Hearthpwn

I tried building a version that abuses Call to Adventure to guarantee Prelate or Finley, but I couldn't make it work. I think Witchwood Piper by itself wouldn't make this deck any better. How would you change the deck to make use of these two cards?

If you hit with the weapon before you play necrium vial, it is possible that you get a Kobold Illusionist instead of Malygos because your Shadow Reflection (Valeera's Hero power card) turned into Kobold Illusionist when you played it. So you probably only had 2  Malygos  on the board.

Druid: Hamuul Runetotem to finally have a tauren in the game.

Else

Some undead hero so most likely: warlock, rogue, priest, mage.

Even if the game goes to fatigue (e.g., against Odd Warrior), due to Deathstalker Rexxar creating Zombeasts with Raptor Hatchling you can fight fatigue to some extend.

Personally I wouldn't keep tracking in the mulligan.

My general rule is: I use tracking if I know exactly what I'm looking for. I sometimes use it with left over mana if I don't have any good plays the next turns, but that feels wrong quite often.

A note for the mental state: Always be prepared to get your 3 best cards in the tracking.

There are secret hunter lists without tracking. For me it doesn't feel that necessary in secret hunter. In deathrattle hunter it is more usefull in my opinion, because your synergetic packages are smaller/more specific than in secret hunter.

You can play any tier 1 or tier 2 deck to reach legend. More important is that you play a lot of games. From rank 2 with 0 stars you need to win 11 games more than you lose. So with a winrate of let's say 52% you would need on average 275 games. Thanks to variance you might reach it faster. If you have a good feeling for your part of the meta (rank 2 to legend on your server) you might get better win rates with the right deck and thus need far fewer games.

About your motivation dropping after loosing a game. Try to play with a friend spectating you. Your friend can help to either spot your mistakes and improve your play or help to accept losses you couldn't prevent anyway. For most player this boosts motivations either way.

The artwork of the 3rd expansion looks like Echo Islands to me. As for a new hero card, if there will be one, my guess would be: either mage, priest or warlock. Reasoning: you can see it within the last 2 expansions Blizzard still kind of considers the clusters (Goons,Kabal,Jade) from Meanstreets and Shaman (jades) and Warrior (goons) got one, so next a cabal class should get one.

PS: For the clusters: e.g., only Goons classes got magnetic class cards.

I asked myself the same question and ended up crafting Aluneth. I do not regret it. My reason: I already had a viable hunter deck but no viable deck for any other class. So I crafted Aluneth in order to be able to play a different class.

Probably meme-tier. Deathstalker Rexxar is always a good craft and will most likely be in the competitive Hunter-decks when the meta settles. Professor Putricide is not worth a craft in my opinion, even in this deck you need him + secrets on turn 7 or 9 to get value, and the value doesn't help you to much against most current match ups. I think a second Tundra Rhino is a decent replacement.

Once you have done the quests that give you packs, you get 1 quest per day that gives you gold. You can reroll 1 quest per day. Try to get the ones that say: 'Play.... cards' and not the one 'Win X games with ...' Because with a small collection it can be very challenging to win withc certain classes in play mode.
Tavern Brawl starts every Wednesday and stays till Sunday.

As for Whizbang: You obviously did not search on this site (Hearthpawn)...

Don't forget to grab all the free packs and cards you can get:

-Knights of the Frozen Throne (Prolog) -> free Death Knight card.

-Tavern Brawls (sometimes pre made decks) -> up to 1 free classic pack per week

- There are pack rewards for the PvE content (in the form of quest) for most of the new expansions.

-If you have gold to buy packs: Buy 1 pack at a time starting with the newest expansion AFTER you got all the quest packs. Stop with an expansion as soon as you have the first legenadary (within the first 10 packs guaranteed).

With 1 hero card and some legendaries and some dust you should soon be able to make a budget deck (without crafting) to get to rank 15 or higher. Maybe you will have a winrate below 50%. But you can still make progress.
When you consider crafting cards, try to do some research, sometimes 2 commons can do more for you than a fancy legendary.

Besides that, it's great that some experienced players around here offered their help regarding gameplay, deck-building etc!

The patrons don't die miraculously, they still spawn if there is space on your board. There is just a limit at the number of defile procs that can happen (it's 12 or 14, somewhere around that).