Hello everyone! I’m Rorix, and I'm a brazilian Hearthstone fanatic. I have been playing Hearthstone even before beta was out (using a simulator called cockatrice) and I have been streaming arenas as much as I can once a got my hands on beta. I love crafting decks and playing constructed games, but my favorite format is definitely the Arena. I also like to share my experiences with the game with other players so I created this blog. I'm the creator of a series of Hearthstone Puzzles that you might have seen on other Hearthstone sites.
On this blog I'll post some strategy articles about Hearthstone. Those include deck techs, reports, theory and much more. I will also continue the Hearthstone Puzzles series that I started on another website. Follow me on twitter (
@hs_rorix) to know when I update my blog and follow me on twitch (
twitch.tv/hsrorix) to know when I'm streaming!
Mastering the ArenaMastering the Arena is a series of articles that I created to help players that are new to Hearthstone. If you check my stream (twitch.tv/hsrorix) you can see that I have an above average performance on the arena, and I would like to explain to everyone my process for achieving grandmaster keys. There is a lot of theory and experimentation that goes into improving your arena deck construction and actually winning the games, so I’ll write weekly articles explaining a little bit of what I do. The idea is that every week I’ll add something that you can apply to your gameplay and then you can gradually improve your results!
This first article of the series will be very high level. I'll not talk about specific decks, cards or plays. Instead I'll give you some very general tips on what you should do if you want to get better results in hearthstone. If you don't like this style of article, don't worry, most articles of the series will give more more detailed information such as card by card deckbuilding analysis, gameplay videos and decklists.
Why play the arena?For me the Arena is the most fun way to play hearthstone. In my opinion, Blizzard made a really good job on the Arena. The balance of classes is reasonable, and the deck construction is very skill intensive. Every choice you make will impact your deck, so an early mistake can cost you a game, and that will reduce your rewards in the end. The randomness of heros to play, and the variety of cards to choose makes the format less boring, even more so if you consider that the amount of cards that are actually playable in constructed is not large at the moment.
Also, the Arena is the best way to improve your collection, considering that you are able to get good results. Usually a deck with 8 or 9 wins will pay itself on gold, give you a pack, and on top of that give you something extra (usually arcane dust, but could be more gold, an extra pack, or even a gold card). Overall the arena experience is very fun, and once you get some experience, is very rewarding.
How can I get better results? Hearthstone is a card game, so there is a lot of randomness into it, but if you think about it, the amount of decisions that are made by each player is so big, that you can usually attribute a win to skill rather than luck. If two players have decks of a similar power level, and they both play the games perfectly (if that is even possible), you could say that the winner is the player who got the best draw. But in reality, players make mistakes on deckbuilding and gameplay, so if one the players made his decisions a little different, he could turn a loss into a win.
So the real question is: how can I improve my skills in order to achieve better results? I would like to point out here 5 steps that any player can take to improve his decision making process and achieve better results in hearthstone. These are very basics steps, but don’t overlook them, they could be the reason why you are not getting more wins. Please take your time to evaluate if you did everything you could on each of those steps, and go back to them if you think you could improve.
STEP 1 - Learn the Game If you compare the “rules” of hearthstone with other card games you could say they are very simple (Magic: the Gathering comes to mind here). Still there is a lot of interactions that you need to learn, and some of them are not very intuitive. The wording of cards is not very clear sometimes, so you actually have to play them in many situations to understand what is going on.
The only way to improve here is to play the game. Before stepping into the Arena, I recommend playing a lot of practice mode. The Arena is very skill intensive, and you can face opponents of very high skill level, specially on the early rounds. If you lose three times on the arena before achieving a reasonable amount of wins, the rewards are really poor, so your gold could be drained very quickly. The minimum amount of practice I recommend is to beat all classes on normal and expert level, so you can complete the quest “crushed them all” (defeat every expert AI hero). It will give you 100 gold that you can use to pay for your first arenas.
STEP 2 - Learn the Cards One of the most important skills in hearthstone is knowing how to play around cards that you opponent might have. What this means is that you should play your cards in a way that you are not in a position to be defeated by a single card that your opponent could have in his deck. One of the most basic examples is playing a round sweepers (cards that deal damage to all opponent minions). If you play all the minions you have and they all have 4 or lower health, a single flamestryke by an enemy mage could remove all of them at once. Usually when that happens your odds of winning the game are very low, so sometimes it is correct to hold back some of the minions in hand.
In order to play around cards from your opponent, you need to learn all the cards of every class, so that you can start predicting what your opponent could have in his hand. Not only should you learn the effects of the cards, but you should also memorize the mana costs of them. You don’t want to play a card that your opponent would only be able to play 4 turns from now, if you expect to win the game earlier.
Again, the road to improvement here is to play more games. Practice mode can only get you so far, because some of the cards are not available on the AI decks. My recommendation here is to play some unranked matches before going into the arena. It can be frustrating to go play there without a good deck, but the experience you get is very valuable. Also, you will eventually manage to get some wins, so you can stack more gold to play the arenas later.
STEP 3 - Learn the Theory Theory? Really?
Yeah, people have actually developed a lot of theory on playing card games. This was mostly created during the early years of Magic: the Gathering, and they have been improving since then (MTG has been out for almost 20 years now!).
If you follow some of the streamers or read some discussion about hearthstone on forums you might have stumbled on terms like “the curve” or “card advantage”. Those terms were created a long time ago by magic players and understanding them is very important to improve your skills in hearthstone.
My intention is to explain those theories on some of my articles. I’ll try to adapt all those theories from MTG to hearthstone, giving examples on how to apply them to real game situations. The good news is that hearthstone is very similar to MTG (I believe the designers of hearthstone are MTG fans), so the theory is very transferable. So my recommendation here is to keep reading my articles and try to absorb as much as you can of the theory.
STEP 4 - Learn the Meta One of the most important things in hearthstone is learning what cards you are most likely to see from your opponent’s decks. Even though the Arena is a random selection of cards, there are two reasons why some cards are more played than others. First, cards have different rarities. Commons cards are very more likely to show up on the Arena then Legendary cards.
The second and most important reason is that players have a tendency to pick some cards over the others. This happen because the power level of cards is not consistent, some are clearly more powerful than others. Also players have a preference to pick some cards over the others, for numerous reasons (could be play style, flavour, artwork, etc…).
Bottom line, any player that wants to be successful in the arena needs to learn what cards are more likely to show up against him. The best way to do this is to actually play in the Arena, but that could be a risky strategy. One alternative is to watch people playing arena on stream. I will try to stream as much arena as I can, so you can check my channel on twitch for some games (twitch.tv/hsrorix). One warning that I should give you is that you should not make assumptions about the metagame based on the cards one single streamer usually plays. You should focus on what card the streamers are playing against, and also try to cycle between many streamers to not get biased by a single play style.
STEP 5 - Learn to Play The last step to improve your arena is also the most difficult to evaluate. Considering that you know the game, the cards, the theory and the meta, are you making the plays that are more likely to give you the win? Due to the complexity and the randomness involved in hearthstone, it is very hard to know if a player made the best decisions he could. The 4 steps that were listed before here need to be taken into consideration simultaneously, which makes decision making in hearthstone a very demanding effort. It takes a lot of practice to learn how to quickly organize all the variables and probabilities into one decision, and there is no better advice here than play a lot of games.
Sometimes a player makes a bad play, a mistake, and he is the first to recognize that. Why does that happen? Why players make bad plays only to immediately regret them? Was he unable to figure out the right play before he did the mistake? Is he playing too fast? Is he over thinking his decisions?
The reasons why a player makes a wrong decision during a game of hearthstone go beyond the cards and the rules. Maybe the player was not on his best physical condition, he might have been playing for too long. Sometimes people make mistakes because they underestimate the opponent, and sometimes they just tilt for whatever reason. Sometimes the player doesn't even know that he is making mistakes, and he just blames the good draws from his opponent.
Recognizing that you are making bad plays and understanding the reason why you are making them is the last step to improve your results in the Arena. This is the most complex of the 5 steps, and it will take a lot of effort to improve on that area. Keep in mind that the great majority of the mistakes people make on this game can be corrected if they work on the 4 previous steps of the article, so you should always focus on those first.
Finishing up On this first article I presented 5 general steps that I think a player should follow in order to achieve better results in hearthstone. The following articles of the series will focus on the specific aspects of the game that should be improved, such as card game theories. My intention is to discuss a different subject each week, and provide additional tools for the players to learn about those subjects such as Metagame analysis, gameplay situations, card by card arena discussion and real game replays with comments.
I hope the series become a good reference for people that want to learn about Hearthsone, and I would like to ask the readers for feedback on my writing style and the content. I’m open for suggestions!
As a final note, I would like to point out that everything I write here is based on my perception of the game. If you have a different opinion you are free to speak up, as long as you are not disrespectful to the community (including me).
Have fun mastering the Arena!
Rorix.
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