It's actually very solid against anything except lategame priests and some mirrors that run more lategame cards. Priest with Rag + Ysera + 1 or more MC will just ruin your day unless you get unbelievably lucky. I would consider it 80% priest favored almost.

Regarding the 1-offs:

Healing touch - there exclusively for the mage problem. I've actually been playing with a 2nd drake in its place recently.
Nourish - pure card draw. I will draw my entire deck faster than you in almost any matchup with just one of these. Two would really be overkill.
Sunfury - Basically a 3rd Argus to be honest.
Loot Hoarder - Just realized I forgot a Novice Engineer in the list. Actually been running 2x Engi instead recently.
Faerie Dragon - I am actually not sure about this card. I may consider replacing it soon, but I am actually a little wary of pushing the mana curve later than it already is. Any thoughts?
Sylvanas, Argent, Ancient of War - Not much to say here. I might consider swapping out the argent for something, but it's pretty much an extra removal spell.

 

Yes, I finally succeeded! I completed my first arena run with 12 wins.
It was a Paladin run with 12-1 wins. The only loss was to Deathwing. I even managed to kill Deathwing, but I was down to 1 health and hero ability killed me. You can't really play around Deathwing.

It was arena run number 8 and now I'm just missing hunter. It seems like that is a relatively bad class in arena from my subjective experience. My worst runs to date were Druid and Priest with only 3 wins each. Overall, I'm at 73% win-rate in arena.

EDIT: My winning deck:
2 Truesilver Champions and 1-2 Argent Protector, Blessing of Kings, Noble Sacrifice, Light's Justice, Aldor Peacekeeper and Sword of Justice each.
No Consecration, Hammer of Wrath or Equality.
Otherwise pretty strong minions and no more than a handful of mediocre ones.

Opponents: 3 Paladin, 3 Mages, 2 Shaman, 2 Warlocks, 1 Rogue, 1 Hunter, 1 Druid (loss)

 

Nice! I have had a run of really bad arenas recently, capped off by the Rogue I drafted yesterday that had a grand total of 3 class cards in it. I lost the first game then said fuck it and retired early it was so bad.

On a happier note, I hit rank 5 yesterday in play mode. Slow grinding from there, but you see some people 2-3 games in a row sometimes, so I've gotten a couple cool deck ideas from them.

 

Damn folks, did you guys just watch a shit ton of streams before you hit the arena?

I'm doing pretty damn bad at them...
3-3 Pa, 2-3 Dr, 1-3 WL, 5-3 Ma, 2-3 hr, 4-3 Pa, 3-3 Pa, 2-3 Dr

 

I watched plenty of streams and vids long before I got into Beta; It helps - but if you get dreadful drafts in the Arena there's not much you can do.

Best case would probably be making some kind of balls-deep early aggro selections and hoping for the best, or so I've found - and even then my best streak has been 5 wins as Paladin.

 

I'm not sure to what extent you already know the basics and I don't want to appear condescending.
I had no card game knowledge before Hearthstone and I always try to keep these basics in mind:

Your health doesn't matter unless it's 0 (because then you lose.) Don't be afraid to take some damage (especially by using weapons or hero ability.)

Try to get favourable trades. You need to be good at this to win. Take out the enemy 4/3 with your 3/2. Try to take out 2 enemy cards by only using one of your own.
Value cards that allow you to do this very highly. That means buff minions like Shattered Sun Cleric (even with the nerf), Dark Iron Dwarf and Defender of Argus. (Or good AoE spells of course.)

Also: get some card draw in your deck. If you have to rely entirely on your 1 card a turn, you're going to lose often.

If you have the coin, try to smooth out your curve with it, if possible. (You have a 2, a 4 and another 4, play one of the 4s on turn 3 with the coin.) Also remember that it counts as a spell and a card.

If you're drafting for arenas, don't rely on potential synergies. Always assume the rest of your draft goes badly and take the best card with this in mind. For instance: only take pirates highly as a warrior if you already drew some weapons. Only take the beast synergy cards highly as a hunter if you already have a lot of good beast cards. etc.
Better a standard yeti than a houndmaster that never gets to buff a beast. (Chillwind Yeti is actually a great card, because at only 4 mana the opponent will often need 2 minions or a spell and a minion to deal with it.)

There are some very clever and counter-intuitive plays for which you simply need a lot of experience or watch streams of good players. Prefer to watch arenas if you're at a low skill level, because constructed at high levels will probably not help you right now.

You also have to learn the cards. At 7 mana a mage can play Flamestrike, so don't play a lot of minions with <5 health the turn before.
Paladin can pull out Truesilver Champion at turn 4, so try to hold on to an Ooze if you can. (If you have nothing else to play on turn 2, play it anyway. Wasting the turn would often be worse.)
And so on.
Try to think ahead of what the opponent will likely play if you choose this or that card. This takes some time to know the cards.

For advances hints you can google for arena guides, which might help you a bit. But drafting by some tier list will not magically improve your play by much.

 

You can get a key for this from here. Saw it on a thread in steamgifts here and have just received it.

On a completely unrelated notice I also have an extra key so anyone who wants just PM me. EDIT: Given to Aekiel.

 

Thanks for the heads up chrnno.

Hope I get a key =o

 

You are welcome.

It should take a few days only, if you have more than one e-mail I suggest using them all. Both gmail and hotmail took 2 days but yahoo didn't receive at all.

 

Thanks for the key chrnno, this game is a lot of fun.

Anyway, I've got a semi-decent Beast Deck made up, I think. Come challenge me, fools!

My name is my name.

 

You also need to put in the 4 numbers after your name too

 

Oops.

Aekiel #2864.

 

I've now completed 19 arena runs and I'm averaging (exactly) 7 wins.
Which means I either haven't improved or the opposition has improved just as much.

Could also mean that the arena system works. As soon as you reach >3 wins you face people with above average skill and/or decks every game.
Seeing as even the streamers don't average more than 7-8 wins per run, it might just not be possible to reach more.

Sometimes you just have a bad draft and are missing all the good cards and had to take a Goldshire Footman.
Sometimes you have a bad start and the opponent has a great one.

I'm pretty satisfied overall. I play an arena every day without losing any gold. Due to the quests I'm now at 1800 gold.
I'll probably start buying cards (for gold) once I reach >2000. I don't want a string of bad arena runs to bankrupt me, so I want to keep that cushion.

 

I still haven't gotten my key, which sucks.

7 wins every run is very impressive. Isn't that the number of wins required to break even 100% from the rewards? Nice job.

 

By exactly 7 wins I just meant I wasn't rounding up from a 6.5 average. More often it's 9 wins in one run and then 5 the next.

It does mean I break even. You can also break even with 6 wins, if you just play once per day and fulfill the daily quest with your run.


Did you not get a key from the Korean website that did the giveaway? Some people signed up with multiple addresses, so maybe someone here has a spare.

 

I used both my emails for that Korean giveaway but no luck so far.

 

http://www.hearthpwn.com/blue-tracker/topic/4329-can-i-get-my-beta-key

Well there's this for anyone who's still waiting for a beta key.

 

If anyone is looking for a fun deck to mess around with, I present to you "11/10 would rogue again" which a friend of mine put together. Lots of fun, but not very good.

http://i.imgur.com/XL71Ndg.png

 

http://i.imgur.com/TrI6oaX.jpg

Trump, in preparation for his Legendary run, made a deck for every class.

Watching ladder streams is fucking brutal, right after the reset. Every top (and low) class player is piled into a single area and they're all just hitting each other.

I actually think they might have to adjust the way a ladder reset works, if this is going to be the norm. Some new player is going to start playing on ladder reset day and get smashed so hard he'll quit.


Edit: He also quickly made a series of decks using just basic cards for those who don't have all dem epics: http://imgur.com/Fv7bMWv

 

Nice hadn't seen that. Most of those decks seem to slight variations of well known decks. The gnimsh aggro mage is so much weaker without the cheap aoe it used to have, but I guess pyromancer is there to compensate. That card is everywhere all of a sudden.

By the way, hipster mage (nerfed freeze mage) still works pretty well. I was able to climb consistently with it before I dropped back to 20 again playing stupid shit.