I’ll start off by admitting that I tank my MMR. Some questions for everyone else:
Do you?
If so, how do you do it?
If so, what are the benefits you see?
If so, what are the downsides?
If not, why not?
For me:
Yes
I have warlock decks for both Wild and Standard whose entire purpose is to damage myself. Games rarely last more than 5 turns even against bots. Note: I specifically kill myself rather than going AFK because it’s not fair to other players to drag the games out.
It makes it much easier to complete achievements and weekly win quests because opponents are easier to either a) stall or b) beat.
I’m so low in rank that there are tons and tons and tons of bots. At least a third of my games take a long time because of it. Sometimes completing achievements in those games is impossible because there’s no way to kill my minions and create board space.
N/A
For me it’s worth it. I don’t care about my rank and only make it to Silver 5 each season. I don’t want to go farther because I’d get more stars.
The only downside to tanking your rank (if you aren’t on bonus stars, you aren’t running on MMR anyway) is not getting higher ranks and the corresponding seasonal rewards.
If you want to maintain low ranks so you can play jank decks and do fun stuff with them for achievements and whatnot, I see harm in it whatsoever.
Ranked gives out better rewards than Casual nomatter what, so if you don’t give a hoot about your rank, there’s really no reason not to just treat it like Causal with better XP. Staying in the low ranks will keep you away from more competitive players anyway.
I definitely don’t care about the rewards. I buy the preorders and rewards track. I also save enough gold for 100+ packs and the mini-sets so my collection isn’t an issue. Scrabbling and struggling to hit legend for a couple more rares and a pack isn’t worth the aggravation.
You’re probably right that I should play more in ranked. I get really bored seeing the exact same opponents over and over again.
I did farm rank 20 and silver 10 for years despite being a very good player making legend multiple times and even made into the top 100 Arena once.
Mostly because I like to relax and face non-meta decks, that’s a lot more interesting to me.
Also because I love winning and tend to get very upset when I lose, whenever I am farming the low ranks I win at least 90% of my games so my mood doesn’t get ruined by losses.
I also get the standard rewards anyway.
Nowadays I do climb wild sometimes, I’ve had a streak of hitting Legend for like 10 consecutive months and still tanked my MMR whenever I was in Legend so I could face gold-silver players despite being Legend (yes it does work). I can literally be in Legend facing bronze players who aren’t on bonus stars)
I know it seems bad but thats how I enjoy playing HS. Some people care about being high rank and facing the best possible opponents, that never interested me despite being a high Legend player (I am paired with 11 stars players all the time in standard despite the fact that I rarely ever play any games after getting out of stars bonus.
So I guess the only ‘’con’’ is that it is unethical for a player like me to ‘’smurf’’ and completely obliterate the low ranks. And I am not playing budget decks, I have the entire wild collection.
However, I spend more time losing not necessarily because I’m not improving, but because I spend a long time browsing data on VS, Replay, and hrs. in the collection manager “Trying” to theorycraft and though I know from the data that any homebrew I put together probably will not work out, I still put together strange and wonky decks, or decks centered around specific packages so I can “experience” their synergies.
In the end, while I am concerned about my MMR, I seek deep understanding of play by homebrewing. Also, when I lose… I’ll go back into the CManager and “try” to mimic my opponent by theorycrafting certain card synergies that I saw them use, that is if I have the cards, then I try to mimic their play in a game. I hate using practice mode because the meta is different(wild).
Incredibly easy time getting the cardback (the only ranked reward I care about, it’s nice getting it in just 5 games), easy quest completion, and facing fun decks for fun games (seriously, it’s fun facing decks consisting of many cards you would never face in a tier 3 or better deck, and it’s fun being able to run a weak deck myself as a result, and it’s easy to stay F2P when you’re in a MMR bracket where your cards don’t matter)
Well, it means barely any ranked reward, but as I mentioned before I don’t care about them anyway, so I may as well say: none
At the moment, trying to complete the Barrens specific achievement for reward track XP. So purposely building a deck to do the achievement but not necessarily compete although I had some surprising wins.
I feel like there is no ‘benefits’ (at least to ladder climbing). If good players are tanking, then I’m still getting good players. I’ve seen the occasional ‘class core deck’ being used though which usually results in a win.
Downside is that you lose rank and rewards. I was at Silver 6 and 2 matches away from hitting the next breakpoint then I just got steamrolled each time I got close to the breakpoint. So I started tanking and now I’m at Silver 10 and have to do it again.
Once a month, at the end of the season when there is no hope of getting to the next level, provided I’m at least D5.
Tanking seems to make for easier opponents next season at least at the beginning.
As long as I still have stars, I make sure I lose more than wins to keep MMR low. I only stop doing that when I run out of stars and need to climb urgently.
