If you ask me I find Duels to be a total failure.
Early Access was complete nonsense.
Blizzard was like: “Hey guys, here is this new Mode. We want your feed back. However you need to give us at least 40$ to try it”. Now that the duels is out for everyone. it feels like a pile of garbage.
I have played few games and I can say that if you haven’t invested in building a card collections you will have terrible time with this mode. it is nearly impossible to win a game vs a higher spender users.
I guess you could argue that because you can only add 1 of each card and the starting deck is only 16 cards. it would not cost you that much money or dust to make decent starting builds. But the difference of having that one legendary card that can win you a game in a deck of 30 and in a deck of 16 is a huge difference in this mode.
Duels is worse then the normal/ranked mode.
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You need to build a deck with fewer cards of higher rarity. (higher average cost per card)
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Random hero. You can not build one or two decks ( Because if you have one or two decent decks you will be at disadvantage when those classes are not offered *Note this is irrelevant if you play in normal duels mode as you can retire without loosing anything )
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hero powers locked behind 10 x epic cards ( you have 4-5% for epic card from a pack)
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treasures locked behind 100 x unique expansion cards. (this would probably take you 25-35 packs) another one locked behind 20x epic cards from the previous expansion. (Now that is some huge money grab 
you need to buy packs from expansion that will be rotated out before the one you are currently playing in)
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Even if you spend a lot of money and have all the cards. You still get to be frustrated by the heavy RNG system. Spending money/dust will give you advantage to probably round 3-4 and that is until all the new players realize they are not welcome in this game mode.
Seeing Battlegrounds I personally had high hopes for duels as my favorite game mode is in the solo adventures Tombs of Terror. which kind of resembles duels here and there. I have beaten the heroic mode with every single class and i am currently working on beating it with every single hero power and next with every single starting treasure.
At the end of the day I find Duels to be a big disappointment. For me It is yet another game mode that tries to milk users for money.
3 Likes
I completely agree. I’m coming into Duels after having taken a break from Hearthstone, and it’s awful. I keep going against people with tons of powerful epic and legendary cards in just the first matchup, and I have little to nothing as far as cards go. I loved the idea of hero drafting in this and was so excited, but it’s just terrible. I’ve done 7 different runs, and I’ve only won 3 matches total. I’m not a master of this game by any means, but I’m also not a novice (been playing on-and-off since close to launch) and it’s ridiculous how hard it is to play this mode with no dedicated collection (which I never have cause I stick to FTP modes). It also feels like the treasure algorithm is off, I built creature-centric decks a couple times and my first treasure choice was between all spell-centric treasures, so they wouldn’t do anything significant for me. Overall just very very disappointed in a game mode I was really excited for
I think issues with Duels open up a discussion about the cost of wild cards in the game.
I remember the community begging the devs for wild packs for years before blizzard added them to the game but it does feel a little bit greedy that they have the exact same dust value and monetary cost per card and pack as the current rotation.
Like you say, £1.99 to enter a duels game and then you have to own every wild and current card to build the best decks to compete is pretty greedy, I think if you play heroic duels at least, all cards should be unlocked.
I think DUEL is trying to correct the mistake they have made in creating Battlegrounds.
Battlegrounds, to me, is fun and a lot less competitive than other modes which I can truly relax, enjoy and have fun. Just go to Twitch and you will see 90% of the top streamers are playing Battlegrounds.
Now here comes a huge problem for Blizzard. Hearthstone is not about having fun but to get people addicted and spend money. However, the only monetisation in Battlegrounds is the 1250 gold perk. As a result, they have created a fun mode which the majority loves but doesn’t generate enough revenue to cover their greed.
In order to make up for the Battlegrounds mistake, they have gone all out to make the over-the-top extreme money grabbing mode: DUEL. It takes 150 gold to start each game, it wants us to craft both standard and wild cards, it has all the usual condescending psychological elements to try to make the players angry … so on so forth.
Therefore, yes, I totally agree, DUEL is a total failure in my opinion.
One issue I keep running into is that the algorithm is not reading the deck I’m playing and customizing. I’m playing a frost mage deck with both passives being frost spells focused. But the options they kept giving me to pick after a match are all fire spells options. Only twice was I given an option to pick frost spell cards throughout the run. Surprisingly i got to 9 runs until I lost, imagine how many choices I had to make and all those choices I was given two frost spells with frost focused passive powers. Blizzard, correct the algorithm so it is actually follows the deck format.