Be Excellent To Each Other

Man it's barely worth it. The rewards can be quite screwy.

True, but I find it fun.

Weird how the whole game can end so quickly on the right draw

Playing against a paladin

Play 1 me - priestess
Play 1 him - coin raptor
Play 2 me - shield , shield hit him in the face - my priestess now has 9 health and 1 attack
Play 2 him - I presume to stop me healing and gaining cards he hits me in the face with his raptor and hero powers a 1/1 soldier
Play 3 me - double health / attach = health and hit him in the face for 18
Play 3 him - bear (3/3 with taunt) the raptor and soldier hit my priestess
Play 4 me - spellbreaker to silence the bear - 18 to the face with the priestess - game over.

I know thats pretty much my 'dream draw' but he didn't even get to make a 4th play and i dont know what 3 mana spell he could have thrown to stop me - if he had hit my priestess with his raptor on round 2 it would have knocked her down to 6 - i could still have hit him for 24 points just with the priestess if i did the same moves without healing her or if i had circle of healing I could have healed and did the same damage

Do you mean a Young Priestess, she's a 2/1 so two Power Word Shields would make her a 6/1? Then a Divine Spirit makes her a 12/1, then an Inner Fire makes her a 12/12?

Actually just realised, you must be talking about the Cleric (which would make sense with him avoiding hitting her to not give you card draw), not the Priestess, as she's a 1/3 and that makes your numbers work

Personally I hate the Turn 1 Cleric plays from priests, because if they have the cards to insta-buff it as you did there, it damn near becomes an unstoppable force before you can do anything about it. If you try to grind it down it becomes practically unlimited card draw for the priest, if you leave it alone until you can deal with it, the end result can be what happened to that pally.

The problem of course with decks that semi-rely on that sort of synergy is that when you don't get the draw the deck can fail pretty horribly. Nothing amuses me more than smacking a priest to pieces and he lamely chucks out a Cleric mid-game for her to immediately get swamped in the tempo of the game at that point

For me the measure of a good deck is one that you can climb the rankings with consistently and confidently, to a point at least - I think Rank 10 will forever remain my high point

Northshire Cleric yes (sorry)



If i dont have the buff cards I would normally just hold onto her for turn one because there are so many 2 point cards with 3 damage so you get nothing out of her and on early rounds using the 2 mana 'heal' can be a waste of power when you could get other minions out.



A mid game Cleric only works if you have stuff out to protect her - or your playing her onto a board which already has some damaged creatures on there (and a circle of healing can give you so many extra cards) - talking about synergistic cards I really like on turn 3 having a slightly buffed cleric + an accolite of pain out - he takes damage (to give me cards) and then I heal him (so she gives me cards) :-)



15 or so seems to be where i get to and thats where you start to get people that know their deck or just have a stream of legendary cards for the later rounds

This is where being a class with insta-kill skills is useful.

Not many classes can insta-kill/neutralise an 18/18 on Turn 3, assuming they even have the cards in hand for it.

In zaphod's example an Ironbeak would have done the important part with a silence, a shammy's Hex would have neutralised it, but your other hard removals, generally speaking, cost more mana than that.

Warrior could have put something together with an Execute.

So yes there are classes and cards that could have dealt with it, but in the main it was going to be game over.

My lazy paladin deck is doing well, somehow. Had a game earlier where the guy dropped a deathwing to clear the board, at which point I reduced its attack to 1

Nice 1/12, erm, thing you have there. He conceded.

Hunter and Priest would have done for it, off the top of my head. Plenty of other neutralisers too

I'm not saying there's nothing that could do it, (and indeed gave my own examples), but that in general doing a hard removal of an 18/18 on Turn 3 is a big ask, particularly since you'd often mulligan away the sorts of cards that could perform that task on the initial draw as they're not generally useful for the early game. (And even then we're running on the assumption that the card(s) are in hand to even get the job done.)

The long and short of it is I think it's a typically wanky priest play and indicative of why I hate the class so much. (No offence to zaphod, he didn't design the class )

I've been dicking around in Ranked with my ridiculous legendary loaded Warrior deck. (Can't be arsed to play properly, except for the daily quests, and even then I'm happier this month to be Rank 20 or close to it, so that they're easy games.)

Tinkmaster Overspark is fucking rubbish, he's currently on a run of EIGHT consecutive turning enemy minions into 5/5s and he hasn't made a single 1/1 squirrel. A few more and we'll be into Cavey roulette territory

Since I got to Rank 18 by accident (win streak off the dailies) I'm sure my current opponents must be wondering what the hell I'm doing playing the most dreadful legendaries into the most ridiculous situations.

The only annoying thing is I'm often dead before I get to play any of the big, interesting legendaries - although amazingly I am winning around 50% of my games...... Nozdormu is a favourite, I wish there were a 'NOZDORMU MODE' where both players just get 15 seconds to play their turns all the time, a bit like speed chess.

I've also done a legendary Rogue deck but that thing really is a car crash in deck form. (I won a game with it last night and was like, 'How the hell did I just win a game with this sack of crap...')

Ugh. Mage manages to end a turn with a sorceror's apprentice on the board.

Archmage whathisface - ring - arcane intellect - arcane missiles x2

Weirdest deck. Started off aggro, then switched into massive damage, then into miracle, then into that to finish me off over the next two turns with four fireballs to the face (he'd already used his other two, both flamestrikes, a blizzard and both polymorphs!).

Hearthstone quiz!

http://www.icy-veins.com/hearthstone/quiz

I got 9/10, which is quite bad considering how much I've played the bloody game.

8/10, not too bad.

7 got 3, 5 and 10 wrong

9/10

I don't think I've ever even seen a Malygos or whatever it was on about.

It's a different one each time.

The one I got wrong was asking how much Magma Rager cost. I thought it was 2, but it's actually 3. Interesting, I'll do a few more of these.

So it is, 7/10 the second time.

10/10 that time, yeeeah.

But it turns out that my knowledge of pirate cards is quite shaky.

Ran it three times, results as follows:

8/10
7/10
9/10

It's nice that it changes the questions each time

My last three arena runs have been horrendous. 0-3, 2-3 and currently 1-2. All three times just getting terrible cards, with one or two useful ones that never show up in the actual deck. I think in this set I got offered about 6-7 sets of cards which had every single one in the 'terrible' section. Ugh.

In the current 1-2 run I have been completely smashed twice, and the one win came at turn 2 when my opponent inexplicably quit whilst three minions up.

I'm mucking about with a Hunter deck at the moment in Constructed Ranked, it's quite good fun, lots of powerful cards in there for the class but I have restricted myself to ZERO SECRETS as secrets are priesty style twat play and I will have nothing to do with them.

I'm deliberately keeping myself down near Rank 20, if I ever get on a winning streak I just insta-concede a few to drop back down again, priests get an insta-concede if they Turn 1 Cleric or play a Thoughtseal, Zoo Lock gets an insta-concede as soon as it's definitely zoo. Oh yes and mages if they do Mana Wyrm/Mirror Image trickery, can't be arsed, concede.

Arena runs when I'm in the mood and have the gold, had a modest 4:3 earlier today. Arena is still good fun and I mostly enjoy it.

Okay, my all-time suck deck is now 6-2 from 1-2.

Maybe it's not so bad.

You're so bloody weird! Secrets are the opposite of Priest play. PRIESTS HAVE NO SECRETS.

You seem very tetchy and instantly concede against anything you don't think you can beat? Where's the challenge?

I just played against a Freeze mage that was card for card identical to the one Trump has played at legendary. Without the cards or deck designed to beat it, there's just no way. Frost nova/doom sayers, card draw, flamestrikes, and then the tiresomely predictable Turn 9 Alextraza followed by the frostbolt/lance finisher.

Clearly some noob at rank 18 that's paid to win for the necessary cards of a winning deck someone else made. There's little challenge there, because that's a very specific deck with very few counters, especially if you're unprepared for it at the higher ranks.

Roll on Naxx to shake some of this shit up.

I did the challenge last season, achieved my personal goal of getting to Rank 10, so I'm just after an interesting variety of games this season which you get at the lower ranks, all sorts of decks turning up which can be fun to play against.

I also got to Rank 10 with 100% my own decks (pally/warlock/druid), (and there were no insta-concedes with that climb!), so I'm happy with that

Not in the mood at the moment, although I am getting quite interested in the Hunter so I'll see how I get on with that, but I refuse to use secrets because they're slippery and cheaty - like priests.



I've come up against some 'semi' Trump freeze mage decks and they're always a tough game, the pure version of the deck played correctly is indeed damn near impossible to beat with any sort of 'standard' deck - but I guess that's the way the meta goes.

It's a bit like when hunters were rampant before UTH got nerfed, you had to use a deck that could beat down the damage quota whilst never having more than two minions out - a tough call but it was doable.

If freeze mage goes 'viral' as it were, it'll be interesting to see what the counters are..... (Healing back above the Alex 15 looks like it could stop it in its tracks.)

Well, yes, I just came up another Freeze mage cunt wannabe and he couldn't do it this time. His play was sloppy though, hurling fireballs at my face during the early game, freezing without a followup to remove. Bad play and bad draw on his side.

It also helped I was playing Druid so the every-turn armour up and various bite/claw cards with armour buffs kept me alive.

It's not the deck that bothers me, but rather that it's merely copied from the people who are actually good at this game. I've never played with a deck list found elsewhere, all of my decks are my own initiative*.



*AND FREE WOOTWOOT.

I don't think there's anything wrong with copying a deck and seeing how you can manage with it.

The mage freeze deck is ferociously difficult to play properly, I'm watching through the Trump videos and he's already made extensive modifications to it, and there are very rarely what you'd call easy games with it - TBH I doff my cap to anyone who can play that deck effectively and consistently, wherever it happens to have come from.

I've played a lot with the Trump F2P Shaman deck, and again, that's a hard deck to play properly - it took a lot of learning and a lot of watching Trump work with it to get my head around it.

The other thing with copying a deck and trying it yourself is it gives you an insight into different strategies when putting a deck together, and high level concepts of the game itself. My pally/druid/warlock decks are 100% my own creations, but in a way 'inspired' by what I learned watching Trump play and following his logic in how he puts a deck together and plays it.

Someone who can play the freeze mage deck well is good at the game, whether or not they copied the deck itself.

Nope. He switched out Pyroblast for Archmage Antonidas. That's it.

Everything else is blahblahblah. Ultimately you found you couldn't make decks that win by yourself, so you go to the internet to try to find the answer, worked out by someone else that's better than you. That you still can't get to legendary with a legendary deck just means you do suck as much as you thought

So I don't disagree that you still need to be good at the game

I've played against quite a few ice mage decks now and if they know what they are doing / get the draw to work then they are damn hard to stop but I think there is a bit of a feeling that if they dont know what they are doing and just play the cards as they come as long as they get the dragon in their hand before turn 9 they knock you down to 15 , turn 10 they either pyroblast you for 10 (plus dragon to the face) or use their other direct damage spells on you and its the end

Playing priest and healing (or having a lightwell out) is the best way to climb a little out of danger - or to get the right cards and knock them out before round 9 would be good :-)

Also had another one of those starts there where they obviously got their best card draw

Against a warrior I'm playing a mage - they went second

Round 1 me - pass (no single point cards)
Round 1 them - coin and http://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Amani_Berserker

Round 2 me - I still dont have anything useful and dont want to hit the berserker to bump him up to 5 damage so hero power one point to their face
Round 2 them - http://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Inner_Rage (cost zero) to the Berserker which drops his health to 2 but bumps his attack to 7 and http://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Rampage which bumps him up to 10/5 - hits me in the face for 10 points

And now on round 3 i dont have anything which will take down something that big yet (i have a silencer but he's four points)

Left to right is how he's changed the deck from Otter > Inbetween > Current (and there were lots of iterations between that).

He's morphed it into a giant/freeze deck, but it's clearly still based on the original freeze deck that Otter trained him with.



After getting frustrated with the game early on trying to make my own decks from scratch, and this being my first ever card game of this genre - (this thread contains the whole history) - I took Trooper's advice to play around with some other decks made by other people to help me get a feel for things (this was very good advice), and from then on I started to branch out into making my own decks, which is where I ended up at last season and managed to climb to Rank 10 playing my own decks. Not brilliant, but it was good enough for me.

Each of my own three decks contains just two legendaries, and one of those is shared across all three (Cairne, who could be substituted by a Boulderfist), the other two are class legendaries (warlock/pally) and then there's a Rag in my druid deck.

(And it's not like you don't actually have any legendaries, you played the priest legendary against me in a game we played.)

So overall that's four unique legendaries across three decks, hardly a ridiculous number and well within the reach of any player whether they pay any money or not. I guess this is how I must sound like when I bang on about 'cheating priests', you've got a bee in your bonnet about 'PAY TO WIN CUNTS' (although deny having ever said such a thing and demand a quote, which is duly provided), but ultimately 100% of the game and 100% of the cards are open to 100% of players, whether they spend nothing or a million pounds - simple as that.

Ultimately you don't get to Rank 10 by having no idea how to play the game with your own decks (and two legendaries in a deck is by no mean a 'legendary deck'), but yeah, of course Trump is better than me, same as he's better than you and everyone else who plays the game here at BEEX, but I don't mind accepting that sometimes the best way to learn something new is to watch and observe folks who are better at something than you are.

Dude, I was only pulling your chain. You know I think you play capably well, we've had enough close matches.

Actual Naxx news!!!

http://eu.battle.net/hearthstone/en/blog/14601010/

Five wings in total, first wing free, next few wings either 700g or £5 each, but you can get a bundle and buy the final 4 wings for £14 instead. I expect i'll just do that and spunk my gold on card packs and arenas £14 isn't too bad.

Seems exceptionally reasonable on all fronts TBH, in particular 700G for each wing really is amazingly cheap IMO - if Blizzard were going to crank up the 'not quite so F2P any more' ratchet, this is when they'd do it, and yet that's a positively trivial amount of gold to ask for. (I've accrued over 500 gold just because I haven't been doing Arena runs for a few days, so it's not much at all.)

I'll lob Blizzard £14 for the bundle no questions asked though, and doff my cap to them for continuing to show how F2P can be done 100% right.

Depending on how the lie of the land looks with the integration of the new cards into the collection, I wouldn't rule out lashing out on 40 packs (once or twice over....) again either

2800g total. I have 2500 at the moment and 200g in pending quests.

Happy to be the living example of how to do this F2P right

It depends if you ever plan on splashing any cash, it's much better value to pay for naxx with real money and spend your gold on packs and arena if you think you are ever likely to put your hand in your pocket

Unlikely, unless they develop something awesome that is only accessible by paying. Who knows, maybe Naxx will be shit and you'll all feel ripped off

7-3 in the end, and had a great match agaisnt a Druid that nearly made it 8-3, but he just had enough to get over the line.

Now I have a Mage deck and am 0-1.

Exciting times.

I now have my 2nd Legendary card (after Nat)

Its a class specific one , can you guess which class ?

I know the answer 'cause it flashed up on my screen

Congrats dude, always nice to get the oranges

http://strawpoll.me/2083732/r

Interesting poll results, currently 60% in favour of using in game gold only to buy the wings.

That's probably just EBJ clicking 3500 times.....

Those kinds of numbers are fine for Blizzard I'd think, getting 40% of players in an F2P game to lash out $20 apiece on an expansion is a good result?

I should have mentioned this before, but my initials are EBG, I don't know where this EBJ came from

I have a decent Hunter deck in Arena, but I just got owned by a Shadowform Priest. I totally misunderstood what that meant. All healing still heals them (apart from hero power), but all healing does damage to you, as does all damage. And that means he doesn't need to play any minions at all, really, as he has the best hero power in the game (basically a double mage), can heal himself with all his regular healing spells, but they all now double as kill spells too. Crazy stuff. Surprised I haven't seen them more often in constructed.

Thats because they switch to damage and they *cant* heal themselves - all healing spells become damage spells

So yes its a double mage power (and you can hit stuff behind taunt) but you cant heal - it can be a problem if for example you have a lightwell out (so every round it will deal 3 damage to a friendly character) or using Holy nova does 2 damage to all enemies - and then 2 damage to all friends :-)

There are only 2 ways to switch over to shadowform - there is the minion who does it while they are out (so you can take out the minion and their powers return to normal) or there is a card to do it

The Priest Legendary doubles this power so if you have shadowform and him out then you have a 4xmage power

You're getting confused here. Shadowform doesn't make things like Lightspawn do healing damage, only Auchenai Soulpriest effect does that.

I thought the same as Zaphod until that match a few minutes ago.

It's so freaking powerful!

Currently 4-1 in Arena with that my only loss.

Chose Hunter and then just picked every beast available, even if there were better cards out there. Seems to be working pretty well!

Ahh - i really thought it was the same as the soulpriest - I dont have the card and its 400 dust to create so probably not for a while but useful to know

Double shadowform makes it 3 damage. It's fine but you don't tend to see it being played hard in constructed as it's a bit slow.

Yeah it's a double mage effect, but a lot of Priest power and class-specific cards make great use of being healed. Keeping a minion in the game is often better than being able to do 2 direct damage.

That must have been a bug, as it shouldn't work like that. The only thing shadow form should do is change the hero power from heal to damage, which is why no one uses it as it's a bit shit.