Format seems to be pretty dead?
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it is, even arena streamers prefer bg nowadays, there’s no point to pay in order to play a completely random mode
After I finished ranked for the season, I play arena. It’s fun to play sometimes, but it gets boring quite quickly.
Having to pay seems to be one of the problems. There’s a lot of RNG involved and similar to Duells it’s a Pyramid scheme. High risk, fairly low reward. Especially with all the other way to spend gold now.
Really wish they would change the reward/entry part. 
yes but at least in duels, you can choose your starting deck
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1-2 runs a month per account so i guess once every week on average.
I still like playing arena and i also still get more out of it then what i pay in gold for it considering the packs are worth 100 gold.
you can also play duels for free unlike arena
Nope; never wanted to play with that format. Not a skilled player here. I never was.
hearthstone or arena?
what’s new about this game that lasts more than 2 weeks that isn’t standard?
sorry, that axe was really sharp i just threw but its a true axe.
You will never have a free arena, they would never make any money. Duels can be free because your collection will still give you an edge, my collections never really been good enough for duels other than to mess around because I’m forever missing a lot of standard epics. I initially thought I’d have an edge in duels because I had wild cards, but that didn’t really turn out to be the case as wild synergies are just too weak to compete. I have pocketed the tickets for next expansion and I will use them on arena where I have a fairer chance. Whereas I don’t plan to buy any of the packs on launch so at least having like 6-12 packs from arena rewards will still give me the commons on launch.
My conclusion is that I think paid duels must be much more dead than arena because few can effectively play it for advantage.
you can’t compare casual duels to arenas though 
Why not? Heroic duels and Arena is similar, pay to play, and you’re at the mercy of drafting rng.
IMO HearthArena (and the like), although a very awesome tool, and incredible respect to those who created it - becoming too mainstream killed the format.
With the drafting phase no longer requiring any skill, it’s just pure RNG with who gets what picks. There’s no more skill buffer.
Also the cards in the pool - with stuff like clowns, discover, etc. which are basically “I win” buttons - it’s hard to play a match intelligently. You just have to dump your hand and pray. So it just doesn’t feel worth paying for.
yes and casual duel is different
Arena is definitely due for a rework though. It should work the same way it does if you participated one in real life, like a magic draft how you each pay for like 20 packs, pick one from a shuffled pool, pass around pick another card from the next pool and pass… so forth. Maybe the cost should actually be like 2000g and you keep your cards at the end then rewards you 50g per win or something, that would be cool.
Its the only format I play bc ladder is just rinse repeat. I’m a pretty good player (sorry for sounding arrogant but i have pretty high average wins).
I tried streaming bc not many seem to streat it but its a dead horse…i can’t even seem.to get 3 viewers
It’s a lot of time and gold investment for disproportionate rewards, so it ends up being a waste of time for the amount of fun experienced.
Yeah, by the time you “break even”, you already eliminated two other players (5-6 wins). You then need to eliminate at least one more to actually make it worth your while and only really profit at 11-12 wins.
Even then the rewards are, fairly lacklustre. It’s the equivalent of a pyramid scheme, where everyone who isn’t benefitting is increasingly dropping out leading to more people dropping out because they stopped benefitting etc.
I still play but get irritated at how hard it is to win going second even with tempo stabilizers. Because most of those are neutral cards, the odds of your opponent also having those cards are high so you might coin 2/3 drop into board stabilizer, but then your opponent will play the one that is one mana higher and then reclaim the board, which gets more annoying.
arena matchups are worse than ever. it basically doenst matter how good your cards are. 90% of the time they will match you up with someone with as good or better cards. especially with legendries. if you get 2 legendries guess what, you will play someone else with 2 or more legendries. aslo if you win be prepared to play counter decks, probably the same class with the same cards multiple times. its bascially become a coin flip at this point. thats why i pay with gold and wont spend a dime on hearthstone since everything is basically rigged
At my best I was average 6 wins, years of the kraken & mammoth. At that time I was also averaging rank 10 at best per month in ladder.
Left the game for 2 years
Come back and now I struggle to get even 3 wins in arena, WITH the help of HearthArena which I didn’t use to have. By contrast I’ve gotten D5 EZPZ every month since Scholomance came out, barely trying.
I don’t feel like I got worse at Arena. Most games I lose, I think at what I could have done and there’s nothing to grow from. I didn’t even have cards in my deck that could’ve swung the game in my favor.
There are so many games, even at 0-2, where I feel like I’m playing against a ladder deck. The opponent somehow has a perfect tempo answer to every single card I play, every single turn without fail. Then has corrupted clowns on curve or some nonsense, and it’s gg.
Perhaps the player pool has dwindled so hard, there’s no one left to match with, even at 0-2 you’re playing against people who are 6-0