Hearthstone

[Jowy]

Good news Seven, if you get high legend in the next few seasons, Blizzard will invite you to a "grand tournament"
http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/blog...-3-28-2014

[SevenSpirits]

Sure.

The Shaman deck is based off TidesofTime's, and the idea is basically just great cards + Rockbiter/windfury combos for burst damage at the end. His had Bloodmage Thalnos, Mana Tide Totem, Al-akir, and Blood Knight. I lacked those cards and substituted Kobold Geomancer, Gadgetzan Auctioneer, Cairne (one of the few legendaries I've opened, yay), and Acidic Swamp Ooze. Cairne is not an ideal substitute for Al-Akir, who serves the dual purpose of resilient late-game power and burst combo with Rockbiter Weapon. He does a decent approximation of the first though. With no Cairne I would try for the best late game topdeck you can come up with. Gadgetzan is a good card in this deck, I don't feel bad about running him at all, and he could easily have been in TidesofTime's list against a slightly more control-heavy metagame. Ooze is a metagame card and has been pretty good. I'm happy with it. Geomancer I am not sure about, but the spell damage is pretty good in this deck and it's often nice to have around. I am thinking of crafting a Thalnos though since it's so generally useful, and I just pulled a Tinkmaster for 1600 dust. The deck REALLY wants Al-akir, but I can't justify crafting him for use in just one deck.

The Zoo deck is based off Reynad's. I forget what he has in there exactly that's different, but these are all reasonable choices and you can just make small changes depending on the metagame. Like, Blood Knight would be pretty good, for example. The important thing with playing this deck is to kill their guys efficiently instead of going face almost every time you have the choice. If I were going to swap something out it would probably be the Scarlet Crusader.

The Hunter deck is, well, most of the list is pretty obvious, and I decided on the specifics myself. As I alluded to I was "inspired" by Specialist's deck, the exact contents of which I am however unaware of. You can play around with the numbers a lot. The Misdirections aren't as good in a deck with so many dudes, so maybe one of them should be taken out. Maybe a Freezing Trap should be added, or a second Animal Companion. The only card I'm not playing because I don't have it is the second Flare. I don't think I'd want to play this deck without Leeroy, because he's just worth SO much to this deck due to powering up Unleash.

What decks are you playing these days, Kuro?

P.S. If you look at these decklists you might (rightly) conclude that Argent Squire is a good card.

So I got up to #3 before dropping down to the 500s through disconnects and a changing metagame. Some prominent streamers started playing hunter, and suddenly I had to contend with a ton of hunter and warrior control. None of my decks have a good matchup against this combination unfortunately. I tried some more controllish decks but I just don't have all the necessary cards for them. So I decided to just play arena for a while.

Last two days I got back into constructed and things are much better again, and I made it back up to #36. (I thought I'd like to be in the top 100 when the season ended.) Not only has the metagame become more balanced again, but a lot of the hunter decks have switched to freezing traps from misdirection (or from neither). This means my own traps are that much more effective, since people's expectations are wrong. I also made a couple of changes to the hunter and zoo decks.

Hunter:
-2 Abusive Sergeant
+1 Stonetusk Boar
+1 Animal Companion

I had put the Abusives in because they are a nice way to get to 3 damage against an enemy minion on an unleash turn. But there are some good arguments for Stonetusk Boar being better: on an unleash turn, it probably draws you a card; with timber wolf, it's +2 damage, too; it turns on Kill Command and adds one damage to it; and it's way better in situations like the mirror where your opponent had led with Leper Gnome. Meanwhile, the second Animal Companion is obviously a good card in general, but the specific reason I put it back in is that it's good in the warrior and hunter matchups.

Zoo:
-1 Scarlet Crusader
-2 Shattered Sun Cleric
+1 Mortal Coil
+1 Blood Knight
+1 Crazed Alchemist

I put in the second mortal coil due to the metagame at some point and I've been happy with it. The Scarlet Crusader got swapped out for a Blood Knight which I decided to craft, because the number of Argent Squires out there is nuts. It's been pretty good so far, winning me a couple of games. I'm not interested in playing more than one though, because it's on the expensive side (3 mana) and the second copy is a lot less useful than the first if you draw both. Finally, I decided to try out a Crazed Alchemist, and I think I like it so far. It has a few uses.
1) General trickiness. For example you can swap your opponent's Ancient of War, effectively dealing 5 to it. Or you can kill Shieldbearers or totems outright. Or you can flip your own high toughness guy for extra burst damage.
2) The very specific situation of recovery from Explosive Trap vs hunter. It comes up fairly often that you can e.g. Defender of Argus to get your guys to survive Explosive Trap, but then they are weak and they are kind of just helping your opponent's Unleash out. With Alchemist you can flip one back into e.g. a 1/4 taunt, which is a lot better.
3) Tricks with the rest of your deck. So OK, what alchemist does is it looks at their current attack and health, and changes their (max and current) health and attack to match, and removed their other buffs from non-continuous effects. So if you Abusive Sergeant your Shieldbearer, now he's a 2/4 until end of turn, and now if you Alchemist him, he's a 4/2 PERMANENTLY. If he was next to a Dire Wolf Alpha, he started as a 1/4, was boosted to 3/4, and then was flipped permanently to 4/3, whereupon his stats are immediately boosted to 5/3 by the Dire Wolf. If you attack a 1/1 with your Amani Berserker, he becomes a 5/2 because of his enrage ability. Now when you alchemist him, he becomes a full health 2/5, who, if he takes another point of damage later, will enrage again to a 5/4. In summary, temporary or continuous buffs + alchemist = profit. (I learned this through a sick Shaman arena deck with multiple Flametongue Totems and Stormwind Champions and an Alchemist.)
He's been pretty good, and certainly a lot of fun, so far. I only put in one though because I don't think I'd generally be happy to draw two of them. It's kind of a narrow card. (And also because I had to craft the one alchemist I did put in, and was somewhat disinclined to make another.)

[Gaspar]

So apologies at first, the thread is too long to catchup on so I'm just jumping in at the end. If everything I say has been covered already, feel free to ignore me.

I just downloaded this over the weekend - I played a lot of an online TCG about 12 years ago at a very high level but since then haven't touched anything in the genre. Boy have I lost my touch. I've been poking around, leveling the heroes to 10 so I have all the free cards and such and today I jumped into some ranked with a version of a popular Warrior Burn deck, modified for my minimal rares and play style. Its kind of lame, though its impossible to invent anything in this day and age, but since my primary goal was just to get a feel for how to play, its served it well. I actually went 10-3 today with it, which felt pretty good.

Anyway, my reason for popping in is two questions:

1. Is it possible to play a decent control deck without a bajillion legendaries? Control definitely more suits my style, I much prefer a build to a big finish (Miracle Rogue is the platonic ideal of a Gaspar deck, honestly - but I've nowhere near the skill let alone cards to play that kind of style) than a speed deck. The warrior burn deck I aped isn't pure burn, so it suits me more than say, a Murloc deck. But every version of a control deck I've seen online has big expensive legendaries to finish. I actually did get a Baron in a pack, but anyway the point remains.
2. Is there some collection of RB'er on HS Battletags? I'm Gaspar#1207 if anyone wants to add me.

Thanks for tolerating my jumping in late and probably repeating myself - I actually tried to get myself to read the thread unsuccessfully for 3 days before posting this.

[SevenSpirits]

1. Is it possible to play a decent control deck without a bajillion legendaries? Control definitely more suits my style, I much prefer a build to a big finish (Miracle Rogue is the platonic ideal of a Gaspar deck, honestly - but I've nowhere near the skill let alone cards to play that kind of style) than a speed deck. The warrior burn deck I aped isn't pure burn, so it suits me more than say, a Murloc deck. But every version of a control deck I've seen online has big expensive legendaries to finish. I actually did get a Baron in a pack, but anyway the point remains.

My impression is that warrior, paladin, priest, and warlock control decks rely on legendaries. Druid too, but a bit less because the class has several good expensive minions... but they are epic (ancient of lore/war). Mage isn't that good, but probably wants some legendaries ideally. Shaman might be your best bet: not only do most Shaman decks I've seen run fine without legendaries (or only with 1-2) and without epics (well, maybe 1 doomhammer), but the good big Shaman guys, Fire Elementals, are basic cards.

Shaman also has some insane burst damage finish options which key off having built up a nice board, with several in-class cards that have or grant windfury, and three good cards which boost attack value (rockbiter weapon, flametongue totem, and bloodlust). So you might appreciate that playstyle aspect of them too.

I'd recommend looking up Trump's free-to-play Shaman. He did a twitch series where he started a new account and played one class up to legendary. (He did it before with mage.) And he is a VERY control-y player.

[Jowy]

Protip: If you don't have Al Akir for shammy, you can combo Doomhammer with 2x Rockbiter for 16 damage at 7 mana

[Kuro]

Exciting new content on the horizon, it seems. Can you overcome the Curse of Naxxramas?. Shade of Naxxramas looks like a potent Arena bomb.

[WilliamLP]

Exciting new content on the horizon, it seems. Can you overcome the Curse of Naxxramas?. Shade of Naxxramas looks like a potent Arena bomb.

Yeah, it looks interesting for arena, doesn't it? It's an epic so it won't be seen too much but there's very little that can remove a stealthed 2/2 played on turn 3. So at worst it should be usable as a 3/3 next turn. And it's quite a "win more" card because if you have a tempo advantage and can afford to keep it hidden and let it grow, it could get out of control and win games like Questing Adventurer sometimes does.

I'm interested in how Dancing Swords will play out, whether it will be good and played in competitive aggro decks or if the penalty is too much.

Baron Rivendare feels more like a fun card, because the 1/7 body isn't very useful. Maybe in decks that run many taunt givers? The effect would be crazy with Sylvanas or Cairne, but it still feels gimicky to me.

[Kuro]

Shades of Naxxramas seems fun because if you drop it on T3 it dodges a lot of removal (Consecration needs to be used T4 or it can't kill it and it's a 5/5 when Flamestrike happens), so you can keep it hidden until you can use it for lethal or when absolutely necessary. I think that Dancing Swords seems really bad, though Nerubian Egg seems potentially useful. Baron Rivendare probably isn't good, but it does want to make me put it in an Ancestral Spirit Shaman with Cairne etc for a million floaters.

[Sir Bruce]

Shade is sloooooow. 3 for 3/3 next turn means it's bad unless you have other ways of dealing with board control until it gets big. So maybe mage or warrior?

The other cards have a lot of flavor but seem kinda weak. Completely agree that Dancing Swords looks terrible and the Egg is probably playable only as a combo with Sunfury/Defenders. Baron could have a nifty combo with that Druid summon deathrattle. Tough to evaluate cards without trying them out though.

[Kuro]

Shade of Naxxramas is slow in Constructed, but I'm thinking it is an Arena bomb.