Hearthstone

[Bacchus]

Talk of never giving up. After playing around with an idiotic aggro-Priest build which saw me fall back down to 16, I started climbing back up with traditional control Priest and off the bat had the weirdest game against aggro Paladin. He is going first, drops Argent Squire. No cleric in starting hand, so nothing from me. Next turn — two blessings of might on the squire, hits for seven. I luck out on a cleric, and a rather desperate shield on him yields another cleric, so coin-second cleric. That prevented my immediate death as I exchanged the poor clerics for the 7/1 divine shielded monstrosity, but aggro kept on until he smacked me in the face with a truesilver, leaving me at 1 health and him at something like 23 with the board empty save for a 3/1 soulpriest. He emoted 'well played' and dropped a Leper Gnome, his last card in hand. Fortunately, before I could concede the draw revealed a Cabal Shadow Priest, so off the gnome went to my side. The next several turns were just agony of waiting for a wrath of either hammery or avenging sort, but neither came, nor did consecration. Instead the poor guy kept dropping an assortment of Argent Defenders and Abusive Sargeants to face my Cabal Priest who quickly partnered up with a Blademaster and eventually they made it to Uther's face.

[Gaspar]

So, what were the prizes?

Nothing special. Pack and all 4 other boxes were gold.

The not shown card is 1 Mirror Image, which I think is actually a pretty underrated arena card.

There's Mirror Image... and then there's Mirror Image when you have 3 Mana Wyrms! I don't think anyone has ever been happy to see a Mana Wyrm + Coin + Mirror Image on turn 1.

That's borderline broken for an arena deck. Mana Wyrms are my favorite 1-drop for a reason - never bad, and can break a game wide open.

Yeah, the 3 Mana Wyrms were obviously hot. I did manage the Mana Wyrm + Coin + Mirror Image on turn 1 once.

[pindicator]

I think Counterspell is another underrated card for mage arena (at least from tier lists I've seen). It's great to drop down when you have board control, especially in a situation where your opponent's hand is empty and he's relying on top-decking. I had an awful mage Draft that could get an advantage out of the early game but no late game and playing Counterspell in that situation got me two wins just by itself.

Also good points on Mana Wurm. I probably need to take that card more often.

Edit: forgot the most important part. Grats on getting 12!

[Nystul]

Congrats on the 12 wins. I don't think there is any such thing as a guaranteed 12 win deck because this is still a game where we draw cards from a pile and don't know what our opponent has. Looks like a pretty awesome deck though.

I think mirror image is underrated but situational. Basically it comes down to making other cards more powerful, or just buying you time. Obviously the combo with mana wyrm is great early. I think it is also great with gadgetzen, because you replace the card and make it very hard for opponent to remove gadgetzen on the next turn. Mages won't normally play big board cards like frostwolf warlord, but if you happened to get such cards mirror image will make them more useful.

I got crushed one time by a mage who opened with mana wyrm and then played 2 mirror images on turn 2. I thought I still had a chance until he played raid leader on turn 3. No AoE for me, game over.

[uberfish]

Counterspell is really nice as a 1-of for protecting your board position, the trouble is it isn't good as a comeback mechanism if you are behind. the other main mage secret Mirror Entity is also strong in mid-late game when you're ahead and both players are mainly drawing, both these cards have won me games but you have to save them for the right time

The interesting question in arena is what do you do when the draft just doesn't cooperate and offers you a choice of a good card that doesn't fit your mana curve or two otherwise awful cards that do (hi, magma rager and silverback patriarch!)

[WilliamLP]

I just drafted the most blatantly broken and unfair arena deck I've ever had!




Surprisingly, it turned out that 3 Wraths, 4 Swipes, and 2 Azure Drakes controlled the early-mid game quite well! And this deck also had a pretty competitive late game with Cenarius and Cairne.

It got 12 wins, and most of the games just felt completely unfair. One game I lost was against a mage that drew 2 Fireballs, 2 Pyroblasts, Blizzard and Cone of Cold and hit me with 26 direct damage to the face. (He was dead the next turn without the second pyroblast.) The other one was against a typical arena dream Paladin deck with multiples of everything Paladin wants to have: Truesilver, Blessing of Kings, Consecrate, Argent Protector, with a key Guardian of Kings drop. Even then I probably misplayed and could have had him.

The last 2 wins were against the same Paladin deck, who also had the usual Arena spoiler card lineup. He may have been annoyed to have to face this deck twice in a row!

(The rewards were a golden Lightwell, golden Questing Adventurer, 250 gold, a pack with nothing special in it.)

[Gaspar]

That's some good stuff, WLP. Druid is such a feast or famine arena class - either you draft a ton of good removal and have a god deck or you get stuck with 1 swipe. I played one to 7 wins yesterday with 2 swipes and no other hard removal but Soul of the Forest is a surprisingly good arena card and won me 3 seperate games. Its just such a great answer to Flamestrike and the like.

Interesting that you did so well with no 1-drops and 3 2-drop minions. I always feel like if I don't have a play on t1/t2 in arena I'm in trouble. But most of the 1-drops are so terrible, its hard to draft them. Congrats on 12!

[WilliamLP]

Yeah, with many decks it feels like you're going to have a lot of pain without a T2 play, e.g. I feel like I nearly always lose when I'm a Priest and having nothing to do but hero power face on turn 2.

With this deck though, between the hero power, using Wraths for 3 very aggressively, and the Pyromancer, that was more than enough to get to swipe range where the disadvantage disappears. Or getting tempo turned around with the Kodo. I think many arena druids misuse Wrath a lot - and just cycle it in the early game which makes it not really better than the hero power would be.

Or, wild growth on 2, then swipe on 3 is a really strong play when you have 4 swipes, because I think people stop playing around swipe so much when they see the first one drop.

What I'm really trying to learn is Arena Rogue. I almost always get 5-6 wins with it but can't go further. I think maybe I draft them to be too focused on early game or something. With Rogue I find the draft difficult because there aren't many "I win" cards that are always good to have more of and single-handedly change a game the way Swipe or Flamestrike or Truesilver or Holy Nova would.

[Kuro]

The problem I have with Rogue is that I find even their good class cards quite underwhelming, with the exception of the always awesome Eviscerate and SI: 7 Agent. Deadly Poison mostly just kills you more because the games are drawn out and unlike Warrior with armor up or Paladin having Truesilver/Guardian of Kings you rarely have a way to really recover. They also have poor AoE.

[Gaspar]

I think the main problem for Rogue in arena is that their class cards sort of require constructed for real value. Preparation is a card that can be game breaking in constructed but is pretty worthless in Arena. Stuff like Cold Blood - usually you'd rather just have a minion.

I haven't had much success with it but I think maybe an ideal Rogue draft is just weapons, Deadly Poison, Eviscerate, SI:7 and neutral minions and just go with as zoo'ish a deck as you can and try and keep tempo. I'm not sure I'd take any other class card. I think WLPs point though that basically any class that doesn't have a decent bit of hard removal is tough to play in arena.

And great point re: Wrath. Like I said, I'm not that good but I noticed I got decidely better when I just started being willing to use removal on almost anything.