Understanding the Meta

[danlathegreat]

Hey there. Fairly casual Hearthstone player looking to improve my game. I've been between rank 15-10 for the past three or four seasons, and I was wondering if anyone had tips for improving my game. Consensus seems to be that rank 5-1 is the hardest part of the climb, but I haven't even gotten to that point yet.

As far as deck construction, I can never seem to figure out what deck I should be playing. I have quite a few cards and can make most druid/paladin/hunter/priest decks, and have what I assume to be decent decks. (I'm a dirty net-decker, though I do make a few modifications). Most often I run a Token druid, control taunt paladin, tempo paladin, or deathrattle hunter. All are sitting at around a 50% winrate. I generally take the time to look back and see if I made a mistake, but I don't usually find something I obviously did wrong.

I usually play about 25-30 games per deck, and if that seems to not be going well, I switch to one of my other decks. Maybe I'm just being impatient?

I guess my question is, how do you determine what you're going to be up against for the day, and do you have any tips for getting past general roadblocks?

[PPN]

I basicly do the same as you. I have a lot of good decks that keep me between 10-15 and i usually just pick them when i have the dailies. I think you need to be more patient with one deck and just do those little adaptations to it when you climb the ladder, since every deck has another gameplan.

Anyway the most important factor i think its the time invested. For me the game depends way to much on luck, i just cba to invest a lot of time.

[Waynhim]

All the net deck archetypes have merit, I Agree with PPN, it's more about tweaking the deck you are most familiar with/enjoy the most.

[Jackielope]

Do you keep track of how you do with each deck? For example, if you're running priest do you make note of which classes and other deck types you lost or won to? If you're as serious about climbing as you seem to be then keeping statistics of how you perform is a big part of playing. It's only once you start recording what decks you went up against and how you fared that you'll easily notice patterns in both your play and in what your opponents are playing.

[kaiadam]

You should probably ignore the "meta" at rank 10-15. It's mostly meaningless as not only will your opponents not be running full meta decks, but if they are, they'll likely be misplaying it some way or another. Net deck any of the top tier decks - classes are actually fairly well balanced enough these days that they're all within a few percentage points of each other in win rate - and pilot it to as high of a rank as you can. Familiarity with a single deck trumps any meta advantage you get from shifting to some other deck with a 0.2% win rate advantage or what have you.

[danlathegreat]

Do you keep track of how you do with each deck? For example, if you're running priest do you make note of which classes and other deck types you lost or won to? If you're as serious about climbing as you seem to be then keeping statistics of how you perform is a big part of playing. It's only once you start recording what decks you went up against and how you fared that you'll easily notice patterns in both your play and in what your opponents are playing.

I started doing this this season, but unfortunately, there's not really any patter to either what I'm facing or what I'm struggling against. The only real thing I've been able to extrapolate is that I tend to do fairly well against classes I play. Otherwise it's very close to 50% against each class and the numbers I'm facing are very even.

You should probably ignore the "meta" at rank 10-15. It's mostly meaningless as not only will your opponents not be running full meta decks, but if they are, they'll likely be misplaying it some way or another. Net deck any of the top tier decks - classes are actually fairly well balanced enough these days that they're all within a few percentage points of each other in win rate - and pilot it to as high of a rank as you can. Familiarity with a single deck trumps any meta advantage you get from shifting to some other deck with a 0.2% win rate advantage or what have you.

I think you're right, I was just hoping there was something I was missing out on. After watching the weekend tournaments, my tauntadin game seems pretty solid and I picked up a few tricks from the pros. Thanks for the input guys.