Hearthpwn

Lightning storm is probably going to proc at least 1 GP... But for me that'd put it par, not favoured or unfavoured. That said, he thinks GP has no poor match ups, where Handlock is an awful match-up, so could be taken with a grain of salt :) 

Quote from Sam_bucus »

Are you kidding? Mage is the best class in arena by far.

Strongly disagree: i'd rather draw Flamestrike than Consecration, but I preffer Truesilver Champion to Fireball, Aldor Peacekeeper to Kirin Tor Mage and Shielded Minibot to Sorcerer's Apprentice. Wouldn't you agree? Or are there ovjective data saing that mage is better, that I dont know about ?

 

http://www.arenamastery.com/sitewide.php would be the information you're looking for. It's midway down the page, wins by class on average, mage wins on average 5.27 games per Arena with Paladin 2nd at 5.02 (when I read it just now). (For the record it also shows that playing first has a higher win% in their data) 

Personally my best result has come from Paladin and Druid, but I've played very few. 

OP, as has been said, your position on hunter can unfortunately be summed up as 

"I like playing rock. This game should let me play rock because I enjoy it and I don't feel I should have to change that. But so many people play paper! Paper ruins this game because it stops me playing rock! I know I could change to scissors to beat all the paper but I shouldn't have to do that, because I prefer rock. Nerf paper" 

Your post is actually a bit worse than this because Hearthstone has a way of letting you play rock and beat paper, by just adding tech cards, just 1 or 2 even sometimes, so you're still playing the same deck overall, but increasing your odds, and you don't want to do that even. Surely you can see why you're not getting a great reception? 

@Nakazawa: I think you will find that the boss's hero power (which I assume is what you are referring to) is rather different from player hero powers, both in terms of power level, and intent. The only reliable way to make the boss fights have a particular flavour  every time, and to introduce a specific challenge every time, (without rigging or stacking their draw or hand in any way) is to utilise something that is consistently present. The game already provides a framework and an obvious avenue to achieve this: the hero power. You will of course have noticed that playable powers cost 2 Mana and either deal 1 or 2 healing, or damage, in some small variety of ways, with warlock being a slight exception. You have likely also noticed that the bosses, particularly on heroic, have wildly different powers, with quite varying cost. To use this as an example of how important hero powers are within the game in general seems foolish. They are simply a convenient way for developers to introduce a theme, or challenge to the encounters. So of course they are important, but bear no relation to the powers of the players, even though they have a similar position on the graphics. 

As to the conversation of the thread, I think that saying a strategy relies on having the right cards drawn is the nature of the beast: this is a card game where you draw random cards. One way of designing difficulty (the topic of whether this is fun or not needs to be separately argued) is to make a boss quite powerful. If you don't draw the right answer at the right time for what it answers, you will lose on a boss designed in such a way. The more options, the more answers you will need to draw at the right time. In this case the challenge is in the playing of the cards largely, is it the right time to do this, to play my silence for example, or my AoE, or do I wait a turn. The challenge for the other bosses is the deck building. This challenge can be outsourced (netdecking). The other is personal skill, so needs to be learned, with luck a (sometimes frustrating) confounding factor. Did I lose because I misplayed or because of luck? Hard to know.