Hearthpwn

 Couple of attempts to get my head around it then victory. Get those 0/10's off the board before you are forced to bite them and it's easy street.

Another great deck, won first time.

This is a really good deck. I took 4-5 runs at him to get the opening right but before long I had developed an absolutely insane gurubashi berserker that was able to one shot marrowgar, didn't even need to nab his any of his bonespikes. Like the post says, you need to get on the board early with cheaper minions (if marrowgar gets any serious board control you may as well restart) and have at least 8 damage ready to dish out by about turn 4 (if he starts playing bonsespikes and you dont have 8 damage between your minions to deal with them you are pretty screwed). After you have stabilised and you're trading back and forth you are going to want to try and either steal his bonespikes or develop a big gurubashi. Getting the bonespikes is pretty RNG, sometimes you get to steal one from the hand, sometimes you can use mind control, but getting hold of 2 at the same time is very rare. Instead I would focus on growing a gurubashi and if you get lucky with a bonsepike then it's just even more damage. Some of Marrowgars spells really help in beefing up your bashi but mostly you are just going to want to focus on keeping a gurubashi alive and taking as many small hits as possible, send him into 1/1's, give him all your healing (I used my hero power to heal on almost every turn in the late game), and once he's really getting up there use a divine spirit to double his health so he has crazy sustain. My berserker ended the game at 32/25.

Again many thanks for all the comments. I have since been playing with a mindset to "learning" hearthstone as opposed to "beating" it and i'm finding it a lot more rewarding. Have been watching videos from Regis Kilbin and Trump in particular. I saw videos of them playing arena and thought it looked like a lot of fun. My first 2 runs in the arena were complete disasters (0/3 both times) I was sure that I was playing as well as I could and just wasn't getting the right cards I needed so I swore off arena entirely. But after doing some homework I figured it was worth 150 gold to see if the arena really did have it out for me or if I was just playing badly (spoiler alert, it's the latter). I got a pretty decent rogue deck in the draft, not much in the way of overall synergy but a lot of interesting minions. Game 1 I actually won, hey maybe the curse is broken. Then I proceed to lose games 2 and 3 and feel like it's over. The next game went on for a very very long time, I won the game but the guy really made me work for it. (I think at this point I was in a bit of a hearth-trance). To the best of my memory I looked at the wins/losses on the menu and went into the 5th game thinking "okay if I can just win this one I will be coming away with at least a 3/3 and I will break even and show that there is some skill to this and more importantly that I have made some improvement. I fought and I fought and I finally won through. At this point I decide to take a break but before I get up my eye catches something, on the arena menu it says "2 losses / 6 wins" and I have no recollection of where those extra 3 wins came from. I was sure it had to be a glitch but the game recordings are all there on Overwolf. I managed to play 3 games against a druid and 2 priests, win them all, and then completely dumped it from my memory.

Moral of the story, either Hearthstone put me into some hypnotic trance like state, or I have a ghost in the house that likes a bit of HS.

So yeah, I guess arena's not so bad after all... 

Thanks for the advice everyone, it is greatly appreciated. Questions up for 25 mins and several helpful responses, so you got a good community here. A lot to take on board. I think the crux of it is I'm just not used to the kind of progression seen in this game. I have always been a target oriented gamer and while HS does have "targets" to reach, but the actual "win state" I have been looking for is so far away it practically doesn't exist yet. I think I need to slow the heck down and just enjoy the games for what they are. Coming from mostly console gaming I felt like I needed to pick one class and specialise only in that, whereas it seems the people that get the most out of HS are the ones who try to build a broad collection, allowing them to try different decks and not get so bored playing the same cards over and over again.

Thanks for the knowledge.