Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it.

Hey! It’s awesome that you’re joining in! Hydras will rotate in for Cobalt Scalebanes once I have the dust.

To be honest, the Rank 15-10 range was where I found the most difficulty progressing so far, so I understand your struggle. Hunter has a lot of poor matchups, which doesn’t help, but I think most of my success has been due to jamming games and riding win streaks. Brute force can be effective some times.

I wrote a full guide for the archetype I’m building towards, which includes some of the requested information:
http://www.hearthstonetopdecks.com/decks/hybrid-hunter-deck-list-guide/

You can also take a look at some of the VODs from my stream to watch some of my matches (and learn from my misplays).
https://go.twitch.tv/rofflehs

Typically, you want a 1,2,3 curve. Against other board-centric decks, I find Eaglehorn Bow to be a good keep since it’s pretty much your only way to win back control of the board. Be wary of the (numerous) board clears in Priest and know which turns they can come out.

Thanks! We’ll see if I can get there! Made it up to Rank 4 last night on Stream.

A large portion of my packs have been 40 dust. I just get the benefit of a Legendary in the first 10 packs for all sets, thanks to the changes to pack openings. It really does help new players catch up a bit.

Thanks and good catch! The article has been corrected.

Firelands Portal and Bonemare are both good replacements for the two Legendaries. IMO, Loatheb is more important than Dr. Boom in this deck.

The stats on Avian Watcher make it a bad fit for the deck. I think you’d be better off with something more aggressive like Cobalt Scalebane or Bittertide Hydra.

Without more information, that’s not a question I can answer. However, this article will offer some advice:

http://www.hearthstonetopdecks.com/hearthstone-legendary-crafting-guide-standard/

Thanks! There’s a Control Warlock list/guide on this site that might help you make use of some of those sweet new cards you opened up. You can find it here:

http://www.hearthstonetopdecks.com/decks/control-warlock-deck-list-guide-standard/

The article has a card replacement section at the end. Tundra Rhino is a good option in place of Bittertide Hydra. I’ve been running Cobalt Scalebane in that spot with reasonable success this season as well.

As mentioned in the Mulligan section, you typically want to pitch away combo pieces in lieu of cycle, defensive tools, and card generators.

It’s important to get deep into your deck, complete the quest, and stay alive. Doing so sets up the win condition better than holding the combo pieces.

Prince Keleseth is currently the second most played Legendary card (behind Patches) and enables multiple decks. Elise is certainly good, but a little less commonly included at the moment.

That said, it depends heavily on the type of decks you’re interested in playing though. Prince works in Aggro/Tempo based decks while Elise favors slower, Control/Value decks.

I think it’s possible that different seasons might have been easier. Others could have been more challenging as well, though. I’ve done this in the past with Aggro Druid and had an easier route to Legend. Ranked play would probably be easier later in the season, but I also think Hunter isn’t in as good a spot as I expected right now.

To your point, even though there are several meta decks with few Legendaries at the moment, I think it’s also the higher concentration of quality Epics that’s driving up the cost of a lot of decks. My current list feels pretty hamstrung by the lack of Bittertide Hydras, for instance.

Something I haven’t heard mentioned is that Solo Adventures, while generally good value in terms of overall card collection, can make it more difficult for a new player to access some cards required to assemble a single, powerful deck. Having to shell out hundreds of gold for a couple commons is really an option. In that sense, the new content release schedule isn’t all bad for the new/F2P player.

That seems more like an article celebrity meme master TacoRocco should write. #WhatTheHeck

Yeah, it’s a good tip but, as mentioned in the article, new accounts have to finish a certain number of 40g quests before they can get one that offers more gold. No matter how many times I rerolled my quests, it came up 40g. I should just need a couple more quests cleared before I can start putting this strategy into practice.

Yeah, that quest is nice and I know you can use emulators to game the system a bit for free packs, but I wanted to avoid doing anything that might be considered cheating :).

I have an Android phone so I only claimed that pack, despite how easy it would be to log in on other devices to snag quick packs.

Honestly, I was pretty surprised. I had mostly written off discussions about this issue as just general complaints, but there really were people with fully assembled meta decks at the 25-20 rank range. My basic cards just couldn’t keep up.

It really is a legitimate concern and one of the downsides to uses a ranking system rather than a rating system.

I started ranked play less than one hour after creating the account. The duration of the arena run was 52 minutes. My average ranked game length is 5.2 minutes, so that’s more than 11 games per hour. Since I only run 1 deck at the moment, there is little to no time spent deck building.

That said, I went back to my VODs and there were a rounding errors with my tracker, as well as time missed on Saturday/Sunday in other games modes that have been corrected.

I only see 136 ranked games, but I’ll double check my stat tracker to confirm that I recorded everything correctly.

Glad to hear you found it helpful! I hope that the guides that come from this challenge will be of use as well.