I'm looking for a little beginner's advice. I started dabbling in Hearthstone and although I feel like I'm grasping it pretty easily (I've dabbled in MTG and I have a bi-monthly game of Dominion with some pals so the concepts present aren't completely foreign to me) I am vein continually pummelled in both casual and ranked. The highest number of wins I've achieved in the arena is 3. I've built 3 decks so far, caster Mage and Warlock decks and a Palidin buff deck. So far the Mage is the only one I can rely on and I only win about a quarter of the time. Most of my losing battles are neck on neck until turn 8 or so where I start to get overwhelmed by powerful cards I can't match.

So my question is: do I simply need better cards to do better? I've opened between 10-20 packs so far and crafted a few cards. Is this enough for me to build and effectively use a solid deck? Or do I just suck and need to hone my skills?

@rocketboot: Hah, I'm in a similar place to you. 3 wins is my best in the arena, and I have opened even less packs. I got to rank 20 pretty quickly, getting a handful of win streaks on the way. Now I can't even reach 19. I imagine I'm ass at creating decks at the moment because I don't know which cards synergise super well with the cards I already picked, and I leave glaring weak spots in my deck (like, maybe around 3-5 mana I will have a lack of minions or something).

If I had enough cards I would just go look at some example deck builds on HearthHead and then play ranked to work out if I'm bad (I feel like I know what I'm doing when I'm playing) or just bad at making decks in the arena.

It's hard to say without knowing what your deck is and what cards you're using and so on.

Hearthstone, in my opinion, isn't a pay to win kind of game. With only a handful of packs you can start winning games. Even those beginning decks are decent enough to win some games early on even in ranked.

Have you gone through all early quests and opened up all the cards for each character? Those can be helpful to understand some of the cards you might not have seen yet.

If you continue to have trouble maybe look up some decent decks online and see what you can put together and play with.

Having more cards will definitely open up more doors for you and give you more options, but honestly a huge amount is gonna come down to play skill, particularly in arena.

A good place to start for now is to look up some popular tournament deck lists and try to build/craft those. Many zoo warlock decks are mostly commons. Play a deck you know has been good, then you'll be able to focus on getting better a playing it. There's a lot more to it than just playing a card every turn. You'll get a feel for the meta and get good at predicting what cards you're likely to see in certain situations and how to counter that, etc.

It's easy to say "I don't have many cards." and "I am losing a lot." and make the logical jump, but there's a lot more to it than that.

@rocketboot: For a beginner the best advice I'd give is Taunt minions are your friends. Use them liberally.

Just put $60 into card packs and then turn the game off forever.

You don't need to put money into the game to do well. Watch Trump on youtube, and you'll learn what strategies/cards are effective. Taunt is a beginners trap, though it certainly has it's use. It's just that most cards that have it are bad. Look at the cards stat line, you want to double the card's mana cost with its stats until you can get some cards together that really combos well. If they don't add up their ability needs to pick up the slack. Card draw is usually worth between 1.5 and 2 mana depending on who you ask.

Unfortunately there are no hard and fast rules.

I'm currently in the top three of the Hearthstone Tournament here on Giant Bomb, without spending any money (Though I plan on buying Naxxramas). I'm using some slightly changed versions of Trump's Mage, Warlock, and Shaman free to play decks.

Knowing how to play what you've got is probably a much taller order than building a good deck.

Thanks for the tips guys. Basically what I'm hearing is practice and trial & error is key. Either that or look up successful deck builds and watch tutorials, but I'd rather figure it out myself. I need to figure out how to get around some of those big game-enders that seem to be plaguing me.

I have reached at least lvl 10 with each of the heroes and I've got an elementary understanding of eachs of their strengths and weaknesses. For example I wasn't interested in playing the paladin until I earned all his base cards and saw the potential to use his buffs on cheap minions (particularly ones that summon a weaker friend as their battlecry), also incorporating buffs from the all classes card pool. When it works, it is VERY effective. But i often get overwhelmed by powerful cards, and typically when that happens the cards are higher rarity.

I want to be clear that I haven no intention on spending money on card packs, but rather grind for gold to play the arena to win card packs. I also feel like I'm doing better in the arena drafting random cards than using the cards I've earned in ranked play. Like I said, my average arena runs are 3 wins, meaning I'm winning pretty much half my games. But in ranked with my decks that I tweak every 4 or 5 losses I'm only seeing success about 20-25% of the time. I'm not just wining about losing because I don't have many cards, it's this disparity between ranked and arena matches that I'm basing this discussion on.

Trump is a professional Hearthstone player and is doing another one of his free to play legend rank runs this month where he only uses cards that are rare quality or lower. Here is the first video where he talks about card choices and begins at rank 25:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByOcm_uNhOQ&list=UUsQnAt5I56M-qx4OgCoVmeA

Deck synergy is way more important than just "big cards". I have two cards that cost more than 4 mana in my Hunter deck. 50% of the time I don't even play those cards. I eve just swapped out Maexxna which is a 6 mana legendary for Angry Chicken, a 1 mana rare. Still feeling it out, but I needed more, early beasts.

Maybe I'll watch one or two of his videos when I have time. In the meanwhile I just won 3 games in a row with my Paladin in ranked, maybe I was just having bad draws over the weekend? How much do you guys attribute success to getting good hands?

It's not a lack of cards it's a lack of knowledge on how to get as much value out of the cards you have. Which is understandbale if you just start.

I think someone already did but I'd recomend watching some of Trump's videos just as a means of seeing games where he talks through his thought processes. He's currently doing a F2P Rogue run. Here's a list of the decks he uses with a section for basic only and his F2P decks (and their "final forms"), Strong fundamentals can get you real far.

Also try out a Zoo Deck, teaches you a lot about board control and mulliganing that sorta stuff but i also real cheap to make in terms of dust.

And in the end if that's not doing it for you go wild mke some weird shit that is gimmicky as heck and just go for it.

Another suggestion is switching up your class.

You're running Mage and Warlock and dabbling in Paladin. Mage and Paladin (more so Mage) require more rare/epic/legendary cards to be competitive. You mentioned you're playing Warlock, do you mind sharing the deck with us? A popular deck on ladder is Zoo or Zoolock. It's a cheap deck that focuses on getting less expensive minions on the board quickly and overwhelming your opponent. It's not necessarily going to make you better at the game since learning to play it doesn't translate over to other decks, but I promise your win rate will ago up.

Paladin control decks are expensive, but look up "Shockadin" for the Paladin equivalent of Zoo that's also pretty cheap and effective.

@c0v3rt: I've got a number of spells and some minions that effect spell damage. Many of the spells are demon specific and I only have a handful of demon cards so I'm going to have to craft a few to make the deck at all useful.

Quick question: when you guys are building decks, do you always add cards in pairs when possible or do you only put singles of each to increase variety? I've been doing the former but I'm not sure if I should increase my options.

@rocketboot: Take a look at this before you craft anything.

And look at this for a guide to the best/worst Warlock cards. The whole guides section there is probably the best resource online for HS strategy.

If you've only got 3 wins in arena it's not the cards. However, as with any card game, knowledge is key. Understanding what cards are good, how the meta of the game is working or even something as simple as what kinda cards your opponent could have is very important to being able to do well. The best thing you could do is just watch others play, especially arena. That way you'll get exposed to more cards and you'll get to see how people use the cards. Focusing on the best pre-made decks etc won't help you much unless you got the basics down.

How do you make sure you don't just run out of cards with that many cheap cards? I find by the end of the game where I can play 3 cards a turn I end up with just one in my hand, and I'm dead.

@bollard: You kill the opponent =) Also, most of the agro decks usually have some method of filling up their hand.

Well after posting last night I went on a 5-win streak with the paladin only to lose to a warlock who had his entire hand on the board by the sixth turn. I imagine that's the kind of deck being suggested here. So I guess I'm making a bit of an improvement.

I think it's worth mentioning that I haven't seen any of the huge "game-ender" cards I referred to in my original post since the weekend. Like, there was one (I can't remember what it was called the names in this game are rediculous) that had taunt, windfury, charge and divine shield. I think his stats were like 6/6 or something like that. It was a bit of a buzzkill, and far beyond anything I could play.

Your own card collection has no bearing on the Arena. The drafted cards come from the entire card pool, not from the ones you own. So a good or bad arena run is always down to your skill and luck.

Newer players in the arena, are often not experienced enough to grasp the strengths and weaknesses of individual cards, so during the drafting phase, they just pick cards that seem cool or strong, and then end up with a sub-par deck. When losing with such a deck, it is often hard to understand that you didn't necessarily play bad, you just drafted bad. As others have mentioned, Trump on Twitch might be able to help you with this issue.

I don't have much to add regarding improving your play in constructed, other than perhaps suggesting buying the Naxx adventure. As far as I can tell, you get a lot of good cards, for a low price, compared to buying deck packs. On top of that you get the actual content of Naxx, which I at least have found enjoyable.

@lemonhead: Yeah I understand how arena works, I was suggesting that my access to a larger card pool in arena might account for me winning more (about 50 percent win/lose) in arena than in ranked (20-25 percent win). But since the weekend that seems to have taken a turn.

As for the new content I've been getting torn up in there against the second boss. I obviously need to change tactics lol.

Well with that deck, I want the game OVER by the time we're on 9 mana (one of my big mana cards is King Krush. 8/8 with charge. If I have a bow equipped, that's 11 damage). The longer we go, the less likely I'll win.

But that's deck synergy. By having loads of beast cards, you find cards that work with beasts.

Buzzard is a key card for that. Every beast you summon, you draw a card. A few ways to play it is, if you do it mid game you can actually find yourself some lucky draws. It's been a few times I've played a buzzard, then played a beast, drew a beast, played that beast, drew another beast. Really susceptible to board wipes.

Another good play is early Buzzard with Snake Trap. If the opponent uses a removal spell, or polymorph, then doesn't really matter. That's actually a waste of that spell.

Ideally you'll have them just attack the buzzard, which will summon 3 snakes, draw 3 cards.

Anyone with any skill will remove the buzzard as fast as they can, otherwise you'll just drown them in minions. So usually I'll play one early to get them to burn a removal spell. And if they just ignore it? Release The Hounds!

Yeah, see, that's the problem. All of those cards you mentioned I don't own. In your first post you were talking about "big cards" - whether or not I (I know you were talking to the OP but it applies to me too) own big cards is not important when the deck synergy you're talking about isn't even possible with the cards I own!

There's not a lot of skill to the game. It's basically top trumps

Ah man Top Trumps is great. I wish they had just made Blizzard Top Trumps instead.

if you only got 3 wins in arena its not your lack of cards. Everyone has the same chance of cards in arena.

It just takes practice. Ive gone from 3 wins arena average to 7 wins arena average now. I even got my first 12-0 arena run finally.

Then you gotta find a way to make the cards you do own work together. That's the point. I'm not suggesting you use my deck (hell, I'm lucky to break rank 10) but I am suggesting you should focus on what you have, and how to maximize how the cards work together.

Know what happened last time I faced Deathwing? A legendary 12/12 dragon that destroys all of the other minions on the board and makes the person who played it discard their hand? I played freezing trap. He attacked, he gets sent back to the owners hand and now costs 12 mana to play. Which means it can't be played again.

This morning I played against a guy who dropped three Legendary in one match. First one I used a removal spell. Second one I buffed a Murloc to kill. Third one, didn't matter cause match was over. So he's taking whole turns to dump one card, that I'm killing off with just a small part of my turn.

Any hero has a way to deal with a giant, damaging, minion. Whether it's Execute, Polymorph, Transform... The question is of "better" cards. And big (lots of damage, lots of mana) isn't necessarily better. I have plenty of Legendary cards that I never play, because it doesn't fit how I like to play.

So look through your deck. If you have a lot of Divine Shields, maybe take them and a Blood Knight. Or if you have some Murlocs, build a lot of those (you can actually make a competative deck with just Murlocs, although you'll really want to have one of each, so you'll have to craft a little). When I get a daily challenge for a hero I don't play? I just make an all Murloc deck with their spells. Doesn't matter, Paladin or Warrior. Druid. Those cards work together fine. They buff each other. And I can steal a game or two, get my gold, and go back to my Hunter deck.

@blaineblaine: I agree with what you're saying (although I again want to emphasise my non-interest in big legendaries, that's not where I'm struggling or what I think I need, and your response seemed to miss that in my previous post) but I'm more concerned about lacking utility. Blood Knight - again, I don't have it. I'm not denying I probably make a lot of mistakes when playing (and drafting decks in arena to boot), but it's hard to have fun when all the highest rated "basic" decks get absolutely trashed in the comments with everyone pointing out their glaring weaknesses, and then I go into ranked at level 20 and come up against someone with insane card synergy from cards I don't own.

@tunaburn: Ok for the third time in this thread: I have no confusion about how drafting in the arena works. At the time that I posted this I was doing worse in ranked play than in the arena. Three kills in the arena is a 1/1 win/lose ratio. In ranked I was winning maybe 1/5 matches. I judged that to mean that maybe if I had more powerful cards, such as those I was drafting in arena, I would be more successful in ranked. Turns out I just needed to tweak my deck a little and add some cheaper minions to the mix and now I'm more or less winning 4/5 matches, and most of my losses are quite a bit closer.