This Week in Hearthstone Week 2 of 2016
Hello fellow Hearthstone players and welcome to this week in Hearthstone detailing my exploits during the second week of 2016. It has been a very challenging week with the new Tavern Brawl and ranked play. I always try to maximize my play and maintain a high win rate of over 50 percent for the week. Well guess what? This was a tough week to maintain a 50 percent win across the formats. I have decided to change up my writing format a little and list a day by journal of my experiences each day of the week. I hope you enjoy the change of pace. I will continue to do my normal ramblings but add the change and see how it turns out. Writing is a unique medium and trying to switch things up makes sense to me personally. Plus I figure I can give more details by publishing a day by day section. The goal as always is to maximize time and get as many free packs or buying packs with gold as possible. The new section I am adding is called the weekly breakdown which will detail my experiences each day of the week.
Maximizing Time
This week was very interesting as we got a new Tavern brawl and a Meta shift in ranked play in my opinion. What to do caused me to reinvent some of my decks to try to win as much as I could in this difficult environment. I decided to split my time between Tavern Brawl and rank play to an even percentage. I figured it was the best route to gain as many packs as I could for the week. The first day of Tavern Brawl was spent investigating and writing my article for the Tavern Brawl article for the week. I made so many changes to my deck that I was beginning to wonder when the wins would come. Well the wins started coming when I went the deathrattle route. Now I had to focus on rank play. The secret Paladin was not doing that well so I changed to a tempo Mage. I agree the other authors on the Hearthstone player’s dot com website that the other deck I played, the face Shaman, has come to a deck to set aside as the new agro destroyed it for me. Next in line is to give my daily exploits in a day by format for the week.
Day by Day experiences
Monday 1/4/2016
We just finished another week of Tavern Brawl which yielded mix results for me. I did not have a 50 plus win in the format but I did play it the most I could that week and still ended up with over 25 wins total. The quest for the day I received was win 2 games with a Hunter. The nice aspect about this quest is the games are quick which fit in line with my time maximization. The first two games I face were against Paladins. I was shocked to see they were both running giants as I had not seen that before in a Paladin deck personally. I split both games to end up one and one. My third game was against what I call a mill Rogue. I won that match. After that win I earned a pack for 100 gold. The pack gave me one blue and netted 80 dust for the extra cards. I decided to play ranked games next. I started off with my face Shaman and finished my run after hero changes at 3 wins for the Shaman, 1 win with my secret Paladin and 2 wins with my Hybrid Hunter. I faced mainly Hunter’s in that run. Being a new month for ranked play with lots of players recommending play later in the month, I decided to play from day one. The reason is I think if you’re playing top players your play will improve. I stand by this analogy and I think it to be true in most cases.
Tuesday 1/5/2016
I switched my Paladin from Murloc to Secret Paladin. What a day for choices and wins. I began the day at 10 and 0 with that deck. I finished the day at 36 and 18 with the secret Paladin, boy was I shocked. I had no idea that was the deck to play that day but I played it the rest of my play time. I did earn a pack for 100 gold. I am sad to report it only yielded one blue card and forty dusts. All in all a very nice day. Yes I did play more than two hours obviously but the eight hours I did play were amazing in rewards and wins as a whole.
Wednesday 1/6/2016
Wednesday started out as a rough day mainly I think due to the day before success. I saw a lot of Mages running alexstrasza and killing me with the spell attack and bonus from being frozen. We did get a new Tavern Brawl today. I decided to go with the secret Paladin to begin with and got a quick win but then I realized that was not the best first choice based on the bonus you receive on your first turn. I later switched to a deathrattle Paladin and the wins became more frequent. I pondered the mage with the spell bonus and it seemed a good choice also. I did see quite a few decks getting the Murloc bonus at the end of each turn to create a free 1/1 Murloc. I did not go the Murloc route this time even though I a Murloc Paladin set aside for future use.
Thursday 1/7/2016
Today started with a quest to win two games with a Shaman or Mage. I also had a “Watch and Learn quest” in the list to net a free classic pack once I could see someone wins a game. I started out trying the face Shaman in ranked to get the two wins needed. That was not the best choice and after a few attempts I switched to my Tempo Mage Deck. I saw quite a few Warriors but managed to get my two wins in a reasonable amount of time. I was surprised to see that many Warriors at rank thirteen in ladder. Have you noticed that when you need that last win or number to finish your quest can sometimes seem to take forever? I win the first part really quick then wait a long time for the final number for than 100 gold packs. Since I did earn enough to get a pack, I went with “The Grand Tournament” even though classic has been really good to me lately. I pulled a blue saboteur and a purple mulch which netted me 135 dust. I think that was surprisingly well since I tend to end up with 35 or 40 dust most of the time. The ranked play started with my secret Paladin which I managed to navigate back to rank 13. I also played my new revised deathrattle Paladin to a 60 percent win rate to end the day in a nice fashion.
Friday 1/8/2016
Today was interesting in game play. I had better day of keeping a fifty percent win rate thanks to the modifications I made for my deathrattle Paladin running Tavern Brawls. One problem I had was figuring out lil exorcist which I kept forgetting was enemy minions so since I was not seeing much enemy deathrattle I took it out for huge toad. Great improvement and synergy with deathrattle. My final version of my deathrattle Paladin ending up being all deathrattle cards with one exception baron rivendare. I played against mainly battle cry Hero’s today. I was surprised to see that as the main focus since I thought spell bonus would sustain after seeing mainly that the day before. I did manage enough wins for a free 100 gold pack. I received 1 blue darnassus aspirant which netted 40 dust to my pile which stands at 8280. I have not needed to create any cards so I am patiently waiting to use it on the next expansion. I finally started to see some Priests show up in Tavern brawl which didn’t happen for the first few days of Tavern brawl. They were playing battlecry also. So todays most seen bonus was battlecry.
Saturday 1/9/2016
I had long time to play today so I played more than two hours. I did not think I would earn a free pack today but for the week I am sitting on winning 4 packs for the week but I still have the elusive “watch and Learn” quest sitting in my log. I am sitting at rank 13 and decided to use my limited time in in Tavern Brawl today. I did earn enough wins for 100 gold to get the “The Grand Tournament” pack. I received one blue competitive spirit and converted the five cards into forty dusts. That puts me at 5 packs for the week so far. I have a chance for seven packs on Sunday. The day was amazing for game play. I ended up playing Tavern Brawl all day. I was going to put my deathrattle Paladin on the shelf due to a long losing streak but still managed 50 percent win rate. I stuck with the deathrattle paladin and once again had large winning streaks I finished the day 37 wins and 15 losses. I was truly amazed. I will pilot it on Sunday again and see how well it finishes.
Sunday 1/10/2016
Well here we are the last day of the week and the completion of my article today. I managed to earn two packs for 100 gold. The first pack yielded one blue explosive shot. The dust came out to 40. The second pack had a blue spawn of shadows and one gold card tournament medic. The dust came out to 35. All in all a great week. I finished the Tavern Brawl today running a deathrattle Shaman due to my quest log for the day of win three games with a Shaman for fifty gold. The deathrattle Paladin netted me sixty wins in Tavern Brawl but I finished with the deathrattle Shaman which was loads of wins and fun.
Parting Thoughts
I hope you enjoyed this installment of This Week in Hearthstone. I encourage all of you to become premium members to get all the info as soon as it is posted. Going forward look for more articles from myself and my team mate LordZhark in reporting the latest in Tavern Brawls for the week. I decided in the end to list the Paladin deathrattle deck as it got me the most wins overall during the week at 101. Peace out from Texas still embedded in snow.
