Don't play the best deck in a meta that is so dominated by it as this one is. You are just going to end up getting pissed that you are trading wins in mirror matches. Play a deck that targets the best deck.
I hit legend for the first time last night. I played to rank 2(my previous best) with a mix of decks I thought were fun and competitive. Once I hit rank 2 last night, I switched to agro druid and it was a cakewalk to legend. I went 13-3 against mostly Jade's, a few mirrors and a couple of Murlocl palidans. I didn't lose to a single Jade.
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The ranked system does not (primarily) use an MMR*. You are matched with other people as close to the same rank as possible, probably without regard to any estimate of your performance.
What this means is that after the reset each month, everyone is clawing back up the ladder. Legend players start at 16/3 stars and people who haven't played start at 25, but if someone starts at 25 and gets to 15 relatively quickly, they'll be playing the slower players from legend the previous month, and their decks.
As the month progresses, the more active players and stronger players move up fast, while others move up more slowly, and lower ranks become easier as a result. Probably the easiest time to move through lower ranks is somewhere near the end of the month, offset perhaps by more serious but inactive players coming back in the last week to rush through getting the card back.
If you'd like to play with an MMR system that tries to match you against other similarly-performing players, Casual mode offers that. While my normal account is in NA, I play an f2p account on EU as well, and complete quests in casual mode using basic decks while laddering with one decent quality deck in ranked. Because casual uses an MMR, and I'm using weak decks there, I can get my quests done relatively quickly because I'm matched against other players in a similar position. Playing ranked, I'm up against all the usual meta deck suspects.
Hope that helps with understanding what's going on.
* It's pretty clear that Hearthstone does at least retain an Elo-like estimation of skill in ranked mode, even if it's not the main mechanism for matching. This is how the game chooses new Legend players' rankings, and how matching is done for legend players. I'm not sure we know if it's used as a secondary input for matchmaking at lower ranks.
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Blizzard consistently manages to make games that are engaging and highly polished. Yes there are other games in the same spaces that are more ambitious, or more rewarding for some particular subset of players, or just more successful. But, I work for another game company, and every single person plays Blizzard games. Maybe not exclusively, but they're all sold on the experience.
The whole "quality going down" narrative comes almost entirely from people who have warm childhood memories of the first Blizzard games they ever saw.
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Getting from rank 5 to legend takes about as many games as getting from rank 20 to rank 5, assuming you maintain the same win rate. If you can play that many games in a day, go for it, but I myself would probably save my energy for the new season and try to get to rank 5 earlier in the month. :)
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Community-sourced data out there such as VS indicates that Elemental Shaman is winning more than 50% of the time from rank 10 to legend. You can certainly rank up with a good deck. You'll probably need to craft Kalimos, not sure how much more dust you'll need than that.
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Just completed my first grind to legend with a lot of deck tweaking to get there. I'm not by any means a pro-level player, but as I was grinding I did spend a lot of time thinking about how things were going, and here's kind of where I went with it in my head.
I used pirate warrior for a chunk of the grinding but I lost interest in it. It was a bit too cut-and-dried about what I had to do on each turn, and all the decisions about holding cards back were about maximizing their value for my game state rather than anticipating the opponent's reactions. Also, game results tended to depend on the quality of my card draw and against whom I was matched up rather than the decisions I was making being clever or interesting.
I ended up trying a number of variations of murloc paladin when I made my final push. I felt that what I personally needed to make it work were two types of insights: what different deck archetypes required that I hold back as answers for later threats, and how to play around key moments in each game. For example, playing vs. a mage on murloc paladin gave me a couple of options to deal with a turn 7 flamestrike. I could limit running out lots of minions (which put the other player in the position of wondering if it would REALLY be worth it to use the spell) or I could run a full board and attempt to buff minion health above 4. Doing either of these required planning several turns in advance, holding on to key cards, and being ready to set up a good board state for the mage's board wipe.
Looking at your stats, you definitely have the win rate with warrior to push to legend if you play only that. If you like playing that class (and to some extent it's just fun to win more) that's awesome. I also don't mean to criticize pirate warrior for being mindless -- there is skill and planning involved, just (in my view) more tactical than strategic.
If you want to take one of the archetypes that's been treating you badly and go for that, the first step is to commit to one you like. Play it a ton, and soon you'll realize that at certain moments in each match-up there's a point at which your stomach turns inside-out to tell you "OK every turn 3 or 4, a rogue always wipes out my 1 health minions with Fan of Knives." Once you can flip that match around in your head and think of what would make you feel that same sick feeling on the rogue side, you'll know what you have to do. :)
Good luck!!