A bit about me first. I played hearthstone in beta and for 2 years straight after it launched. I reached legend once. Have played it on and off ever since, going on binges. I pretty much stopped playing because of the amount of money you needed to invest to play standard ranked competitively every new content release. I still enjoyed the game when I played it though; I focused on one or two classes and just disenchanted almost everything else so I was able to craft the decks I wanted. I would say I’ve spent a few hundred bucks probably since the game’s release, no more than 500. I was a really good arena player as well - not quite free to play, but would average 4-5 wins. Even after being away for a long time.
I recently came back after a year off because I found out Blizzard gave away a bunch of packs. I logged in to 180ish free packs. Great! Now I can craft one or two decks with mage if I want to play standard. Awesome!..yea no. I noticed I had a few thousand gold though, so I decided to get back into Arena. I always thought of it as rng but with skill, kind of like poker. It was fun to me. Better than picking a meta deck or a variation of it and grinding out legend.
After playing about 15 arena runs I can honestly say this mode has turned into the most absolute garbage card game mode I’ve ever played. As a “thinking” player, you know when you mess up. “Oh, I should have played this instead” “I should have waited a turn to do x y z” " I should have drafted this card". This is not the case anymore. Players are doing things to me that I just sit and stare at the screen like “whelp, must be nice” with no counter play. It’s literally about what cards you get now, and the RNG of discover, or luck in your draft with combo decks. I managed to win over 7 games twice in probably 10-15 runs, and I had a few where I didn’t win a game at all. That’s never happened to me, ever.
I am venting because I really want to like the game, and for the majority of my time spent with it I’ve loved it. It’s just very frustrating right now, where you feel hopeless when you lose to no fault of your own. I know it’s a card game, and I know that happens - it just shouldn’t happen this often. Arena, at the very least, needs a rework. Is anyone else having similar problems?
Hearthstone suffers from a lot of poor balance and powercreep these days, which translates into a lot of broken cards and broken combos that are so impactful it creates scenarios where there is little hope for counter-play when these cards or combos get played.
I watched a video of an Arena Board Leader, named Kolst, discussing how Arena is less about playing “curvestone” or “tempo” these days and how it’s more about having lots of these broken cards and combos in your deck to increase your chances of getting to play them. To borrow a quote from Gordon Gekko from the movie Wall Street to Illustrate this point: “Greed is good” in Arena right now.
Kolst used a “cupcake” analogy to illustrate his point about how Arena was once more about building an important foundation (the cake of a cupcake) of having a good curve and good tempo-based cards with a just a little “icing”—the “secret sauce” in a deck that was a few strong cards that served as finishers.
Kolst goes on to explain that Arena is now much more about having a lot of “icing” and less “cake,” which means having a deck with a lot of greedily drafted broken cards and combos, because having a lot of icing is now far more important than having a perfect curve or trying to win through tempo or through the steady exchange of minions from playing “tradestone.”
https://youtu.be/UVNK0opmTwI
Also, Arena has another important complication these days, which is the abundance of “Super Drafts” in the format:
Ironically, I played an “Icing Heavy” mage draft today that was 9-0 when it ended taking a loss against “kolst,” the Arena Board Leader, whose cupcake/ icing analogy I had previously discussed above.
Thanks for the responses. Botting makes sense, and it’s sad. This game mode is why I’ve stuck around the game for so long. Unfortunate there’s always going to be a market for people looking for shortcuts, in any avenue in life. It ruins it for the rest of us. I guess I’ll just play until I run out of gold, opting for combo/greed cards.
