Hearthstone Constructed Progress

I posted a week or so ago about my Hearthstone constructed deck and the potential viability of hitting legend with it. I felt at the time like it probably wasn't doing good enough unless I had been getting unlucky in my previous games or was going to start getting lucky going forward. My deck just didn't seem like it really had enough of a late game. But I didn't have any actual stats to show any of that, I just had my gut feeling about being stuck in the rank 10-12 range for a while.

Anyway, I started keeping pretty meticulous track of my results in a spreadsheet. For a brief period of time I tracked the length of each game (13 games in 83 minutes for a little over 6 minutes per game) and other than that I tracked opposing class, deck type, and result for each game.

After 69 tracked games with my deck I was 34-35. I was actually up 7 stars over this period of time thanks to the winning streak bonus. But I still wasn't really feeling like my deck had enough oomph. My brother suggested the next card I crafted should be Dr Boom because almost every deck that runs any legendaries at all runs him. I have my eye on building an expensive paladin deck at some point and it definitely runs Dr Boom. My mech mage deck could also run Dr Boom, and I had enough dust to make another card, so I went for it. I took out the copy of Jeeves since it was another late game card, probably a better one, and having extra things that cost 7 would make Jeeves worse anyway.

I've put in another 175 games with this version of the deck and I've gone 90-85. Better than before, and I think the change was a positive one, but still not fantastic. That's not at the 52% win rate I thought I'd need with 5 minute games, but it's getting close, and I'm still learning match-ups so I am getting better. I'm up 21 stars in this range but it feels like I've gotten stuck again. This time I'm hovering around rank 4-6. Rank 5 is where the bonus stars disappear, which is surely part of why I feel stuck.

All that said, I have played 244 games in 12 days. That's nowhere near the pace of 1700 games that was my upper bound for games in a month, and I think I'm actually playing more constructed lately than would be ideal what with my hard drive dying and being unable to do much of anything else. So I probably need to find a way to up my win rate even though I'm only 27 stars from legend right now.

I do think the two versions of the deck are close enough that I can safely combine the stats from the two of them to get a feel for what other people are playing. My most played matchup is the mirror match, with 39 plays. I've won only 38% of those games. That number did improve when I added Dr Boom, but not even over 40%. I do know I'm playing an older version of the deck that I copied off the internet and I guess the changes that have been made since then have made the mirror match better for the other people. In particular they're playing mad scientists and secrets and I've lost a few games to being unable to draw a cheap dude and having to choose between giving them a good creature with mirror entity or not playing any creatures. I've tried both choices and they both end in death.

Other decks I've played against more than 10 times, in descending order, are ramp druid (57%), mech shaman (67%), miracle rogue (48%), '33 win' paladin (29%), warrior control (56%), priest control (69%), face hunter (64%), and hand warlock (77%). Ramp druid and warrior control both got worse with Dr Boom which seems a little weird but Jeeves actually went to town against both of those people. They're slow decks without good mass removal which meant drawing 4 cards a turn against them would overwhelm them pretty quickly! But I don't play against them enough to justify adding the Jeeves back in I don't think.

Breaking things down just by deck category I've played against 30% mech decks, 18% control, 15% ramp, 9% miracle, 9% '33 win', 6% face, 5% hand, 3% zoo, 2% burn, and 1% aggro. So the meta actually seems reasonably balanced with 40% control, 48% midrange, and 10% beatdown.

Actually, I'm not sure if I should be counting mech decks as midrange or beatdown. My versions seems more beatdown than others, but I am also running flamestrike and 2 other things that cost 7 so I'm nowhere near as beatdown as the hunter charge decks. I did have one opponent friend request me so he could berate me for playing 'cancer' so maybe lumping mech in with face hunter does make sense.

Anyway, I don't know that it much matters... What I really want is a deck that does well against the various varieties of mech decks since they make up such a large chunk of the meta right now. I could look at what's beating me most often... Which of decks I've played more than a couple of times would be burn mage (25%-4 games), '33 win' paladin (29%-21 games), mech druid (33%-6 games), mech mage (38%-39 games), and zoo warlock (43%-7 games). The paladin deck is the one I'm trying to save up for but I need another 5000 dust for it. The burn mage was interesting looking, but realistically what I should be doing is just updating my current mech deck and see where that takes me.