Just started my arena runs about 7 hours ago… Haven’t bought any packs or nothing. Had about 900 gold… Tried tirelessly to get all level 10s to get into arena. And i won maybe 6 games total out of the like 6 or 7 runs i did. Got terrible cards to pick and eventually i stopped getting legendary choices. I’ve gotten 2 legendary cards out of the what like 20 packs I’ve gotten leveling up and maybe 2 epics. I know I’m definitely not the best player. But this just doesn’t make any sense… Seems like blizzard wants to make it damn near impossible to get anywhere… Is there incentives for people who put money into the game? I worked my … off to get that 1k gold and now it’s all gone and i got my … stomped 90% of the plays i made in arena. I got early game cards and got wrecked my late game, mid and late and mixed and still got my … handed to me mass spells few spells half and half didn’t matter. For reals what’s it take …
I am sorry to hear about your bad experience.
Going all-in on Arena was probably not a good choice. Arena is not designed to be an easy place for beginners. You are new, so almost every opponent will have more experience than you. So you are unlikely to get a 50% win rate in Arena, unless you are so extremely skilled that this compensates for your lack of experience.
Put simply (and slightly simplified) - an Arena ticket costs 150 gold, and you are guaranteed at least one pack of the last expansion (normal value 100 gold), plus some extras. If you do have an average win rate of 50% (which, again, would be unusual for a new player), then those other prizes amount to 50 gold on average plus a tiny amount of dust and a miniscule chance of an extra card. So based on the maths you break even at 50% win rate - but you still converted 100 gold into a pack. Which, if your gold is limited, burns through your stack fast.
If you want to keep (or even hoard) gold, then you need to get at least 150 gold back from the Arena (in which case you break even and get a pack and a small chance of some extras “for free”). But that requires a sustained average win rate of 70% over a long period of time, for an average result of 6.42 wins per run. Only the best and most experienced players can hope to reach that level. I looked at the published top 150 arena players of February 2019 (https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/hearthstone/22922068/top-hearthstone-players-february-2019) - they all are above 6.42, but most of them only barely. I estimate that perhaps another 50 or so players are above 6.42. All others lose gold (on average) for each Arena run.
Bottom line: if you play Arena for value, you need 50% win rate (and enough gold to convert 100 gold into a pack each run). If you play Arena for gold, you need 70% win rate.
If I were you, I’d start playing ranked. You are probably still in the new player ranks (50-26). Though your collection is limited, so is that of most opponents (except a few that already threw buckets of money at the game). And they will also, like you, be relatively inexperienced. So you should start getting better win rates. Eventually you will rank up. And be awarded for that with card packs - two at reaching the thresholds of rank 45, 40, 35, and 30; and 10 at rank 25.
You will also get 10 gold for each three wins (maximum of 100 per 24-hour period). And gold for completing daily quests (which you should definitely do, it is probably your major source of income unless you have the time to play ranked for the 10 gold per 3 wins for a long time each day.
When you have gold to spare (and only then!) and assuming you still like the format, buy an Arena. When the run is over, review your choices during the draft. And review your choices in all games (https://hsreplay.net/downloads/ is an excellent resource for this). Be critical of your own game. Look where hindsight shows that another play would have been better. Learn from your mistakes.
Also, when possible, watch Arena streamers on Twitch, and learn from their plays. I currently often watch dreads. Shadybunny is also very good, but his timing doesn’t work for me. Both these players are not only good, they also talk about their choices on stream which makes them excellent to learn from.
If you don’t like the Arena format, or if farming gold is your main objective, then steer clear of Arena. Expecting a 70% win rate vs experienced players is not realistic.
If you play Arena for the value, then do as suggested above, but from time to time make a realistic assessment of your plays. Are you improving:? Is it realistic to expect that you’ll ever be able to get 50% win rate or better? If the format doesn’t fit for you and you’ll never go above 50%, then purely based on value Arena is not a good choice for you.
And finally, of course … it’s a game. It’s supposed to be fun.
If Hearthstone is no fun for you, then simply uninstall and move on!
Thanks but this is like my fifth account i just always dust my cards to make decks and have to start all over again because i just don’t have hundreds of dollars to throw into this game and to me one single deck won’t get me under level 19
That, too, is a mistake in my opinion.
I don’t think I have ever dusted cards, except surplus cards (cards I own more than 2 of) or cards that were nerfed and therefor temporarily dust for more than normal value.
I also never bothered about the ranks I got in the first one or two years of playing. I realised that while this game allows you to get a very nice collection of cards without ever paying money, that takes a lot of time. And I chose to pay with time and keep my money, so I accepted playing at lower levels for a long time.
If you want to have lots of cards, AND you want to have them fast - well, that is where your wallet comes in. That’s the choice you need to make: get more cards by investing time, get more cards by investing money, or uninstall and find a game that better appeals to what you are looking for.
Kind of hard to believe when someone tells me I’m just new when my matches usually go something like this links below
Scrounged up another 150 since I’m poor now and went 0-2 then 2-3 i haven’t had the option to choose any legendaries for the past like 10 games and I’m supposed to believe this is all in my head http//imgurcom/hJ95v7M
http//imgurcom/Fwk31BQ
I get it when you say if this games not for you then uninstall but it’s my only option and I’m not hating I’m just legit trying to find out how to overcome this. I’m playing ladder and seriously considering making yet another account because i dusted all my legendaries again and crafted a mech paly which I’ve gone like 0-5 with now
Legendaries are rare in arena. They’re also almost always worthless anyway E.g., I had Deathwing and Kazakus in one of my recent arena runs. I never played the deathwing and I played the kazakus once (and didn’t play the spell I made) in all of 12 games (went 9-3 with that deck). Would have been better to not have those 2 at all.
Arena is not an easy mode to play and since they’re rotating sets now, it gets even harder. You have to know the cards in those sets and that’s best done by having played a lot when those sets were in standard.
I’ve done ~25-30 arena runs since RoS came out and I have ~5.3 average wins per run. Had only 1 11-wins and only 1 12-wins runs, obviously no 0 wins runs (the opponents I meet at 0-2 are just SO bad, that no deck can lose to them), but I had a couple 1-win runs when I went a bit experimental on my decks (XD).
If you want to get good at arena, you have to play a lot of arena, learn the meta of arena, get a good idea of what cards work and what don’t in arena and also be able to build a viable deck on the fly with limited choices (and have a decent idea of what you can and cannot expect from the remaining cards to come).
I’m not a great arena player (usually hover around 4 wins average), but I feel like rotation of the older sets helped me get a bigger edge against newer players who may have not played those cards.
P.S. I have ~1200 arena wins and ~5k standard wins, usually hover at rank5, but get legend occasionally. I’d say I’m about your average opponent in arena. Think about that before you blame your losses on the game or “randomness”.
I did that and made one for each class but I have a ‘main’ one for everything. It’s true what you say because my ‘Druid’ account dusts everything that isn’t Druid but keeps the neutrals for example (as do the other class accounts).
Needless to say, I have a Lucentbark deck up and going.
Basically, all my class accounts have better decks with better synergy than my main account but I do have a Whizbang on my main account so I have 18 decks to play, just randomly (wish I could pick them). I’m definitely crafting Zayle when it comes out.
I fully support what Biochemikas says.
Some Legendaries are insane in Arena. But then, so are some Epics, Rares, or Commons.
And a lot of Legendaries are just moderate. Legendary means that the card is supposed to be unique by design/lore, or that it has a very unique/special effect, or that it has an effect that should not be included in a constructed deck twice.
Here is a link to my public profile on HearthArena: https://www.heartharena.com/profile/bighugger. You can click the links on the recent runs to see the drafts. You will see that (1) I too have more runs without legendaries then with them; and (2) there is no significant correlation between number of legendaries and results.
I addressed that question already in my first response in this topic.
I know it’s a long read with a lot of math on value and so, but there are also a lot of tips in there that you can use to get better.
To me, it sounds like you are directly competing with the business model Blizzard has set forth with Hearthstone. By that, I mean you are expecting instant gratification for minimal time invested.
Hearthstone is not “pay to win”, but it is certainly “pay to save time”.
Your best bet for doing well in ladder, as well as learning the core elements of the game (maintaining board value, knowing when to trade and when to go face, when and what to mulligan versus specific opponents, etc.) is to simply play the game without expectations, or set attainable goals (my first goal was to hit Rank 15).
Stick to one account. Don’t dust your cards. Obtain and open standard packs, to build a basic collection. Watch streamers play on Twitch, and try to understand not just what they play each turn, but why they are playing it. And above all, remember that “Time = Money”.
If Blizzard handed a free-to-play account everything up front, there would be zero incentive for players to spend money, and that is simply bad business.
You see it’s funny because i just started another run with shaman and I’ve got 4 or 5 of 2 certain cards and now I’m 3-0 might go 3-3 but I’ve certainly been beating aggro decks I’d never win against otherwise. This game certainly decides who wins before the match had even started.