Hearthstone: Winner Winner, Legend Dinner

It took a total of 266 wins with mech mage, but a few hours ago I managed to put together the last win streak I needed to get up to legend rank. It put me in at position 168 to start off, which seems really high. I've been matched against people in the 400s I think, so that's way up on the ladder. Has it been tracking my Elo all along? Have most people just fallen below the initial Elo? Who knows!

Now the goal would be to get up to the top 50 or the top 100 to earn some of those worlds qualifier points. But I'm wondering if maybe I should work on a better deck first? I've been finding more and more I play the same people repeatedly as I got closer and closer to legend, and some of them have decks I have very little chance against. (This version of the deck has gone 2-9 against zoo warlock, for example.) So having more decks to switch between when the guy who plays zoo is around would be really nice.

But what deck should that be? My problem is I don't have enough experience with constructed to really know what beats what. I'm getting a decent idea of what beats mech mage, but that's it. Probably the right thing to do is to build a zoo deck and use it next month on my way up the ladder! Focus more on drafting for the rest of this month and grind out a bunch of mech mage games closer to the end of the month and try to eke into the top 100.

In case anyone wants to try out my current mech mage variant (not exactly ground breaking stuff here, and some decisions were based on not owning many classic cards) here's the list:

2xclockwork gnome
1xcogmaster
1xmana wyrm
2xfrost bo9lt
2xunstable portal
2xmad scientist
2xmechwarper
2xsnowchugger
1xduplicate
2xmirror entity
2xspider tank
1xtinkertown technician
2xfireball
1xpolymorph
2xgoblin blastmage
2xpiloted shredder
1xloatheb
1xarchmage antonidas
1xdr boom

Hearthstone: Disenchanting Value

A while ago my brother suggested to me that maybe the optimal line of play for a 'free to play' constructed player would be to flat out ignore some of the classes. Thus far I've been only disenchanting excess cards but I could just blow up every card for a class I'm unlikely to play in constructed like hunter. Certainly with the new information that I'm going to want constructed decks for 3 or 4 classes it certainly seemed like investigating the value I could earn by sacrificing 4 or 5 of the 9 classes seemed reasonable.

I've had a spreadsheet under construction for a while now with every card list and how many I owned to make it easier to track what cards I still needed for specific decks. It was a simple matter to modify that sheet to take into account the value for blowing cards up and then break things down by class to see where I stood.

For reference I have specced out a a few decks I'm potentially interested in and they mostly cost in the neighbourhood of 5500 to 6000 extra dust to make.

Now, if someone were to step into things with no cards but infinite dust, how much dust would they need to make all the cards? Each class currently has cards that cost a total of 9440 dust to make. The neutral cards cost 90160 dust. All told it would run you 175120 dust to make all the cards. I've averaged about 100 dust per arena run with my ~67% win percentage so I would need to draft 1751 times to craft all the cards. (Fortunately most of that dust is generated by blowing up cards from packs and I can just keep 2 of each... But even then, the relevant cards are only worth 4 times the disenchant cost so it's still a silly number of drafts to get all the cards.) I could also buy packs with gold, and I do average 125 gold per draft.

Anyway, those are just some numbers with no real importance on my current dilemna. The question that actually stands is what I could get by blowing up all my cards of a class. Could I get the 18k dust I need to make 3 more decks? (Actually less than that since all 3 decks run The Black Knight which runs 1600 dust to make alone.)

The answer is a resounding no. If I were to blow up every single card I owned I'd only get 5850 dust out of it. And that includes blowing up Dr Boom for only 400 dust when he also goes in one of those decks! Choosing to sacrifice all of my druid cards would only get me 135 dust! I could get almost 700 out of my mage cards, but I'm using many of those in my only deck! Heck, I have 750 dust on hand as it is, and I've spent 3200 making cards already.

So while sacrificing a class or two is an interesting idea, it actually isn't very useful for me. It wouldn't get me any of the decks I'd want, and it would certainly set me way back in the long run. You never know when I'd suddenly want to play a shaman deck and be sad that I didn't own any shaman cards at all. It would also take a lot of clicking to blow up all those cards (there's a button to automatically blow up all the excess ones).

There is the option of manually picking out the epics and legendaries I own that really suck and blowing those up. I have a Bolvar Fordragon card, for example, and I can't imagine ever putting him in a deck. But that's one card, worth only 400 dust.

Realistically there are only three options that I see to actually get a bunch of cards. Pay a bunch of money, draft a ton for dust, or spend gold on packs instead of on drafting. (Or go super infinite on drafting...) I've actually been hitting the gold earned cap in ranked play every day this week and while that only gives one pack it is a pack for a set I can't win in draft.

Touching on that last point a little... I now own every common in GvG and 93% of the rares. By contrast I own 27% of the commons and 10% of the rares in the classic set. So I actually do think I need to buy a bunch of classic packs in some way.

I don't want to spend money on packs at this point, so I think my plan is to keep playing a lot of constructed and spend some of that gold on packs and some of it on drafting.

Hearthstone World Championship

Why does getting up to legend on the constructed ladder matter? Well, other than just wanting to be the best and making a number get bigger (smaller?) there's also a pretty majour tournament which uses ladder rankings as part of the qualifying method. They haven't announced a ton of details about the world championship itself in terms of when/where it will be but they have posted the qualification details.

As far as I'm concerned the basic idea is the top 23 point earners in the US/Canada get qualified into a tournament, with the top 8 getting some extra byes. Beyond that the winner of the fireside series, whatever that is, gets in as well. And then 16 more people who advance from a last chance tournament get in as well. In order to qualify for the last chance tournament you need to have earned at least 2 points total between the months of January and August.

Ok, but how do you earn points? Get into the top 100 on the ladder each month to earn some points. Or participate in tournaments to earn a lot of points for finishing very highly. It isn't currently very clear to me what these tournaments are or how to join them. Some of them (the fireside things) seem to be local events sort of like Magic FNMs? But the closest one on the list is in Ottawa and that's sure not going to happen for me!

There's also the problem that tournament formats require playing 3 or 4 different classes. They sound like pretty interesting formats, but my collection doesn't really allow for building real decks for that many classes right now. Even if they provide the cards (which it sounds like some tournaments do) I don't have the ability to test other decks right now. I've also lost a chance at points from January since I wasn't playing constructed at all then.

So realistically my 'in' would be to just earn 2 points sometime in the next 7 months and use that to get into the last chance qualifier. You get 10 points for top 50 on the ladder in a month and 1 point for top 100 in a month. So I need to get 50th or higher one month, or 100th or higher in two months. I feel like that's actually very plausible. Maybe not this month, but the more I play the more cards I'll get and the more I'll know about the format. I'm pretty confident I could pull this off in a few months.

As far as this month goes, I actually hit the win cap in terms of earning gold yesterday. (10 gold every 3 wins, 100 gold max in a day, so I won over 30 games yesterday alone.) I'm also up to rank 2 on the ladder after making some minor changes to my deck. I'm still not thrilled with where I stand but I have won almost 59% of the 85 games I've played since I added secrets to my deck. I have started getting absolutely dominated by fast warlock decks though... They don't seem to use any expensive cards either, so maybe I should give that a try for variety's sake. And for learning! SCIENCE!

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.

Hearthstone: Board Sweepers

One of the key concepts that needs to be learned for practically any CCG is the idea of card advantage. The super basic idea is that you want to trade one of your cards for two of their cards as often as you can. Since each player draws one card per turn if you can make more of those trades than your opponent does then eventually they'll have no cards and you'll have a couple left to use to actually win the game. It's a lot more complicated than that in reality, and especially in Hearthstone in particular, but it's still a very important thing to keep in mind.

There are some cards that just innately generate card advantage without either player having much say in the matter. Mage has a card 'arcane intellect' that costs 3 and draws 2 cards. There's not anything that either player can do about it... If the mage has time to squeeze that spell into their rotation they're just going to go up a card. Similarly, azure drake is a 4/4 for 5 that draws you a card when you play it. That's innate card advantage assuming you can get any benefit out of the 4/4 body (and you almost certainly will!) There are also weapons like the paladin's truesilver champion that basically guarantees to kill 2 of the opponent's 4 toughness creatures. You can work to minimize the value they get out of the second attack by using taunts or selectively choosing which creatures to put in play but unless you have one of the few cards that kills a weapon they will straight up get to 2 for 1 you just by virtue of drawing the weapon.

On the other hand there are quite a number of cards that may or may not trade for multiple cards, and the play of both players decides just how good they are. The biggest example here is the mage spell flamestrike. It costs 7 and does 4 damage to every creature your opponent controls. If your opponent has a single 8/8 in play then it doesn't even get card parity. If they have a full 7 creatures in play all with 4 or fewer toughness then you get a massive 7 for 1! Both players get to work to make the flamestrike better or worse with the choices they make. The mage can use freezes and stealth creatures to limit the trades their opponent can make in the turns leading up to the flamestrike, letting their opponent potentially overextend into it. The opponent can proactively make trades instead of going face in the turn leading up to 7 mana being available. They can hold onto sticky/big creatures and play them before the flamestrike to minimize the damage done and keep stuff on board after the flamestrike.

Now, if you want to properly play around these kinds of cards you need to know what they all are. This is true in both limited and constructed, with a higher priority in limited being placed on commons and a higher priority in constructed being placed on the more powerful ones regardless of rarity. Anyway, I wanted to make a list of potential card advantage removal spells that can be played around. And then Matt asked me if I had one, so I figured I really should make one. So here we go! Broken down by class and rarity after the break...

Hearthstone Legend Thoughts

I got quite a few interesting comments on my constructed Hearthstone post both here and on Facebook which have been running through my mind for the last couple days. One of them from Sthenno basically pointed out that if you just play enough games you'll get to legend. His number was 1700 games, which is a lot of games to get done in a month. If games take 5 minutes then it's over 140 hours to get there, and my games take longer than 5 minutes. That would actually be an advantage to playing the most mindless deck possible. I've fought a few people playing a hunter deck that can pretty much be described as mindless. It's just a bunch of cheap dudes and charge dudes. Win fast or lose and get into another game fast. I tend to be drawn to more controlly decks that have lots of decisions but even if I had all the cards for one of those decks would it even make sense to play it? How much higher would my win percentage need to be to make up for games taking 2 or 3 times as long to play?

I decided to write a spreadsheet simulation that would randomly pick a win percentage and then play up to 50000 games, stopping if it ever earned 96 stars to break into legend rank. 50000 games is actually way too many games since there are only ~45000 minutes in a month and I need to sleep and actually resolve games! But I figured it would make sure to show if a given win percentage really had a chance or not. I ran 100000 simulations with the following results...

Some of the people winning in the 44%-46% range wouldn't hit legend in 50000 games, but some of them would. But I'm not sure the number of games it would take those people make a lot of sense. Realistically if you could expect to average 5 minutes per game, and could expect to play 14 hours per day, then you'd be more like 5000 as an upper bound, not 50000. The lowest win percentage of a player who got legend in fewer than 5000 games was actually 42.7% win rate, who managed to do it in 3262 games. This is possible because there is a win streak feature in the lower ranks and anyone can clump all their losses together at the start and then wins at the end to get to legend. Any one 'can' do it, but most people won't!

Every single person who averaged a rounded 42% win rate or worse failed to hit legend in 5000 games. Every single person who averaged a rounded 50% win rate or better was guaranteed to hit legend in 5000 games. 96% of the people at 49% pulled it off, 69% of the people at 48% pulled it off, but only 32% of the people at 47% pulled it off.

Ok, fine, but I'm not actually going to play 5000 games even if I built the face hunter deck. I want to play a variety of games in a given month. Even my Hearthstone time is going to be split between drafts and constructed. So more realistically I might be able to play 7 hours a day, 20 days per month. That's still almost 1700 games! How does that shake up?

Now 45% and below are entirely failures. 52% and above are entirely successes. 71% of the 50% winners get to legend though. But realistically if I spend 1700 games and don't get to legend I'd be really unhappy, so I wouldn't be happy with a 50% deck under these odds.

What if I'm spending more time per game? What do the odds look like for 850 games? 567 games? Only caring about the full guarantee of legend I'd be looking at 54% at 850 games and 56% at 567 games. It sure feels like finding a deck I enjoy would be the big thing since it only has to be a little better to make up a huge increase in time spent in a game.

My current cheap mech mage deck is fun enough, but I'm not sure it's actually going to better than 50% once I start playing exclusively top notch decks. I have noticed that I keep losing the mirror match because other people have both Archmage Antonidus and Dr Boom while I only have one of them. Our early games are so similar that we always just trade off until we hit late game and their having two (or more) late game legendaries means they have a big advantage.

So really I need to find a faster deck, or I need to get more late game cards. Or I need to keep track of my win rate as it is and then just put in the time if I'm winning even 54% of the time.

Hearthstone: Potentially Frustrating Draft...

I just finished a draft with a druid deck that didn't seem terribly exciting. My best card was probably azure drake, which is a passable body for a 5 drop that also draws you a card. It's card advantage, and card advantage is good, but it isn't jaw droppingly amazing by any stretch. The deck was rounded out with 3 copies of starfire which is a single target burn spell that costs 6 and hits for 5 and also draws you a card. Oh, and 2 copies of swipe which hits one target for 4 damage and all other enemies for 1 damage each. So some pretty decent removal which pretty much all has card advantage baked in. Fill up with some good to mediocre creatures and I guess you have a recipe for success. I did have 4 creatures which gave spell power and at one point I managed to cast swipe with 3 of them in play to kill off a 6/7 and a pair of 3/3s which was pretty sweet.

Anyway, I ended up starting out 9-0. More than a couple of those games featured me playing starfires on turns 6, 7, and 8 on the single creature my opponent played while I attacked with a couple creatures. Huzzah!

Then I got paired up against a mage who also seemed to have an unexciting deck. He didn't play anything amazing either, though he did also play an azure drake. My biggest problem with this matchup was that he never really played anything worth hitting with a starfire. Most of his 'end game' creatures were either untargetable or created other creatures or drew cards. So his deck was a lot like mine, except with better creature quality. He crushed me.

I queued up again and was immediately matched back up with the exact same mage. He once again crushed me. The idea that you can end up playing the same person twice in the same draft is pretty ludicrous to me. Especially in a draft environment that has a very rock/paper/scissors feel to it. Many of my losses I think about afterwards and decide my odds of winning a rematch would be pretty low. Hearthstone decks are so small and drafts often end up pretty homogeneous so if a given opponent has a deck apt to beat mine and has already shown himself to not be bad enough to throw the game away I don't like my chances of winning a second time.

This got me pretty frustrated so I took off to get a drink, clear my head, and make sure I didn't face that same guy a third time. I came back, didn't face him, and finished off my draft with 3 more wins. So I ended up going 12-2 with a deck I wasn't terribly excited about, and both my losses came to the same guy.

I guess this means going forward if I lose a match deep in a draft and don't think it was just misplays on my part that I should probably wait a bit before playing again to make sure the guy who is likely to beat me gets a match against someone else first.

Zelda Race Results

Last weekend I was up during the day on Saturday so I joined in on the second of the 'Get Yourself Speedrunning' races. It was for the SNES Zelda game, A Link to the Past. I managed to get in a few practice runs and actually knew where all the keys were located and where to go for the entire run. I didn't get lost and I only game overed once, and it wasn't even much of a time loss since I'd just entered a dungeon and dying in that game takes you to the start of your current dungeon. Since it healed me back to 4 hearts it might even have been faster than not dying!

The race winner finished in 22 minutes and 1 second. I finished in 28 minutes and 33 seconds. This means I only took 30% longer than the best person which is way better than my Mario 3 result where I took more than 4 times as long as the best person. In the Mario 3 race I did come 91st out of 140 people. In Zelda I only came 121st! Which sounds worse, except attendance for Zelda blew the attendance record set by Mario 3 out of the water. 301 people showed up! 290 of them even finished the race!

The rating system the SRL website uses is clearly flawed though, as this race showed. The guy currently in 7th place overall on the A Link to the Past leaderboard has only done one race. This one, where he came 34th. 33 people beat him, but only 6 people are ranked higher than him on the leaderboard. Presumably the system treats initial races as more important, or only cares about how many people you beat, or how many higher ranked people you beat, or something of the sort. I feel bad for the people who may care about the Zelda leaderboard since this huge race clearly messed things up.

121st place was actually good enough to get me some ranking points. Not enough to skyrocket me to the top of the charts but I have an actual number for a game now which is pretty cool. And it was fun!