Hearthpwn

I see your point there, but the super high power cards are simply too much. Cobalt Scalebane gives you an edge when you are even with or ahead of your opponent. When you are behind it works as a 5 drop 5/5. Yes I would lose a game because of this card but it is not impossible to recover from the deficit. But insanely OP cards like ultimate infestation can actually bring you back from far behind. You draw 5 cards without losing much tempo as you also summon a 5/5, while you also gain 5 amour that prevents your from losing next turn??? Firelands portal is already "quite" OP but this card guarantee you a 5/5 which is slightly better than a random 5 drop. Plus a sprint that draws 5 cards. That's at least 7.5 from a slightly better firelands + 7 from sprint + 1.5 from extra card draw + another 1.5 from 5 armor = at least 7.5 mana swing given your opponent also play 10mana-worth of stuff. 10-mana cards are supposed to be high power, I understand, but most other cards either can be played around or the card has some disadvantage in certain circumstances.

Agree. I tried to draft a few super fast decks in arena. It turns out even if I play on curve from turn 1-4, it really doesn't matter much as there is a whole bunch of cheap AOEs, or quality mid-drops, and there are more and more heals / gain amours as new expansions released. Now I draft more towards the midrange / attrition style. I find in general those decks work better in the current arena meta though occasionally I would still lose to aggro decks with insane early games.

I don't get mad for drafting aggro and lose to AOEs coz that's what I get for drafting such decks, high risk high reward. I just hate the "draw-that-one-card-and-you-win" type of game.

I have been playing hearthstone since beta, mainly an arena player avg 7 wins before, now around 6 wins. I understand drafting involves RNG and luck is inevitable in card games like hearthstone, but what I would like to stress is that blizzard creates far too many insane power level cards in recent expansions and that makes arena less and less skill-oriented. There were decent quality cards in the past but cards like ultimate infestation, spreading plague, bonemare, free from amber, dragonfire potion and DK cards are insanely broken in arena mode. Flamestrike is one of the cards that I can think of from the previous card pool that is comparable to those cards. Those high power-levelled cards in the past are "relatively fair" as they usually have some kind of drawbacks. If you play jaraxxus your health is reset to 15, while you gain 5 armor plus better hero power plus battlecry for the DK cards. If you play sprint for 7 mana you basically give up your turn, while ultimate infestation not only gives you card draw but also gives you direct damage plus a 5/5 body (3 mana = draw 1 more card, 5 armor, 5 damage, 5/5 minion). I don't feel bad losing to players with multiple high power leveled cards, coz that's pretty rare and one needs to be super luck to achieve that, but losing a game just because your opponent has 1 insanely-powered card really pisses me off. Blizzard has banned DK cards and vicious fledgling (which is good), but there are other cards that blizzard needs to look deep into as well. The arena meta now is too much card quality-oriented which make you almost impossible to turn the tide even if you have a better skill level.

To F2P players:

Even if you suck in playing arena, at worst scenario you lose ~30 to 40 gold at 0-3.

Take this as an investment. Soon you will improve and get to average 3 wins or more. Then you will be able to get your packs at < 100g.

You can always get advice from others on arena card picks, be it a real person, heartharena companion, or people from this forum. So, actually there is no way to stop players from getting advice, and I don't think there is a need for it too.

Just lost to a mage with (at least) 1 flamestrike, 1 blizzard, 2 fireballs and 1pyroblast. 22 dmg in the last 2 turns. SAD.

Avg gold reward for 5-6 wins is ~90-110 right?  That means you pay 50 gold for the pack, which is quite good. Not to mention sometimes you get golden cards / dust which is more valuable than gold to me.

How about this. Don't include every single turn. Just some turns that you are not sure about. Otherwise the whole process will be extremely slow. Like turn 2, it is pretty obvious that you trade your 2/1 into opponent's 3/2 and develop your 2 drop.

Say if I get 5-6 wins in arena I usually get around 70-80 golds plus a pack. So basically I'm paying 70-80g for a pack, which is quite a nice deal to me. What do you think?

Always do arena unless you are not F2P. That's basically the most efficient way for you to grind gold and packs while having fun. Don't worry if you get 0-3s or 1-3s at first. Everyone has gone through that stage. But once you get on avg 3+ wins, you start to gain from arena. Another thing is that in arena you sometimes get dust as a reward, which, in my opinion, is much better than gold. Say if I get 20 dusts I would translate it as "50 gold" in my mind (as most of the time I open a 100g pack I would disenchant the cards and get 40 dusts - 4 commons, 1 rare).

As a person I dislike Kripp. He BMs. He blames bad luck when he loses but ignore the topdecks he makes.

But the more I watch his clips on youtube, the more I respect him for the knowledge he has on HS.

And I just don't understand why people give a fuss on how he is not a legendary player.

If he is really that bad, why is he asked to cast tournaments? Just for his fame?

If you really listen to his commentaries, you will find that his plays are legit.

Actually even the best players can only achieve sth like ~70% winning rate. So theoretically a whole bunch of other players win against the pros every day.

I don't play patron warrior but I agree that the animations take too long. 

I usually just give it a laugh, but I agree players should not be subjected to this kind of harassment. It is not about whether or not a report system is easy to implement, or whether or not you are mentally tough enough to take it, but rather, if a person SHOULD/SHOULDN'T be harassed. It is hilarious to see people trying to say implementing a report system is offending freedom of speech or whatever. Having freedom of speech doesn't mean you can insult people anytime.

PS. I'm from Hong Kong and I play on Asia server. I can read Chinese and English. Once a Korean player lost to me and sent me text in Korean which I didn't understand at all, and then instantly unfriended me. I was like, huh?

Say you play facehunter and you farm at rank 20. You get one win and one lose (by auto-conceding) in around 5-10 mins, assuming almost 100% win rate. That means you on average earn 10 gold in 15-30 mins. 100 gold in 2.5 - 5hrs.

However if you play control decks at rank 10 or 5 or  whatever, you on average play a game for 10-20 mins. Assuming you have 60% win rate (which is pretty high), you still need slightly less than 20-40 mins to get a win, and thus 1-2 hrs to earn 10 gold. 10-20 hrs to earn 100 gold.

If you are a f2p player and you want to earn gold to buy new packs, which path would you choose? Yes at the end you still want to play various of decks at higher rank, but meanwhile you need to grind gold for packs to expand your collection...

I'm now around 40k dust away from obtaining a whole collection, and I don't grind gold intentionally. But I can see people with only 20-30% of the collection wanting to grind gold by farming rank 20.