rank hits rock bottom, does it matter if your goal is just to learn?  No one else will notice it besides you anyway.  There's nothing to really worry about.  In short, don't be afraid to fail, take pride in perseverance and you'll be relaxed enough to start learning the game as opposed to just worrying if you are going to lose rank or not.  This is a good way to take the pressure off and it's more productive than stressing.    

I think the Voice Chat solution is one of the better, quicker options suggested in here, but the thing about this subject is that fundamentally it's about taking control of your headspace. I'm not gonna spend a lot of time writing a reply here, but you could always look into meditation because it's primarily about the same thing, it's a way to avoid stress and anxiety by focusing on something else instead of letting your head run away with you. You don't have to focus on your breath or something, you could probably develop some healthy habits in game too. Here's a few that I employ:

Recognize when you're lucky. We tend to focus a lot on how unlucky we get when things don't go our way, but if you pay attention you will also find games where you topdeck just the right card or your aggro opponent misses his 1-drop. Sometimes these things are subtle, because it's easier to tell when you get wrecked by keleseth on 2, than when it isn't played and you steamroll them.

As an extension, remember that random distributions aren't even. A lot of people, if they're asked to draw random dots on a paper, they draw them with nice even spacings; actual random distributions come more in clusters. So even if you have a 66% winrate, it doesn't mean you often win 2 and lose 1. You're still gonna have streaks of each, and sometimes they're gonna come at a shitty time compared to rank floors.

These 2 are really substrands of a large category which could be called Don't stress about factors out of your control, because inevitably those will get frustrating. Instead focus on your missplays, we all do it, I know a lot of people here on the forums go "I don't misplay I'm just unlucky" and that's fine, if you wanna think that go ahead, but it really is just self-deception because perfect play is, I would argue, literally impossible in HS (because of the nature of how sometimes even optimal plays, in a specific game, is a losing play). In your specific case, I would suggest reviewing the win condition of your deck, and the win condition of your opponent, and looking at where the opponent's win condition began to seem inevitable, and try to find, even a desperate play, which could have invalidated that turn/play. There's plenty of other articles on how to improve in this regard though.

A last thing I'll mention is that I sometimes use rank floors to focus on weird decks. Without the threat of deranking, I whip out my dragon hunters and my thief rogues, and I just start playing thinking only about my deck (which, effectively, distracts me from my rank). Which cards are underperforming? What would I like to have in my hand instead of this card? Which archetypes are my biggest problem? Should I try to catch them all, or should I double down on my strong matchups? Which cards emphasize my winning against this and that popular type? When I think about those things, I implicitly already accepted my rank as being 15, and instead make the goal to make my deck better, not my rank. Sometimes I can do this outside rank floors now, after having done it for a while, but I will admit that it gets harder the later in the month it is if I haven't reached my desired rank yet.

It might not be that those same things work for you, but I really think that the only thing you need to develop is an honesty with yourself and learn to work with what you realize. Obviously you won't see much of that on forums like these, because most people develop a social persona which seems cool or whatever, and I think sometimes, if you're younger, you can end up utilizing that same persona in your head when you're alone. I used to do this to such an extreme degree, that I would keep telling myself things I wanted to be true over and over again, to the point that I couldn't tell how things actually were and what I simply told myself. Eventually I just decided to get rid of it and I honestly found it easy to improve almost any skill that I do because I just look at it without flattering myself, and in hearthstone that means going 'It looks like I'm rank x, which means, I probably play like a rank x and not legend.' and sure, it sucks to admit to other players who might be higher ranked, but you don't have to, you just have to admit it to yourself and that will (hopefully) allow you to start thinking about the things you have control over, instead of deflecting, like most player bases in most games do (it's teammates, it's luck, it's shitty game design, etc. etc.).

I think it's often tempting to think that 'I'm as good as my highest rank' but actually, if 90% of the time you're rank 10, and one time you made rank 6, if you actually think you're a rank 5 player, you're gonna find going to rank 5 really frustrating, whereas if you think yourself a rank 10 player, then getting to rank 5 should be really satisfying.

.... aaand I think that's about as much as I feel like writing about that subject on a game forum.
Good luck OP and everyone interested in the subject :)

My goal each month is to get rank 15, for the reward. I usually get there just by completing quests. I do play more proven decks until the rank floor and more experimental and meme decks after. So I'm not insensitive to my rank, but not obsessed by it either and I think that picking a goal that isn't too hard to achieve helps with that.

Streamers play Hearthstone many hours every day, often for multiple years. Watch them to learn from, not to compare yourself to them.

Quote from kalytero >>

 

Quote from M0byFish >>

 then you too can reach high ranks, even with a 50% win-rate.

 Actually you can not.

 

Realize the worst thing that happens after a loss is that you lose one star. At some point you just have to get over ladder anxiety, there's not really a secret to it, you'll have tons of opportunities to get that star back.

After a loss I always ask myself what I could have done differently. Should I be mulliganing differently for a matchup? Should I have developed a minion when I spent a turn removing one of theirs? Should I have played around X or was it right to hope they didn't have it? Did they just  have the nuts and there was nothing I could do? If you analyze why you lost you can gain an edge when you face that deck again. You'll get your stars back and then some.

Even if not everyone believes it, try to approach Hearthstone as a skill based game, because your decisions are all you have control over. RNG and opponent deck choices are not something you have control over. Good luck.

Quote from kalytero >>

 

Quote from M0byFish >>

 then you too can reach high ranks, even with a 50% win-rate.

 Actually you can not.

 

Obsessing over your rank isn't going to make you play any better, so just don't worry about it. The only time it should really concern you is on the last day of the season when you are trying to get the most from your ranked rewards, otherwise your rank doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. Your rank on day 15 of the season for example means absolutely nothing.

I appreciate the tons of advice being given on this thread, and hope it helps others like me.  Glad to see I'm not alone, and there's opportunity to just play the decks I love while learning throughout the way.