Hearthpwn

This is the most bullshit fucking game I've ever played!!!!!!! Can't even look like getting a fucking win at rank 20.  15 games in a row lost.  FUCK YOU BLIZZARD

It can definitely be bullshit when you start up haha.  You just have to think that ranked is exactly that: a ranked ladder, that is meant to be competitive.  You can't mean to legitimately climb there after just starting the game (not saying it's impossible, just saying don't expect it right away).

I've got a coworker who knows nothing about these websites or anything, I introduced him to the game a couple months ago.  I think he hovers around rank 20, but he seems to be having fun with a combo priest that he made on his own (not unlike some combo priests on the upper echelons of the ladder, it just lacks better flashy cards).  He talks about how much he loves to build a 40/40 ish minion with Inner Fire and whatnot.

My advice: stick with it.  It's a decent game once you have a good collection.  If you have money to spend, I highly recommend pre-purchasing the next expansion whenever that may come out.  Another thing I like about spending money is it forces me to play the game, because I've spent real resources on the game haha =P.  A lot of people out there disagree with that sentiment though, but whatever, I'm a real life grown-up apparently, I do what I want lol.

12 year old kids who use have free reign of their parents credit cards and saw disguised toast playing this deck.

I've just clambered out of a similar situation (with a Prince Liam too!). I had saved all my dust for Baku (as I think he's the strongest single card in standard) then made my Baku-Liam deck. It sucked. I then disenchanted my gold cards (which it seems you've already done) and crafted pairs of key cards: Level Up, Unidentified Maul, Divine Favor. The deck now rocks. Haven't escaped rank 19 yet, but will hook into it again tonight.

Keep saving that dust and build around what you want to play. Taverns of Time should offer plenty of assistance to this goal. Reroll your quests that aren't 100/100.

And one thing with Prince Liam, he is really random. Obviously.

A deck crafted with the perfect legendary and epic cards full of synergy will mop up a bunch of random legends. Some people just have ridiculous collections, and Prince Liam is a good chance to play better cards than you have. That said, random legendary cards + deck synergies of your own can work quite nicely. Before you flesh out that deck, however, your key card, Prince Liam, is a 1 in 30 chance to draw.

Quote from azairvine >>

This is the most bullshit fucking game I've ever played!!!!!!! Can't even look like getting a fucking win at rank 20.  15 games in a row lost.  FUCK YOU BLIZZARD

I don't know what you're expecting, honestly. You just began. You have mostly basic cards, barely any dust and obviously don't have fully grasped yet basic mechanics and techniques, let alone advanced ones. You should stick to Casual, not Ranked.

Ranked if for serious competition. Even if you dumped money to craft tier 1 decks you probably wouldn't fare much better either. You don't even have a month in the game and most likely would be another guy with a tier 1 deck at ranks 20-15 playing it poorly and mostly winning out of nutdraws against equally inexperienced or bad players.

Again, you're just trying to rush something that's not within your grasp yet. Stay in Casual, you also gain gold every 3 victories and can complete quests there. Play all classes, experiment with cards, etc.

I'm not a veteran player either. I started in mid-December, barely 5 months in. For the first two months I didn't even touch Ranked except to get to rank 20 for the cardback.

Only In the third month, after spending some gold on packs and working with what I got, I climed to rank 15 with C'thun Healadin. And after that, went back immediately to Casual. In the fourth, with C'thun Rogue again to 15. Two decks that didn't even appear anywhere on any kind of meta radar. Midrange Hunter got me to 10, and again having reach those objectives, went back to Casual. In the fifth month peaked Rank 2 and in this month peaked rank 3 so far. 

During this time, I watched the competitive scene, some streams, found places to read about the game and of course, carefully and smartly saved gold and dust. In April, when the new expansion released, I had managed to accumulate more than 10k dust and could craft anything I wanted without any form of aggressive disenchanting.

When I get quests for classes I don't have competitive decks, it's fun how I can beat some top decks in Casual with my overall lower power level decks simply because I now accumulated enough knowledge to know their plan (and they don't know mine) and either win or give some of those decks a run for their money simply because I'm playing better. If I had those top decks months ago, it wouldn't make me win much more than I did with the C'thun decks at rank 15.

Anyway, you won't have so much frustration in Casual. In Ranked you're simply having unrealistic expectations.

Also try to watch the competitive scene, the last tournament was HCT Seoul, you can look for that on Twitch or Youtube. You don't need to watch 7+ hours of video, just try to watch one or two Best of 5 matches now and then, and the commentaries and plays will help you improve in a lot of aspects (win conditions, playing around common stuff, thinking on turns ahead not just the current one, etc).

I never spent a dime on this game but have most of competitive legendaries since I played this game just after beta. Highest I got was rank 1 just two stars left for legendary.

What I found out is that at rank 20, some people lurk around at that level for easy farming and never level up. Once you hit like rank 17, it's actually easier to climb up.

Quote from avatarx0 >>

I never spent a dime on this game but have most of competitive legionaries since I played this game just after beta. Highest I got was rank 1 just two stars left for legendary.

What I found out is that at rank 20, some people lurk around at that level for easy farming and never level up. Once you hit like rank 17, it's actually easier to climb up.

 

 

 To give some defense for the OP, it was MUCH easier to rank up with a poor collection back in just after release.  I remember my first real deck was Trump's F2P mage deck which he used to get to legend.  It got me to rank 12 but, more importantly, I didn't feel like a loser after using it. Before then I was stuck at rank 20 with crappy made decks.  

Nowadays, people have been reporting that it's MUCH harder to break into Legend with a F2P deck.  I haven't really seen anyone say otherwise who aren't just remembering when they tried it years ago.  The collections are larger, the meta has pushed more to control over aggro (which is MUCH more expensive), and the playerbase is MUCH better at playing the game.  

I do know that rank 20 is still harder than rank 15, but unless someone has the time to go run some F2P decks again, it may be the case that it's just as frustrating as the OP is making it out to be. 

Newbies can get to a decent spot MUCH faster than we had it, but it's still very painful that they have to be dumped into the big kids pool so soon.  

I started at the arse end of TGT (when I heard about the upcoming wild rotation I thought I would give it a try) and I think it was probably much easier then for F2P noobs, I used a mage deck with mostly basic cards (crafted 1 mana wyrm and a knife juggler when it was a 3/2) and 2 polymorphs in the deck gave me a fighting chance against the Tirion secret pallies (EDIT: Forgot about Dr.Boom lol, I would often polymorph one of the boombots to save face damage back then).

Nowadays the control decks are much better and the aggro decks are a lot faster to keep up with I think.

EDIT2: I do remember that Faceless Manipulator was my first Epic craft (to do the Faceless Tirion/Polymorph him combo) and my first legendary was Sylvanas (Ragnaros was my 2nd of course, either order would have been fine though). I got rank 17 in my first month (actually half month since I stared mid Feb 2016) which is super hard now with 5 stars per rank.

EDIT3: I do remember upgrading my raging worgen, yetis and boulderfist ogres was a big deal though, those cards just won't cut it these days. Sen'jin Shieldmasta was a good card to play then.

EDIT4: Found my first deck I wrote in my notebook from back then, it certainly wouldn't cut it at rank 23 these days,will upload it for the lols ;) I had unlocked 1 Naxx wing, 3 Blackrock Mountain wings (was racing towards wing 4 with the Flamewanker unlock), and 1 LoE wing

My first written down F2P deck, not recommended for laddering ;) Must have had a big problem with aggro to play an Ironfur Grizzly instead of another Sen'jin

EDIT5: So I was rank 15 17 in my first 2 weeks of playing with this deck back then, I had crafted a mana wyrm but too stingy to craft another, opened a sorceror's apprentice, this was before I crafted a Knife Juggler as well. I'm amazed I managed to spend 1500g on adventure wings I am guessing this was just after getting the 300g for 100 wins achievement.

EDIT6: I see that this was early April so I got to rank 17 in the first month with a worse deck ;) That explains how I had managed to unlock 5 adventure wings anyway. I spent all my early gold unlocking wings rather than buying classic packs which was probably not a good choice. This deck was from early April 2016 when I was rank 15.

EDIT7: I see I was having massive problems with aggro (specifically zoo warlock) so much so that I occasionally ran a Mana Wraith in the deck, and it worked sometimes ;)

Quote from azairvine >>

This is the most bullshit fucking game I've ever played!!!!!!! Can't even look like getting a fucking win at rank 20.  15 games in a row lost.  FUCK YOU BLIZZARD

 Don't get discouraged it obviously sucks playing against people with full meta decks at such a low rank and specially when you're just starting but you can't blame all your loses just cause they have legendaries and you don't, there have been multiple times when pros take budget decks and reach high ranks, at least rank 5, if you keep that mentality you'll never win, go ahead buy every card on the game and you'll see that those won't get you far, you just started to play, chill, you expected to reach top 25 legend when you just started, get better at the game and play a lot and you'll see that you'll be able to beat those decks filled with legendaries played by skilless players. 

Guys, you're the most supportive bunch of ppl I've ever seen anywhere (other than one or two of my pet rat groups I must admit!)

I had the shittiest day yesterday - I had to euthanise my rat who I had named after my grandmother (who meant more than the world to me) - some ppl think "oh, just rats", but they're pretty my children.  So yeah, I just wanted to get my mind off things after a shitty day and ended up just getting blasted non-stop.

Unfortunately for me I'm on the ASD spectrum a bit - and it's probably not even related - but I tend to beat my head against a wall metaphorically speaking when something is kicking my ass.  Like I'd just keep going back to ranked because even though I've been playing for a month and played probably 400 games, NO ONE should have such a stinking run as I'm having.

I looked through all the tier 1-3 metadecks and the most I had of any of them were 13-14 cards.  I started replacing the cards with kind of similar ones, but I felt I really started to lose the synergy of what the decks were designed for.  I then did a tonne of searching and found an FTP Mage deck that looked decent.

https://www.hearthpwn.com/decks/1125007-ftp-mage-deck

I was able to switch in what I thought was a number of really good cards so was feeling confident about getting some wins - but yeah.

I ended up building this:

### FTP Mage

# 1x (0) Shifting Scroll
# 2x (1) Arcane Missiles
# 1x (1) Mana Wyrm
# 2x (2) Frostbolt
# 1x (2) Frostwolf Grunt
# 1x (2) Pyros
# 2x (3) Arcane Intellect
# 1x (3) Black Cat
# 2x (3) Stonehill Defender
# 2x (4) Ancient Brewmaster
# 2x (4) Fireball
# 2x (4) Polymorph
# 2x (4) Vex Crow
# 1x (5) Bonfire Elemental
# 1x (5) Cobalt Scalebane
# 2x (5) Gurubashi Berserker
# 1x (6) Archmage
# 1x (6) Blizzard
# 1x (6) Spellweaver
# 2x (7) Flamestrike

I added
Shifting Scrolls because I assumed that it would roll into something more powerful than I had.
Mana Wyrm because it has pretty much crushed me early every time I've played against it LOL
Pyros I thought was going to be an amazing add - to help with draws and just be badass.  But holy shit it's dead to a silence or morph :/
Black Cat cuz I just got it :D   And cuz I feel it's good value for a 3 drop with spell buff if I can keep it around
Stonehill Defender & Ancient Brewmaster - simply because it's my fav combo atm and early taunt is the strat of the deck.  Also need to flesh out the draw because I'm running out of cards around T10-12
Vex Crow seemed like a good card to buff the board for free essentially.  Haven't even drawn it from the deck yet though!
Bonfire Elemental - how did THAT get in there?  I thought it was in the original deck.  See, having a shitty night! It only synergises with Pyros and I'd have to play it at T7 at the earliest just for a card draw, so I'll probably replace that now
Cobalt - I love this card but I only added it because the author stated it at the bottom of his notes.  I'm not sure how it really works with this deck.  I did have some board presence and got some buffs out of him, but it definitely wasn't game changing.  I might switch him out.
Blizzard - cuz Mage :D

I feel as though the cards I added synergised with the deck and made it (on paper) a lot more powerful - but clearly not.  I'm getting great AoE and board clears which is so much fun, but I get to T10 or so and every single game the opponent plays a card to upgrade their hero and the resultant buffs seem impossible to beat.  One of the games I had the opp down to something like 6 health, I had near full health, had board control.  Then he plays whatever card it was that gave him 3 attack I think (sorry I'm so vague) and crushed me.  I'm definitely not playing perfectly, but I feel like I'm MOSTLY playing the hand I get dealt optimally.....and then BOOM.

I don't care to climb the ladder all the way, but SOME progress please!  Not 15 losses in a row after dozens of hour researching strategies and decks and blah blah - who wants to do that?!

I'm not entirely sure which way to go with the deck building.  I'm wayyyyyyyyy off any of the meta decks.  Do I pick one I like the look of and start crafting toward that with what I believe to be the best value-for-dust cards I'm missing?  Do I pick a deck that has good stats and not toooo much of a dust requirement from HSreplay and just try it out?  I saw that I can craft one of the Mid Range Hunter decks that has over 1000 games and a 56% win rate for about 900 dust.  Do I just throw in on that and see how it goes?

It's really difficult figuring out which way to go with the deck building.  I'm trying to be really cautious about crafting and dusting as little as possible.  I've only dusted gold cards, and my crafting has been somewhat limited.

Thanks for all the support guys!

Quote from Lanko >>

Quote from azairvine >>

This is the most bullshit fucking game I've ever played!!!!!!! Can't even look like getting a fucking win at rank 20.  15 games in a row lost.  FUCK YOU BLIZZARD

I don't know what you're expecting, honestly. You just began. You have mostly basic cards, barely any dust and obviously don't have fully grasped yet basic mechanics and techniques, let alone advanced ones. You should stick to Casual, not Ranked.

GREAT advice thank you.  So good that I'm actually considering following it - which is significant for my brain considering if I get stuck doing something I'll just keep going at it til I figure it out!  Way less than ideal, I know :D

Shifting scroll is a terrible topdeck.

Gurubashi Berserker is way too slow.

You want to be playing 2x Water Elementals to get more chance for elemental triggers. EDIT: That only affects Bonfire Elemental, but Water Ellies are better than most of the minions you have right now.

Archmage is too slow.

Brewmasters are bad when Stonehill defender (weak minion) is only target, play a better taunt minion instead.

Spellweaver is far too expensive, you need to play a spell on the same turn,  you want the 2/2 Kobold (Geomancer?) instead.

Frostwolf Grunt is really bad, Ironfur Grizzly is better, but it's still crap ;)

If you have trouble with early aggro 1/1s you want to be playing an Arcane Explosion.

You should be playing solid mid game minions like Yeti and Boulderfist Ogre if you need minions.

My first thoughts anyway.

 EDIT: You also have a mana wyrm, consider 1 mirror image for the classic mana wyrm/coin/mirror image opener, can win games.

Great.....I run into Rhok'delar.  I've only got enough non-minion cards to build 23 cards into my Rhok'delar deck FML!

Quote from mungo2613 >>

Shifting scroll is a terrible topdeck.

Gurubashi Berserker is way too slow.

Thank you SO MUCH for the advice.  I'll make some changes for the next match.

What makes Stonehill Defender a weak card?  I thought it was pretty strong with it's draw - I've picked up many a Lich King Knight with it's help!

It's a good card (but with weak stats, nice value card though with the discover), but it's not so good that you would want to pay 2 mana to return it to your hand so you can play it again for 3 mana afterwards.

Put your best taunts in instead of the brewmeisters if you need a taunt. EDIT: My post was saying the brewmasters were bad not the Stonehill Defender. You'd be better playing a decent taunt or an Acidic Swamp Ooze (same stats as the panda, better effect, panda effect is quite often bad since you remove a minion from the field and have to pay to play it again, and it can't attack same turn it is played). You need a really high value minion to bounce to be playing the brewmasters, not a 1/4 discover a taunt.

EDIT: It also picks class cards at 4x likelihood of neutral cards for the discover, mage has no class taunt cards, which is why it mainly sees play in Paladin (warrior with quest/control warlocks too because Rin, voidlord).

I started my asia account the other day, and at rank 25 i was matched against people with meta decks. Like wtf are these people doing at rank 25

I just had a thought - while I start Asia.  There are three regions - would it be viable to do something like:

Primary account (US) - manage it as per discussions in here
Secondary account (Asia) - F2P, NEVER go near ranked, just dailies & arena
Tertiary account (Eur) - Dust EVERYTHING and build a meta-deck from a chosen class?

What I'm thinking is that if I just have a NGAF attitude to an account and (completely inefficiently) dust everything from 7-8 classes it'll give me a better chance of building a meta-deck.  And if it doesn't work well who cares?  Just do dailies and arena.  And I can always just not play that server any more right :D

Quote from amuse >>

I started my asia account the other day, and at rank 25 i was matched against people with meta decks. Like wtf are these people doing at rank 25

 Makes you wonder.  Sure there may be a few million ppl who only play casual or wtf?  I mean....where else can you utilise a meta-deck?  Not in arena, not in the tavern.  Against friends, but yeah.....

I can only imagine it's a tonne of ppl who don't play very often or are way too rich!  :D

I'm completely F2P, but obviously playing since Feb 2016 has advantages.

I main my EU account. I mainly play ranked but buy packs and play arena, I spend gold when (after spending) I have 100g more than when I last spent gold, so my gold stash is always increasing. When a new expansion launches I blow my whole stash and start saving again.

On US and Asia I play arenas if I don't play one that day on EU, I play on the account with the most gold. I still creep up on the gold though, every time I get 750g more than I had before I bought packs last time I buy 5 packs, so I get 5 packs and have 250g more than when I started. I spend half my gold stash on these accounts when a new expansion launches.

I don't dust cards on any account unless they are trash golden legendaries or gold cards (I keep gold cards as dust in the bank if I am missing the regular version though).

It takes about 6 months to get a decent starting collection TBH.

EDIT: Since I started, there have been times when priest, warlock, warrior, shaman, hunter and paladin were really hard to win with on ladder. Mage is pretty bad now if it's not control. All those classes had top decks at one time in my era so dusting everything for 1 class is short sighted to say the least.