Well, Arena is supposed to get a makeover within the next six months:
“Blizzard has announced during today’s Warcraft 30th Anniversary Direct that Hearthstone’s Arena is getting an overhaul.
- There will now be two modes for arena.
- Normal Arena lets you play the more typical arena run with a shorter format. “Awesome competitive experience.”
- A new mode, the Underground Arena, is available after your normal run and adds high stakes card play.
- Underground Arena has longer runs and allows you to edit your deck after a loss by redrafting cards to up your chances of winning.
- Arena Ratings will be available for normal and underground modes, with separate rankings.
The updated Arena will appear in the first half of next year.”
Well, the pools are curated to point where many strong cards will commonly be available to draft. A quick look at the best performing cards for each class will reveal some neutral cards are among some of the most impactful cards, such as Gorgonzormu, Kil’jaden, Marin the Manager, The Ceaseless Expanse, Snoozin’ Zookeeper, Prison of Yogg-Saron, Ethereal Oracle, Paparazzi, etc… If one does not get one of these cards as a first pick, then there are many cards that can discover some of them.
Then there are the uber class cards, like Nebula, Pack the House, Meteor Storm, Huddle Up, Exarch Hataaru, Infinitize the Maxitude, Horn of the Windlord, Drum Circle (when combo’d with cards like Discipline of Eonar), Cruise Captain Lora, Climatic Necrotic Explosion, Corpsicle, etc… Again, many of these cards are discoverable.
People have been super-drafting in Arena since year one, and the recent creation of a “barcode jail” has done little to prevent this behavior, since it’s easy to avoid such a trap. Barcode accounts are still common in Arena.
Despite Arena’s problems, I still find the mode more fun to play than the current Standard meta, but I do look forward to improvements to the format. I hope the devs manage to deliver on promises, rather than destroy the format with changes.