Objectively less so than back in the day of the old rank system (fewer stars), by the way.
That’s kinda the whole point — please don’t tell me they happen only to ‘bad players’. 
Or, for that matter, that the whole success or rate of climbing isn’t mostly about getting one of those streaks, as opposed to the matter of ‘good’ — or less so — players.
Oh no even the good players would go on a losing streak. I don’t even know if there are statistics from back then to show wins/loses. It was just one big huge grind back in the early days.
Generally speaking the very top players would finish the grind faster. Mostly because they spent more time in game and just got better playing specific decks. Sticking with a very specific set of decks was a way bigger deal back then because of how infrequent balance changes were. Too many changes to the game these days IMO.
Yeah, I know.
Definitely due to that and not a Gaming Chair™, pink hair or Ragnaros being Sniperos. All of this on a stream, of course, or something like that.
Have you seen the level of play at the tournaments of supposedly the best players back then? You’d be forgiven for mistaking it for a ‘fireside gathering’ of some average (I’m not saying ‘bad’ — just middling, ordinary) ladder players.
Didn’t get that point about ‘faster’, though. Do you mean earlier in the month specifically? Doesn’t make much sense, at least to me (maybe I’m tired now and not getting it, sorry then), in terms of time spent.
Funny, 'cause they complain about ‘stale meta’ so much.
Theoretically you can do it with lower than 40% win rate too because of isolated win streaks but it’s not helpful to try to make it harder.
E.g. currently swarm shaman is probably the best all-around deck because it’s bad at nothing and it’s doing well almost everything.
You wouldn’t get the same performance from a deck with classic cards only.
You probably wanted to say “with any netdeck, of high win rate”.
tbh if you are at 11 stars you could literally climb with any deck, with 10 stars it still possible but harder.
Nah, quite literally any deck with a reasonable strategy can get there. Going away from netdecks generally just raises the skill needed to get there.
With the star ranks operating strictly on MMR these days, you can get there while still basically using starter decks. Your rank is going to be awful when you get there, but it’ll be done.
if you want to give away some of the time you are granted on earth to blizzard yes, if you think you can pay to get your time back know that time cannot be bought
The deck can’t be horrible, if you don’t want to hope for a win streak to do it for you after a losing a lot (assuming no 11 stars obviously).
E.g. I can make a flood pala deck without any buffs that will probably have a 30% win rate even if you try hard to do no mistake.
Right, hence the “reasonable strategy.”
The task can be done with a far, FAR weaker deck than most people assume, and not just by relying on lucky win streaks. The weaker your deck is, the more you need to out skill your opponents though. Some of the top end players have done legend runs without crafting/buying a single card using basic only frost DK decks.
I don’t recommend that path to people, but it’s doable. Most people can’t replicate those results. The honest answer to “can tier 4 decks hit legend?” Is definitely a yes though. I’ve done it many, many times over the years.
To be fair cheap DK and DH decks aren’t that powerless, because the classes didn’t exist when all cards were weak.
But that changes the subject a bit because the point was “you can have a strategy on a bad deck”.
Since everything is MMR based anyway, you can theoretically tank your MMR to a point where you can get to legend with the trashiest of trash decks vs bots these days. Thanks to that, the theoretical limit of how bad your deck can be and still reach legend is REALLY low.
For most though, stick to stuff tier 2 and up if you want to get there.
You may run out of time to do that, and it may be bannable to lose on purpose a lot. Also the MMR of opponents may always turn high enough inside diamond to ever get bots during D3 to 1.
It also depends on the region. EU is generally higher skilled.
The current star rank and your MMR are pretty much unrelated at this point. You can get to D5 on win streaks, have an absolute trash tier MMR, and just coast to legend. There’s no actual wall to climb over other than just being slightly better than you currently are. Pretty much anyone at any skill bracket can get there now.
The context was a terrible deck. EU is usually tryhards on optimized netdecks inside diamond. Theoretically you can tank your MMR on purpose but it might be actionable.
What I’m trying to get across is that “diamond” means absolutely nothing anymore. It just means that at whatever rank you are at, you won X times this month. You can have bottom of the barrel MMR and be in diamond. It doesn’t require tanking your MMR to have this be the case, some people are there naturally.
Across the board, your deck can be in the Tier 4 range and reach legend without needing to do anything fishy anyway.
That wasn’t into question. The MMR will likely be high enough inside top diamond to never get bots or new accounts in EU.
Maybe if you start losing dozens of games on purpose but that’s probably bannable.
That’s incorrect. There are bots in legend. Rank and MMR aren’t related.
The bots may be playing for 24/7, with incredibly bad win rates. How are you going to do what they do with like a dozen games a day only?
You don’t need to. You just need to get into D5 ranges while still in bot MMR range, which can be done over the course of months with star bonuses. Once there, you just start beating the bots and will be in legend WAAAY before you actually start seeing difficult opponents.
But again, all of this is irrelevant. You don’t need to be at that low of MMR to get into legend with Tier 4 decks. You can do it across the entire spectrum of MMRs.
How you ever done this? Because it seems you throw some wild conjecture there.
The K-Factor of their MMR algoirthm is probably overtuned for very low MMRs.
That means it’s probably impossible to get extremely bad decks in top D.
You will likely start getting netdecks whenever you are D4 or at least 3.