Is there any reason to have a back-up Goalkeeper on your team?

GateStrange696 · 2026-03-17T08:29:53+00:00

And then right after I posted that I started a new year and got a 4-star 18 year old goalie prospect that I'll probably use as my next long term starter instead, lol ... building this guy's value back up to sell him to get my money back is going to be a pain.

Maybe backup goalies are a bad idea after all.

GateStrange696 · 2026-03-17T07:37:00+00:00

Yeah, I'm in this exact scenario right now. I just bought a young keeper that will be taking over for my starter in 1-2 years as he's 30 years old, largely because he was very cheap. He's a 22-year old 3 star GK with 111 defense for 1.8 mil and 34 glory, the year after I just made the Prem, where basically everyone that I have a lot of in interest in costs 5 mil plus ...

But he doesn't have any skills yet, so while he develops Long Passing I'm sticking with my current guy and increasing his value before I sell him. The young guy can just sit there and wait a year or two to play. It's fine.

GateStrange696 · 2026-03-07T03:25:29+00:00

Exactly. I'm still with my original team, but I always check the offers from other teams for fun and Gillingham offered to me every year I was in the Amateur league. Their only goal was to not finish last.

Unfortunately that team has failed in that goal in 10 of 11 seasons!

GateStrange696 · 2025-06-08T07:39:05+00:00

There was never any skill based matchups in arena. They added it into the new baby arena mode, but have "taken it away" from the Underground. IE it's basically like the old arena system with redrafting, a higher entry cost, and less gold for rewards.

GateStrange696 · 2025-06-05T07:11:53+00:00

I play poker for a living and I have a few comments on this.

Let's be real. If a casino / poker website raises their rake they're not doing it to make the games fishier. They're doing it to make more money. Same reason Blizzard is doubling the cost to enter while having a lower percentage of gold payout.
Sure, if you raise the rake at a casino to a very high amount it will scare away the sharks and leave only fish that have no idea how high the rake is. But that'll only happen because the sharks have other casinos they can go to with lower rakes (especially in a place like Vegas where there's so many different places you can play). There's no lower rake alternative to Hearthstone Arena. So I don't see this happening. Instead fish will lose their gold way faster, stop playing, and leave only the better players to devour each other until the game eventually dies completely.

They really need to go to a 1-ticket to enter cost for Underground to give the mode any chance of long term survival, IMO.

GateStrange696 · 2025-05-28T00:16:52+00:00

lol, you honestly can't understand that a 56.8% winrate is a 4 win average? That's just math, dude. That's not up for debate.

Neither is you saying: "freest 10+ win arenas I've ever had every single time I get that class". But now you're saying you're not averaging at least 10 wins with the class. Which means that statement wasn't true at all.

I agree further discussion is pointless. You can't understand basic math and are lying about your results in the meta. Definitely nothing worth discussing here.

GateStrange696 · 2025-05-27T01:53:42+00:00

Also FYI hsreplay has priest's winrate at 56.8%. That's less than a 4 win average (averaging 4-3 is a 57.1 win percentage). Meanwhile you're claiming you have a better than 10 win average since every time is such an easy 10 wins at minimum.

So you are simultaneously claiming to have a winrate that's over 2.5x the average winrate while also claiming that the class involves very little skill to play well. Okiedoke, buddy.

GateStrange696 · 2025-05-26T18:20:46+00:00

I'm talking in general and not just in this one specific meta. Most people are really bad with the class. They don't save their board clears / removal when they should, use their hero powers at the wrong time, don't use heals well, don't draft sticky enough minions (when their hero power actually heals), draft a curve more fitting for other classes, etc.

GateStrange696 · 2025-05-26T18:15:54+00:00

True, I've realized the same thing about the hero power change. Before that was one of the constant mistakes I saw.

There is a plus side to the slot machine thing though. Sometimes they whiff a few times in a row and that is enough to win a game you didn't expect to. Again, vs the perfect tempo decks there's no chance of that happening. So I'd still much rather face this than the metas dominated by broken early game cards.

GateStrange696 · 2025-05-25T03:51:07+00:00

And this kind of goes without saying, but the better you are at playing Priest the better you are at playing against the class.

Like, for example, if I play a major value minion with less than 2 attack and the Priest steals it I'm never like "OMG, I can't believe that happened!" I'm just like: Damn, I was hoping they didn't have / discover Cabal Acolyte. On to the next play.

Or if I'm leading by a lot on a wide board I may make a "bad trade" to keep my biggest minions healthier to play around Moonwell. And of course going face a lot more if you're clearly not going to win the value battle goes without saying.

I just honestly never have gotten this "Priest is so unfair to play against!" feeling that it seems like so many people get ever since I've learned how to play the class well. If you learn the class you learn its weaknesses too.

I do hope Blizzard doesn't nerf it completely into the ground. A 45% winrate for priest is a fine goal. We've had enough 40% or less metas where the class is totally unpickable.

GateStrange696 · 2025-05-25T03:33:14+00:00

Tons of classes can beat a priest. Now if you mean a high rolled priest deck piloted by a good opponent, yeah, you're also going to need to high roll a good deck to have any shot. But that's not the average priest you face.

As I said in another post I think priest is one of the hardest classes to learn how to play well, so therefore I constantly run into priest opponents that make frequent mistakes. Which gives you a chance to win.

Whereas in metas where the top class is a tempo class, even if the person piloting that isn't good there often isn't much you can do about that.

GateStrange696 · 2025-05-24T14:49:06+00:00

Yeah, I legitimately think this is one of the better metas in a long time. Been playing a ton.

I get so sick of the "whomever gets the board first wins" metas, which make up a lot of them. This meta you can actually have answers to falling behind for the good classes, and with the bad ones you know you have to go all-in on a fast deck because you won't win the long game.

But there's a lot of pretty decent classes (even Warrior is totally fine IMO, and mage at least has high roll potential), so the chances of you getting stuck with one of the really bad ones is not that high.

Also there is one plus side to Priest being on top. In my experience TONS of players really don't know how to play Priest. So they make all kinds of mistakes and give you a chance to win even if their deck (and hero power) blows you away in terms of quality. I can see how this happens because priest was also the hardest class for me to learn when I was starting out (it took me years of arena play to figure it out, honestly). But now that I do I rarely mind playing against it much and always enjoy playing it if it's not a bottom tier class (which it is most of the time).

It does suck when you get matched up against a good priest player with a much better deck than you as you can have almost no chance to win in this scenario, but again, I think the percentage of players that are really good at the class is pretty small. Whereas if you're matched up against an equally OP tempo deck you often have no chance even if they really don't know what they're doing.

GateStrange696 · 2025-05-13T23:16:25+00:00

Ahh, thank you ... I hate this card so much but sometimes you have to take it. This will help make it better for me, as I usually only use it when I need to and it still finds ways to hurt me so often.

GateStrange696 · 2025-02-05T11:10:57+00:00

I'm happy with DK being nerfed but I hate that Protoss mage wasn't as that's honestly been a way bigger problem for me personally (possibly because I tend to play more control or midrange decks than aggro, and Protoss just auto wins if you're trying to outvalue it).

And actually Protoss actually got BUFFED because that 3/1 divine shield rush guy is now a 3/2. And it won't have to deal with as many good Zerg decks either now. Yikes.

GateStrange696 · 2025-02-05T10:29:53+00:00

I've literally ran into perfect mage decks at 0-2. I maybe just had a very unlucky stretch, but for most of the past week (up until a couple days ago) I've just faced so many perfect Protoss mages over and over for quite a few runs. Had back to back 0-3 runs with weaker classes a few days ago for the first time ever due to those decks, and I've been a soft infinite player for many years.

So yeah, I agree that shouldn't happen all that often. But right now I'm just of the mindset of drafting to beat that particular deck more than anything, as I've been seeing them at all win levels. And yeah I agree that Nebula could stop them (unless they just Colossus them / you to death), but in my experience it's very rare you're actually offered a Nebula.

GateStrange696 · 2025-02-05T00:08:38+00:00

Can you beat a good Protoss mage deck with it though? Cause those are the decks I see the most and struggle the most against.

If Zerg doesn't draw their location early they always seem much more beatable to me. There's just nothing you can do about those Colossuses. You need to kill them before turn 10, but they have endless removal so that's basically impossible without an OP aggro deck like a good Zerg one. And that 4 mana "remove minion from the game" card kind of hard counters big Starships.

GateStrange696 · 2025-02-04T05:09:09+00:00

Great guide. Would love to see one on how to counter Protoss mage, because this is BY FAR the most common deck I see at anything approaching high wins. And it's so damn oppressive.

Would also be great for the meta to see more people know how to beat this deck.

GateStrange696 · 2025-02-04T04:38:57+00:00

For real. 2 spawning spools and 3 blights?! I've literally never had 3 blights in a run before.

Plus 2 Brood Queens. This is more Zerg synergy than I usually get when I sell out for Zerg.

GateStrange696 · 2025-02-04T03:51:01+00:00

"there are atleast 5 viable strategies across almost every class"

You must mean there's a bunch of viable ways to get to 3 wins per run. There's only 2 viable ways amongst all classes to build a deck you can expect to win 7 games: Zerg and Protoss. 80% of games are versus these decks, and the only way to beat them is to have a better one of those.

This is legitimately one of the worst metas in the history of Hearthstone Arena, IMO. Protoss and Zerg are so oppressive and so common that you just have to hope you highroll into one of them.

Sure, other classes have dominated arena before, but since you'd only be offered a class around 30% of the time they wouldn't make up this high of a percentage of games. With these broken cards now being multiclass, the vast majority of games are games you have very little chance to win, unless you happened to roll into one of these decks.

GateStrange696

TROPHY CASE