Besides needing to play the game A LOT I would presume to reach legend rank, the main reason as I’ve always known it for why I myself and I also presume most other players will never reach legend rank in wild mode is because the game is too inconsistent.
I’ll see a deck or figure out how to make a really good deck and I might even win the first 3 matches in a row with it making me think okay I’ve got it figured out, and then I’ll lose 2 in a row.
You’ll try an aggro deck and then you get the control deck that stymies you just enough that they end up winning, or you’ll face someone who also goes aggro but unlike you when you somehow draw the only 3 cards in your deck that don’t work till turn 5, they get the dream perfect opening hand and out zerg you.
Or you’ll find the gimmick deck like Uther with the 2 cards that all that to insta win on turn 10 only to face a rogue who plays like 20 Mutanus cards and toally screws your strategy, or despite having 3 ways to draw Uther you’re down to 7 cards and haven’t somehow drawn him or a way to draw him.
Like I’m okay with the fact that the best I’ll ever do is gold 5, but don’t pretend to tell me that I could totally get to legend rank because A) I don’t have that kind of time, and B) while I know some people somehow pull off the impossible in gaming and have a way of seeing things others don’t or just have super good reflexes with super good eyesight in first person shooters, I’m not one of those players and I don’t think most are either.
I’d be willing to bet that tops of 1% of the people who have ever played this game have reached Legend rank, and even 0.01% have reached it several months
Well first off, there’s no shame in prioritizing real life over a children’s game. Progress = skill × time, and with low time it’s very challenging to make equal progress. I encourage you not to take your rank seriously while you have insufficient time to commit to climbing the ladder. Ace that CMA
However, if you’ve got 40 hours a month, there’s really no excuse not to get at least Diamond 5. The ranks below that are designed to be climbed even if your winrate averages below 47%, if you have that much time.
Not sure it’s a good idea to play Wild in the first place. It’s a cesspit of lack of balance; those people can not even balance Standard well; Wild is multiple times more complex as a mathematical problem so it has no chance (as long as those people develop the game at least).
Other than that if you want help talk to us about specific problems; we can’t help with a vague “I can only do Gold”; I also see some hints of some arrogance in you when you proclaim you are so sure about everything you type (and that’s bad for gameplay performance too).
You implied it. You didn’t say “children’s game” as a good thing in that context. You said it to mock their choices in life and therefore you implied it’s a stupid choice.
Carn, I said it to mock our choices in life. Myself included. You’re entirely missing the self-deprecating humor element, which turns “stupid” into something a lot more like “silly.” Chill out.
You don’t need to play a lot, you just need to be good. Legend is a skill diff and the distinction between diamond players and even low legend usually comes down to mismanaging some part of their macro strategy. This is equally true for both Wild and Standard.
Wild has a giant filter on cards you are allowed to play because it’s an eternal format with almost no bans (and majorly overlooked for balancing). In Standard you can get away with more homebrew, and to some extent that’s true in Wild, but Wild is really an environment where unless you are already good enough to be in Legend then you really need to be playing the best to beat the best.
Deck choice is as much of an important decision to your games as the actual plays you make. When I took a break from Wild and came back to it earlier this year (I hadn’t played the format in over a year), I had zero star bonuses. I didn’t have any aid in helping me reach legend, I just had to do it with a change in the meta I was unfamiliar with and I still managed to reach Legend in like 2 days of playing. I’m also not grinding Hearthstone and playing for more than like 2 hours a day so it wasn’t a matter of playing a ton of games, it really is just a matter of being better than other players and having a good winrate and logging off after losses that would otherwise tilt you.
If you want to hit higher ranks playing a lot helps but realistically you’ll eventually be filtered out from reaching even higher ranks if your skill doesn’t reflect your goal. I don’t watch streams, I don’t watch YouTube videos of people climbing but I do reflect on things like prioritizing my lethal reach, giving up card advantage for tempo advantage in the appropriate situations, deck changes that help facilitate both of these things, and playing decks that are good without the coin but more importantly playing decks that are even better with the coin (the coin is majorly polarizing in Wild).
Just be self-reflective, understand your losses more than your wins, and recognize situations where no matter what you draw that sometimes you just have losses that can’t be played through.
So you reached Legend in 4 hours of playing? That’s 20 matches? Right, sure you did.
This makes more sense. I might have wild growth, big game hunter, an 8 cost minion, and another card or two. If my opponent has nothing out there, but does drop a big minion and that’s their turn, then what do I do? Play the big minion in my hand? No, because then he just hammers me on next turn when I could use big game hunter to clear it and then wild growth to gain a mana crystal or draw a card, or play one of the other 2 cards, maybe both if they can be given the mana.
All I know is sometimes despite having 3 big game hunter type cards in my deck I get a big minion opponent and can’t draw any of mine to save my life. Hell I might have the warlock clear board for 8 mana and can’t draw that either. My deck was aggro with little minions and he kept a lid on me long enough to now zerg me with big stuff and I lose.
Again proves my point that obviously some people know how to solve that issue and sometimes even win, but most of us just see 30 to 16 and then dead because I couldn’t counter all that big stuff.
I am saying that my GENERAL habits are that I don’t play more than 2 hours a day, not specifically during that time that I didn’t play for more than 2 hours in two days. That’s confusing so I understand the questioning it. I should say that, as of current with star bonuses, that I don’t play for more than two hours a day. Last month I had an 80% W/R and I only did like 5 games a day. Netting 4 wins in legend is going to make you climb especially when your MMR places you anywhere in the top 1-2K (depending on time period). I think last month I had a 22-0 record before my first loss in Wild.
BGH was one of the decks I used to climb. It was more casual since Druid farms BGH but it’s pretty viable against almost everything else as long as you ETC tech against mage. One of the other big matchups is pirate priest. The main deck I climbed with when I hit top 200 in Wild was pirate priest which I have a decklist I am willing to share, but I am sitting in Legend RIGHT NOW using Earthen paladin and BSM in Standard if Wild is not something you are concerned with, contrary to your post.
I think the takeaway here is that players are generally better than they think but they’ve completely ignored resources to make them better (as I have) but also lack the natural ability to progress without assistance. I can’t even say I’m naturally better, I have a very intensive MTG and YGO background and played in other games like L5R and Flesh and Blood, others casually like Pokemon, WS, and Digimon (both versions). My pedigree of card games is not very typical and so I cannot compare my experience to players who have been playing HS for 1, 2, 5, or even 10 years. My point is that by understanding the game that the meta took place in and my disconnect was irrelevant because my basal understanding of core concepts was much stronger than dedicated players. I place Legend every month in HS and, when I feel like it, place Master in Master Duel which I have not only screenshots but full recordings to substantiate.
And with that said the most important aspects of climbing, in my opinion, is the understanding of value versus tempo and how important it is to play a variety of decks outside of your preferred playstyle. Long ago when I was constantly hitting a wall in diamond, one of my close friends (who owned a college team for HOTS and played competitively) hit legend with face hunter. At the time I considered us to be equal but he just used a deck that was better suited for the environment (this was during Naxx). What I didn’t understand was the very nature of him using face hunter made him a more talented ranked player than me. He hit legend at a time where I literally couldn’t, despite HOURS of grinding, couldn’t break diamond 1 5 stars (this was before the ranked restructure). For literal years I was stuck in this position where I was at THE very top of diamond, all that separated me from legend was a single win more times than I can count, and yet I’d spend hundreds of games at the leylines of legend and never once breaching it.
What I learned after hitting legend was that the threshold between high diamond and legend was simultaneously small and enormous. I have firsthand experience knowing the qualities separating high diamond and legend because I was the poster child for that distinction. When I post on the forums and tell people how to climb, it’s not BS, it is an actual fast track to very hard to learn and very arduous lessons I had to learn. Bear in mind that when I was stuck in HS diamond I had an MTG SCG top 16 (where I met Melissa DeTora), I had a YGO nationals invite, I had a YGO regionals top 8, and I spent years as a top FIVE rated player on Duelingbook and I regularly played with an ex-German national champion (Red X – I can’t remember his real name but this was around 2012-2013). The more elaborate takeaway here is that Hearthstone, for all its similarities to other games, has very distinct nuances that separate it from other like-games and the best players know how to navigate these dynamics on a turn-to-turn basis because of mechanics such as discover, the numerous RNG effects, and just the general structure of the game that endorses an “I hit you then you hit me” flow of game.
The largest improvement I made between my transition to a regular diamond player to a regular legend player was accepting that my cards are temporary and I shouldn’t try to hold onto them for some hypothetical late game, tempo is arguably the most important aspect of the game and playing for tempo facilities both aggro and control, and using consistent decks that take advantage of statistics.
The last point is especially important because when I hit top 1000 legend (wild) with pirate priest I did so in under 100 games. This was my first time using the deck, prior to I almost exclusively used elemental shaman. My hardest games were OTK Druid who could realistically end the game on turn 3 with very high roll hands. Every turn I played, starting from turn 0 (the mulligan), I had to justify my knowledge of mulligans and how best to utilize the coin to see if I could push for up to 20 damage by turn 3, looking for lethal by turn 4. If any game went beyond turn 4 I know that I am in a very real position of losing and I needed to look at card choices that helped for burst on turn 5 and no later than 6. The shadow package was the most obvious answer and a PiP ended up creating one of the most important cards in the deck, Narain Soothfancy.
I don’t know what the played rate of Narain is Pirate Priest for Wild but it’s not a very popular pick. This is an example of homebrewing that people say doesn’t exist in Wild but definitely does. It might seem like a single card in a 30 card list doesn’t constitute a deck being “homebrew,” but when you have enough experience playing games that are paper thin and realize than any increase in percentage completely changes the efficacy of card choice, you’d realize that a single card is pretty significant.
On top of that I completely cut doubles of other cards out, such as Voidtouched Attendant, Mind Sear, and Spawn of Shadows and instead doubled down on cards like Acupuncture, Brain Masseuse, and the inclusion of Narain Soothfancy.
In many ways the distinction between card choice parallels the small choices that diamond players make compared to legend players. I would argue that 95% of people who hit legend deserve it and the other 5% probably get there via elo manipulation (tanking their W/R in a previous month to play worse players in the current month), pure luck (such as facing an usual numbers of players who DC, bots, etc.), or have a hot streak that is abnormal compared to their usual play patterns (sometimes indicative that they are improving but is not yet a consistent paradigm in their play patterns – ergo, they need to play more to see if they can replicate their success).
With that said, if you are consistently placing in gold, I would argue that there are very fundamental lessons that need to be learned that extend beyond factors like RNG and card collection. I also believe that if I managed to break a threshold that I maintained for literal years then you can as well. I play against gold players ALL the time (casually, against friends). I can’t go over all the behaviors I see that separate them from where I used to be but I can say that these distinctions are usually small but occur frequently. The fact is that the difference between you and a diamond player likely isn’t very large, it’s just that you have some problem that occurs regularly enough that it compounds into an adverse number of losses in what would otherwise be close games.
Without spectating any of your games, I would say that the best piece of advice is to watch high level play, commentate on what they’re doing, and record your own games and commentate. You will see the differences in what you say about yourself versus someone who is better and that is the most apparent way to see the differences in play. Anything more specific than that really requires a guiding hand.
Actually, it’s not hard to get to Legend. Even though everyones experience is different from the next guy, theres a few guidelines that can help.
Knowing what classes are on top of the meta helps, knowing their decks / win conditions is huge.You can get those from Legend rank streamers.
That being said, if you know those, it’s easy to shift into one deck or another to have a fast run to Legend.
With the old star ranking it used to take 6 to 10 hours of gameplay to go Legend, but since the new ranking it went to 5 to 8 hours maximum.
If you value your time, knowing what to look for instead of dropping countless hours of watching / playing is much better. Quality over quantity.
The word game implies something being related to something a child would enjoy.
Now, that isn’t to say adults can’t or should not play games, but let’s not pretend this is the hobby that is meant for mature individuals.
It’s adults becoming kids for a little while and enjoying a game.
Nothing wrong with that and Scrotie didn’t say there is.
He obviously has played games himself, being in a gaming forum page and whatnot.
He is just reminding where one should put their priorities. I agree with him because I am also a self-hating individual;)
I’ll join the self-hate train and agree with what Scrotie said that OP should prioritize his real life over achieving a pixel rank. If anything, he shouldn’t even care that much about it in my opinion since they are playing a game where RNG is a major factor.
Some self-hate is only meant to remind you that real life exists, and you shouldn’t prioritize this game over things that actually matter.
You can convince yourself that gaming is more important than real-life responsibilities, but if you reach that point, you’ve likely crossed into some form of disorder.
Unless games are HOW you make ends meet, I think most people (not literal addicts) agree that having a place to live, supporting children, and eating are all functionally more important than gaming.
It’s a little weird that a game should be seen as childish or child-like, though. Like what are ‘proper’ adult hobbies? Wood working? Going to bars and complaining about your work day? Gardening? I mean you can still do any of those other things and still play games.
Tbh most adults really don’t even have hobbies. The amount of people I meet who just don’t do anything other than watch TV is insane. It’s better to at least play video games that literally go to work and then come home to watching just TV. And it’s also not like other hobbies are very convenient either. I mean if I want to go rafting it’s not like I can just pack things up before or after work. I’m just curious what an adult hobby is to you.