Hearthpwn

Total sidenote, now that I'm a regular at r/ArenaHS, hearthpwn's forum on Arena really declined in activity.

But yeah uh, the most consistent Arena streamers right now are Dreads and BoozorTV (a mod on this very webite!). Both of them streams on a daily basis and have multiple top leaderboard finishers. ShadyBunny and Collins is playing a lot of Autochess right now so you're not seeing them play Arena that often.

Strongly recommend watching Grinning Goat and their Lightforge podcast - the break down of every new meta at the first month of the expansion is invaluable.

PS: shameless plug, I'm also streaming Arena this month at least 2 runs a day tryharding to make the Leaderboard. I've made it about 13 times in a row now but this is the first month I'll be streaming regularly for 2 runs a day (on weekdays except Friday) to get this tryharding done.

Warlock is probably the hardest class to draft right now. I still haven't found the most consistent way to draft - and it seems to shift every once in a while. Most other classes are rather straight forward - draft for good 3s, 4s, and 5s. But Warlock you have to balance your removals which they could give you too much, or you end up ignoring for curve minions. It's also theorized by top players that Warlock is easy to get to the 4-5 win threshold, but after that it's much harder to average high wins with it. For me I've seen good Warlock decks and people with good averages, so there must be a formula, it's just a very hard one to find. I recently gone 12-1 with this deck and basically cruised my way to 12.

The twisting nether was basically useless but you can see here the balance between small removals, early game minions, late game minions, removal minions or spells, and AoEs.

They just need to be moved up on the bucket system. Also bonemare isn't really that much of an issue. Turn 8 plays are supposed to be strong, nowhere nearly as oppressive as 7 mana bonemare.

God, I also made the prediction Paladin will be great, but it currently has the worst win rate right now after 12.0. No idea if Paladin class cards will buff that scenario lol

Every new expansion or new releases (in the case of Tavern of Time) is a good time to get in. Tons of new players coming in, way more variety in terms of who you're up against. Usually during the last month before a new expansion are when people are bored/saving gold and only the Arena regulars play.

Win rates doesn't reflect it's position on the top bucket, which means it probably loses games on the spot as well if people just blindly play it on turn 3 and forever gets behind on board. Plus I'm sure they'll add more vanilla crappy taunts next expansion to dilute the pool.

who and whats their avg

It's a 10 mana card and you expect them to remove it when they have shits like Ultimate Infestation?

You DO play around it. If you're a weapon class you make sure you don't sink your health that low. In general you should be drafting a light enough curve with enough taunts to make sure they can't consistently Pyroblast you everytime on turn 10. It sucks ass if they went first with a great curve, but it shouldn't be happening that much that you feel the need the card to be removed entirely.

Tbh with class win rates close to 50% for most classes I'd say it's at its peak in terms of class "fairness".

It didn't "get worse". It got better, Steed was at 80% of all Paladin decks, now it's at 68%. For example.

They made slight changes and it just isn't enough yet.

They actually hotfixed this the same week my post was made (was made on Monday, changes came on Thursday).

It's variance.

I had an amazing deck last night that went 1-2 but won 11 games in a row to 12-2. Games are honestly harder at low wins for me than high wins since I draft specifically to beat high win decks, but low win decks can cheese you out with stuff like Freeze or repeatedly picking random Discover cards over tempo cards.

The tweaks are in, Witchwood cards are certainly placed in different tiers now than before.

Still feels like a Steed meta, just maybe less Steeds and less Blizzards than you'd expect pre-hotfix. Only drafted one Paladin so far and it still had 2 Steeds, Vine, and Silver Sword.

Quote from Sinti >>

Lot of the problematic cards in the draft atm r rares, so lets hope the hotfix is aimed at them, even tho for some reason they didnt want to be very specific ... big surprise there, sigh. Well, at least they r being relatively fast with the hotfixes, so fingers crossed.

Good guide, however I disagree slightly with Druid being on the bottom with Warlock and Hunter.

Druid does okay in a tempo meta because a lot of their cards (not from Witchwood) are tempo cards, whether it is a tempo minion or tempo removal. Cards such as Swipe, Lesser Jasper Spellstone, Power of the Wild, Druid of the Claw. Then you got Druid's late game which can be stacked with late game taunts. Your opponent generally do not have enough hard removal to get through them all. Also, you can re-load with efficient card draws (Branching Path is a really good card) if you do get AoEd or you feel like an AoE is coming. Druid I think will always be in the middle of the pack in Witchwood. It punishes new players who have no idea how to play with the class, but it generally has balanced cards with the only OP card being UI, which is a turn 10 play minimum.