Hearthpwn

I hit rank 13 last month with a non-dragon Reno Priest.  i mean, it had SOME dragons in it (Azure Drake, e.g.) but it wasn't a "dragon" playstyle.  It was a control deck designed to outlast.  It was super topheavy and full of taunts and heals.  It worked great against pirate warrior but almost always lost to Jade Druid.  Worked fine against Jade Shaman.  

I hit 500 wins with it and am now so sick of priest I don't ever want to play priest again, so I deleted the deck.

Quote from VPShadeX >>

i save 8000 gold, but all u know 1 ingame pack = 1/3 value of real money pack so....

I've got 2700 gold saved up plus I preordered, plus got the 4 free ones, so I'm up to 80 packs.  My kids like to open them and it releases on my son's birthday, so I'll probably them do the opening.  

And then I've got about 3k dust saved up.  Should have around 7-8k by the time I get my HoF refunds and dust duplicates.

I used to just do FtP but I'm too impatient.  Once I decided I liked the game enough to keep playing it, it was an easy decision to start paying.  I was willing to pay $10-$15/month to play EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft, and Warhammer.  That works out to around $120-$180/year depending on the service.  Don't see Hearthstone as being really any different.  I guess the $50 doesn't guarantee you "all" the content, but I don't want or need "all" the content, I just need all the commons, most of the rares, and a few legendaries and epics to make some decks and I'm off and running.  

I don't think I've ever bought any classic cards and I almost have almost a full set.  Just need 13 epics (which are all second copies), 13 legendaries (mostly ones I don't care about) and 7 rares (also second copies).  Got that entirely from Quest and win gold, I don't play arena.

I accept most friend requests.  It's about 50% ragefest and 50% polite frustration.

The ragefests usually have something like this: "Nice RNG lucky f*cking n*er bullshit."  I just unfriend them and leave it at that.

I had one guy who started out like this but I shut him down quick.  It went:

HIM: LOL more jade shaman trash

ME: Yep.

HIM: u'll neve rmake legend playing net decks

ME: Nope. But I won't make legend either way because I'm not a skilled player, I just play strong decks as well as I can.  Jade is all I can win with consistently.

HIM: LOL me too 

ME: Tight meta right.  Looking forward Un'goro

HIM: LOL me too.  I have play a friend u want in?

ME: Sure!

Achievement Unlocked:  sooth irate college freshman (reward: 80 gold)

Quote from Clife >>

Nice to see daily login rewards, poor to see that they are so light. It's pretty much necessary to buy at least the 50 packs bundle in order to have a chance to compete here

You mean the nations where Blizzard has never once previously made any cost adjustments to deal with fluctuations in exchange rates, and players outside of the United States have been getting cheaper cards for for the last 3 years for no reason other than arbitrage?

The system will never be "fair" to everybody unless Blizzard adjusts the pack prices every day to account for exchange rates.  Which would be annoying as hell to anybody outside of the United States.  

If the situation were reversed, you'd be gloating over how those self-entitled American pigs were finally not having their cheaper cards subsidized by higher prices paid by everybody else, and it was about damn time Blizzard fixed it so those damn Americans paid their fair share for this game.

Blizzard isn't in charge of the world economy dude.  Nobody is.  No matter how you slice it, somebody is getting screwed.  That's been the U.S. for most of Hearthstone's run.  

WOTOG was a unique expansion in that so many cards revolved around just one card - C'Thun.  To put together even a basic functional C'Thun deck, you had to get the one specific legendary plus at least a half dozen other cards just to make it work.  This wasn't the case with Mean Streets and doesn't appear to be the case with Un'Goro, either, so it makes sense that there's less need to front-load it.  

I always buy the prebuy 50 pack and maybe save up. I'll have 3k gold at launch.  Plus around 6k dust.

April 6th, most likely.

Very nicely designed card.  

The earliest you can play this is round 2 as a 4/4.  That works only if both this AND Soulfire are in your mulligan, AND you play Soulfire on turn 1 (wasting a removal on face) AND it discards this card and not the other.  So, 50/50 chance at best.  Then turn 2, you've got a 4/4 to play.  Not that much more ridiculous than 3/4 Totem Golem on turn 2, and it takes some serious luck to make it happen and you have to give up a good removal card.  Now, they may add another 1-mana discard, we don't know that yet obviously, but this seems just right.  And it's a Legendary, so the odds of getting it in your starting hand are half any other rarity.

I don't think this is going to build up as fast as people think.  You're going to have to keep playing a lot of discards AND get lucky and discard THIS card instead of something else.  That means you're going to be losing other cards sometimes that you wanted to keep, unless you really keep your hand lean.  But, if you do that, your ability to counter is really restricted.  This is exactly the kind of card Blizzard loves - potentially big upside, but you have to give something up.

Love the design.  I suspect this is going to be harder to make work than it seems.

The card I hate are the cards that basically completely change the game JUST BY HAVING THE CARD IN YOUR HAND.  No skill or thought or combination or set-up is required.

Do I have Card X?  Then my win % just shot from 0% to somewhere north of 50%.

Entomb is one of those.  I can't count the number of games where I'm against a priest and the game is over. Well over.  I have thoroughly outdrawn and outplayed my opponent.  Good game.  Well played.  Then he entombs something and draws it and plays it the next turn.  When you get to late game and you're playing a finisher, the likelihood it is drawn against you is high.   This would be less annoying if the deathrattle at least trigged.  Like, it KILLS the card and THEN puts a copy in your deck, so the DR at least runs.

Reno was sometimes this card.  In most games where my opponent played Reno, I still won.  But it went from, "you will 100% lose on next turn" to "50/50."  In some games (maybe 1 out of 3) they pull it off.  I will say that this flipped with Mean Streets.  I probably won 9 out of 10 games vs. Reno until mean streets.  Probably closer to a coin toss now.

The card I hate the most right now is Devolve.  WHY IS THIS 2 MANA!??!  By comparison, Mass Dispell is 4 and it does something similar - screwup all the card text and synergies of whatever is on the board.  Only Mass Dispell doesn't ALSO make everything a cheaper, crappier minion.  Devolve does.  I know, I know.  Mass Dispell lets you draw a card.  You're telling me that it's worth 2 extra mana to draw ONE card versus not draw but change every enemy minion into a lower-cast minion?  I'm sorry, but the "randomness" factor here isn't random enough to justify the cost of this card.  For 2 mana, it should devolve everything on the board, at least.

Other cards I hate - just because they're annoying, not necessarily OP or anything:

Gang Up, Argent Horserider, Refreshment Vendor, Justicar Trueheart, Living Roots.

Flamewaker, Reno Jackson,Entomb.  I run them all in my decks but they are all badly broken.  I won't miss Sylvanas [/card]or [card]Ragnaros either. Totem Golem, too.  I love shammy but a 2-mana 3/4 when you've got almost no 4-health removal at that mana?  Problem.

Brann Bronzebeard.  Good riddance. Emperor Thaurissan. Adios.  

And whatever Druid card makes the OTK C'thun deck work. Aviana.  Sooooo stupid.

Eh.  I'm in a nice position in Hearthstone, in that I'm in my 40s and have effectively limitless disable income for the game.  But I also have a full time job and busy kids, so I don't have time to climb the ladder into legendary rank.  Basically, I know I will never be able to get into those competitive ranks, nor do I have time to endlessly grind gold to buy packs.

So I just dump the dough into the game to play for fun, usually hit around rank 15-14, sometimes down in the 12 range, and just mess around with decks, play, have fun, get excited about new content.  And based on what Hearthstone tells me at end of month, I'm usually in around the top third of players.  That means the majority of the Hearthstone player base either doesn't do ladder at all (e.g. Arena rats) or is worse than me at it.

The complaining about the game seems to come from two sources: the very small minority of highly competitive players who don't feel like Blizzard is kowtowing to them enough; and a group of very vocal players who seem to want Hearthstone to be something it isn't and never has been.  What that specific thing is, depends on the person.  Some want a more "adult" game, whatever that means.  I assume it means more adult themes (violence, nudity, sexuality, darker tone, I don't know), something Blizzard has never really done in any of its products. 

But by far the #1 thing I see people complain that they want is a more dynamic meta.  Basically, how things were before Secret Paladin.  Since Secret Paladin, we've consistently had 1-3 top decks and they don't really drop out of the meta absent some action from Blizzard (nerf, new cards, or rotating old cards out).  This suggests a lack of innovation in deck building among the players, as I've had tremendous success on the ladder playing tier 3 and tier 4 decks and in some cases, decks NOBODY was playing.  

I got my Golden Shaman just before Old Gods, so I haven't really wanted to play Shaman on the ladder since.  Instead, I've been working on getting my Golden Priest, and I've been playing Dragon Priest on the ladder for the last year in about 50-70% of my games.  Including before Drakonid Operative and Netherspite Historian and so forth.  I didn't do any better or worse than with Aggro Shaman or MidRange Shaman or Totem Shaman or any other kind of Shaman I played.  I consistently got to rank 15, often pushed below, but couldn't ever reach 10.

 But Dragon Priest was WAY out side of the top of the meta and has only recently become "good."  I've been running two Dragon Priests since Gadget, one with the new cards, plus my old deck, and my old deck does better.    Just hit Golden Priest Hero, so now I'm off to something else.  Probably Druid or Mage, I don't know yet.

My point is that the people complaining about the meta seem to be mostly complaining that they are sick of losing to the top tier decks, and the best counter-decks lose to basically anything else.  So the only way to win consistently is play a tier 1 deck.

That just hasn't been my experience.  I've had the most luck making my own deck and just running that.  Sure it takes a week or two to tune it but once you do, nobody knows how to play against it because they don't know what you have.  I ran a Rogue Divine Shield/blood knight deck last summer that I went 14-2 with at one point.  I only stopped playing it because Karazan came out and I wanted to go back to leveling up priest towards Golden.

I ran a Witchdoctor/totem deck last fall (59% win rate), and then it suddenly got popular in the last few months for some reason.

I had a pre-Gadgetzhan Reno Control Priest that I called my "Swiss Army Knife" deck, it was basicalloy a buttload of removal and situational cards so that no matter what my opponent played, I had a good chance of having SOMETHING in my deck capable of countering it.  Seen Big Game Hunter lately?  I had him.  Took care of those damn Facelesses.  The idea was to choke my opponent out on cards and then drop some big stuff to finish.  Ragnoros + Volajz.  Malygos + mind blast.   If all that didn't work, there was some heal to fatigue them out.  I could consistently out-fatigue a fatigue warrior with that deck.  Entombing their Reno or C'thun helped.

 And now I've been playing C'thun warrior, which I'm also doing well with, I hit rank 14 in February off mostly C'thun warrior and a post-Gadgetzhan variation of the above-mentioned Reno control priest.

I'm not a good player, but if you're hating Hearthstone, try NOT playing a net deck for a month and see what happens.  Most of the decks you make will be terrible (I've tried to get Purify Priest to work so many times....) but you'll be shocked at how many games you win anyway because your opponents badly misread your deck, and play around cards you don't have, which in turn causes them to play into the cards you do.

Try it.

Please change mine to Archaelicos.  Want it to match my Hearthstone name.