Hearthpwn

Thalnos is in my opinion one of if not the best legend in the game, and an auto include in every shaman deck and a lot of other decks too. He is definitively something you want to have.

Wasn't he using an emperor cobra? 

You might as well just put ancestral spirit on cairne and faceless him, as that costs less mana, less cards and gives the exact same amount of yetis. This combo has existed for ever and nobody really runs it, so I don't think were going to see to much new cairne shenanigans. 

For the first bunch of nax cards I thought "lame, i will never play these cards", until reincarnate came! I am also super exited to see how good slower shamans are going to be, as I think/hope more decks would start running cards like cairne, sylvanas (earth elemental?) and maybe also ancestral spirit. Hopefully shamans will be in the position a lot of other classes are in right now that there are actually multiple viable completely different deck types. (I don't like bloodlust...)

Not loosing any sleep over it either though xD

The thing about earth elemental is that if you play him on turn 5 and he dies (which is very likely as he dies to BGH, TBK and all the instakill spells), you only have 3 mana the next turn which is horrible for turn 6 as a shaman. Turn 6 is usually when you turn the game around or secure your board controll, not when you sit on your ass waiting for the overload to disappear. Its just such a huge tempo-loss to play earth ele early in the game. But what if you play him as a late-game minion? Its a 7-8 for 8, not particularly overwhelming. It seems like a card that only really works in an extremely specific meta, and I don't think this is it.   

Crap! Now I have to remove my MVP card from my decks :(

The main reason I personally don't run the axe is because it really makes your curve awkward. The biggest most important turns for a shaman are generally the turns 3 and 6, which is why you usually want to avoid casting overload cards the turn before. Just like you don't want to overload the turn before fire elle, you don't want to overload on turn 2. Unless you have the coin (in which case you can play it turn 2 and coin out a 3-drop turn 3), the axe is only really going to be playable on turn 4, which is in most situations past the time where its really useful. 

According to Hearthstats it is: 

1. Mage

2. Rogue

3. Paladin

4 Shaman

5. Druid

6. Hunter

7. Warrior

8. Priest 

9. Warlock

http://hearthstats.net/apr

Should be more accurate then our personal preferences to be honest. 

My god I must be unlucky then, because over the course of 6 months and many hundred packs I have gotten a total of 5 legendaries... I usually get around 500gold a week and used all of it on packs from the start til about 2 weeks ago. 

I just did the math and found out I had about a 58-59% winrate, and it took me a good 140-145 games from rank 5 to legend. Even if you have a better win rate than me, you would still probably have to play at least over 125 games from rank 5 to legend. It really is quite grindy. If you want to get legend without a lot of time you would have to have an insane win rate, which is unlikely in a game with as much RNG as HS. if you just played ranked consistently every day you could probably do it, but I generally find that playing ranked is something that is best done in a few long gaming sessions, and most people only really have time for that in the weekends. 

Quote from meret18 »

Quote from SirGamesalot »

Took me about 170 games to reach legend, which IMO should be doable within a month by most people. Its really just about motivation and whether or not you can be assed to grind your way up the ranks. Probably 80-100 of those games were at rank 2 or above though, so rank 3 should at least be doable. 

@SirGamesalot what decks did you use in rank 10 to rank 5 and in rank 4 to rank 1?? 

I used pretty much the same shaman deck all the way from the start, except that I used different variations as the meta changed. There has been a lot of experimenting with different cards and such, but the main difference in the meta (at least when I played) is that there was a lot of warriors b4 rank 5, so I ran an ooze, and after r5 it was more zoolocks and miracles so I ran a harvest golem. I feel like shaman is pretty solid in the current meta, it doesn't really stomp anything (except for maybe warrior) but it has a solid chance to win in pretty much any match up. It also didn't really seem to matter that much what cards I swapped in and out, as the games were usually decided by the matchups, the draws and the plays and not so much the deck itself. I ran the Al'akir version of shaman.

Took me about 170 games to reach legend, which IMO should be doable within a month by most people. Its really just about motivation and whether or not you can be assed to grind your way up the ranks. Probably 80-100 of those games were at rank 2 or above though, so rank 3 should at least be doable. 

This might not really matter to much I guess, but personally rank 5 and above is just you sorta looking at the screen playing the cards but really your doing something else, and at rank 5 and below you actually start trying to do the right plays and win. 

Even at rank 6-7 you see some wonky decks (and classes) which occasionally give you cheap wins, but that is also completely gone below rank 5. Its probably as people have previously said before, its a combination of tryhardism, nothing but solid decks and no win streaks. 

Quote from fleeeeetwood »

Are people really having luck with oozes/Harrison Jones? I find that most miracle rogues won't assasin's blade or deadly poison until the turn they plan to blade flurry.

Yea, that's what I also thought. I was running it for a while but never got any value out of it except vs warriors which is already a very good match up. I got to legend recently, last 3 games being miracle rogue and i won all of them. It seems like you just have to go hard aggro and hope that key cards like leeroy, gadgetzans or preps are on the bottom of the deck. Seems to work about 30% of the time. With the large amount of charge/direct damage creatures and spells you have in shamans, its usually not that hard to pick up the kill if you get some early aggression with something like a squire and a flametounge. 

I just went on a streak from 1 star rank 2 til legend without dropping a single game! Played against very few warlocks, but did actually win the few times I did play against one. I think I might have been a bit salty when I said that you couldn't possibly beat them, as I had just lost to quite a few of them in a row pretty much without drawing storms at that point. Thanks a lot anyways nuba, your tips throughout this thread have helped tremendously, and my deck is more or less based on yours (with a few kolento inspired changes)

Heres my decklist if anybody is wondering: 

Legend hype!!!!! (My highest rank last season was 6 xD)

My tip to anyone trying to reach legend is to just keep going at it. For me it has seemed like I would always get stuck at one rank for a long time, just going up and down an equal amount of ranks, but if you just keep going you will eventually get on a streak of good luck and favorable match ups, and you will slowly but surely be able to make your way to legend.