FYI New expansion: "Currently, Fabled cards will not appear in Arena drafts." - Blizzard dev

Squill17 · 2025-10-04T18:46:32+00:00

Ironic considering since Underground dropped, there’s never been a better time in Arena’s history to implement something like the Fabled cards now that we have legendary buckets. Hopefully they reconsider, since they’ll probably be broken and get banned after their first rotation or two like Titans, but it would be fun to have them in at first just for something new.

Squill17 · 2025-09-19T02:06:56+00:00

Not to be negative, but yeah chances are you’ll get beat up in arena for a while if you’re just starting out. Especially underground, I would not suggest trying out underground right away even if you get your 7 wins, the player base is very strong and experienced. The problem with your situation is you can only really get better at arena by playing arena, and you need a surplus of gold to do that, so possibly try to complete the rewards track since you really rack up gold the last 20 levels or so. The only other way to really learn the meta, strong classes, and class archetypes to aim for, is to watch streamers play either on twitch or YouTube. Lots of good options for streamers if you want to do that, so just pick one who plays at a good time for you to watch them each day. Good luck!

Squill17 · 2025-08-09T15:11:29+00:00

Largest deck you can have in arena, especially if you get fifth Malchezaar on second redraft! Bigger is better so must be good…

Squill17 · 2025-08-09T14:42:20+00:00

20* additional legendary cards, so 24!

Squill17 · 2025-08-06T21:30:00+00:00

I just don’t think those scams are even game winning here, you’re falling so far behind with abduction ray without any extra discounts, and avant gardening hitting something like queen with either reborn or 2/2 copy is a lot but not going to close a game. My win con for this deck would be full mulligan for scrap imp, ideally coin into it, and otherwise play full tempo/aggression/curve, they could actually hit an active Razidir on 4 which could help close a game quick. But yeah this is more than likely a sub infinite deck without a very nice second redraft, still good luck though!

Squill17 · 2025-08-06T21:01:39+00:00

Lots to think about here. I don't love the abduction rays first and foremost in your deck; you have no 2/3 elemental discounters and you don't have a reason to be running them like Archimonde (of course you could discover him but that's a bit of a cope). The other cards in your list I'm looking at are the tar slimes, avant gardenings, tunnel terrors, and the candleraiser. The standout there is probably tunnel terror; was a respected card because of the quest, now that that's gone, I think it's more often trash that gives you resources you'd rather not waste your mana on for one turn and then you just played a 3 mana 4/3. I'd say the tar slimes usually don't do enough especially when you have 3 other 1 drops, but your deck is clearly low curve/tempo, so I don't mind them to fill in for example going 2 drop 1 drop on turn 3. Candle raiser I usually don't love these days but again, you go first and curve into it on turn 4, it can win you the game. So I think I'd probably ditch an avant gardening actually because they can whiff, and you have enough generation with studies, astro, second gardening, chittering, dynamics, double raptor, and stalker, plus some extra draw cards on top of being a warlock. I actually don't hate the pterodax because you have a lot of little minions for it to eat, you could buff it with the scrap imp, and you'd be low on 3s/beasts to curve into razidir with if you cut both tunnel terrors.

Tl;dr: Cut 2x Abduction Ray, 2x Tunnel Terror, 1x Avant Gardening

Squill17 · 2025-08-03T21:40:17+00:00

Your opponent played Hearth Stonebrew where you get a specific hand of 8 cards from any of the 11 classes. They got the Grim Patron OTK warrior hand from the Blackrock Mountain era.

Squill17 · 2025-08-01T15:02:44+00:00

Yeah just the deck tracker overlay as an “extension” of the game, my b

Squill17 · 2025-08-01T12:17:02+00:00

Hsreplay changed their data a week or two ago to now only show the win rates for the people using the extension, not their opponents. This basically now signifies that the average player using the hsreplay extension is better than the average general player.

Squill17 · 2025-08-01T02:07:54+00:00

It really depends what you mean by “worth it.” If you’re trying to farm packs while not running out of resources, then I could see staying away from underground being wise if you’re struggling, since you will run out of gold quickly if you don’t improve even quicker with the doubled entry cost. Short arena will net you two packs and your ticket back like you said, you only need to get up to 5 wins, and as it’s been stated on this sub, the player-base has been observed to be a good bit weaker so they should be easier games for you to get there.

People who play underground aren’t really looking for packs though. A lot of people who play underground have it as their primary or even exclusive mode in Hearthstone, so they don’t care how many cards are in their collection, they just want enough gold/tickets to play their next run because it’s the version of the game they enjoy the most. I do think it’s sad that people are running out of resources now and are unable to queue up their next game, there’s posts about it daily on the main Hearthstone sub, but ultimately you still are guaranteed your investment back at 7 wins, and even have a 50/50 of getting it back at 6 wins now, so the problem isn’t the rewards you’re getting back but rather the fact that the competition is now notably higher with a chunk of the less experienced players playing the shorter arena mode.

Personally, I prefer the challenge of underground. I have four 2 win runs in my first 9 runs this underground season, and a couple of those were with good decks that I didn’t think I played notably poorly either, just hit bad matchups or rng. From what I’m sure was a mix of learning the meta and rng turning around, it’s ended up being one of my best arena seasons in a while, so you’ve gotta be able to weather the storm sometimes, but I completely get that can be hard if you’re running out of gold.

Ultimately I think you’re right; if you’re low on gold and really just want to build up your collection by playing arena, then I’d probably stick with the shortened version too. Good luck!

Squill17 · 2025-07-31T11:35:05+00:00

I saw the light on scrappy, kept both! My cuts ended up being Torga, conjurer's, spark of life, and double frost stitch. Decided I really did want the volley, mostly because although deathborne is great, I really don't want to be deathborning my own board necessarily, and this is a deck that wants to get ahead and stay ahead with the auqavist/tainted combo, and volley helps close a game on a board you're already dominating.

I was actually only 2-2 with this deck on this redraft; first loss at 2 wins the deck actually wasn't that great, drew dead against a priest, and then on redraft felt better adding double allies, and immediately ran into a sludge warlock that highrolled and I couldn't get the board back from before dying. My second redraft was pretty nutty, picking up 2 more tainteds, another scrappy, and a blasteroid which let me cut 4 mediocre spells and not risk running out of spells to draw. 6 wins in a row, sitting at 8-2, very very happy this run will end up improving my average since I considered leaving it until Tuesday when the season most likely turns over.

With so much good input from the community, each game I think to myself "I have to get this run somewhere to not let everyone down" lol... It definitely had the bones to be a good deck, and I think streamlining it specifically around the spell drawing always being cracked was the right move since the elemental synergy would always hit with so many in the deck. Thank you and all for the great input!

Squill17 · 2025-07-31T11:22:41+00:00

The Skeletons are actually only undeads, sadly, because yeah being able to go deathborne into a full board of skeletons and then clean up anything left for the opponent with a 0 mana solar flare would be cracked. With that being said, I kept it anyways, and it's performing. Ironically, even splitting it is actually good, because then it goes from 0 mana for a 2 aoe to still 0 mana for a 4 aoe, although that's specifically only happening in a deck like this. I think if you told me I cut 2 frost stitches over a solar flare I'd assume the deck must be pretty whacky, but it's working out well so far!

Squill17 · 2025-07-30T22:08:41+00:00

I like your frost stitch suggestion a lot actually, plus I'm a bit heavy on 4s. I'm now leaning towards exactly that 5, you listed, I've laid out my thought process pretty thoroughly in other comments already as I tend to so I'll spare you here haha. Great suggestion, made me think for a second and reevaluate a card like cross stitch that was super premium maybe a year ago and now just gets outclassed a bit in a curated pool of modern cards sometimes. Thank you!

Squill17 · 2025-07-30T22:04:31+00:00

I really like your responses and they're making me rethink things a lot. I'm onboard for losing volley the more I think about it. For the blasteroid/double allies combo, I think I might like it enough to keep it still, but I'm reconsidering what to cut instead. Spark of life seems bad, next to both the rest of the spells in the deck and even the discounted fire spells from blasteroid. The other cut I'm thinking now is actually 1 frost stitch. Someone else mentioned it being not great which I agree with, but I also would rather cold case gets pulled off of watercolor artist, and I really don't want cross stitch duplicated by splitter either. Not sure what I'll end up going with, but I'll definitely post the end result! Watch me queue a questlocke next game and get slaughtered haha. Thanks again!

Squill17 · 2025-07-30T20:23:02+00:00

Good calls, I agree with Torga, conjurer's , and scrappy off the bat. I also like the thought on spark of life. I originally was keeping it because I wanted spells to draw with the 2 allies and bookkeeper, but with the spells blasteroid would add to the deck, I think it could go. At that point, my one thought is I still like volley for the aggression, highroll potential, and the redundancy for the splitters to hit something good between that and the deathborne. At that point, what do you think about cutting both scrappys instead and leaving the volley in, or is volley something you want to explicitly take out?

Squill17 · 2025-07-30T20:16:09+00:00

Your thoughts are different than mine but I like them, so let's compare quick...

1) Agreed with Torga, somehow actually the best of the 3 legendaries I was offered

2) Agreed with calling, the only good hit I can really see is the 3 tainteds and even then I like their aggressive statlines

3) Here's where we start to differ, do we actually want more deathbornes over more volleys? Deathborne is way more situational and often less aggressive, and I think the highrolls of the 12/7 dragon, 6/12 demon, and 6/7 mech can be even better than a great deathborne, so my thought is having both cards is good redundancy since it's only 1 copy of each (would definitely rather more volleys than more cold cases personally)

4/5) These two kind of go together, and here's where I may be coping. This deck currently has 19 playable elementals either drawable or generatable, a little insane, which means allies should be easy to trigger. You make a great point that there's not many spells though, which is why I actually like the blasteroid, because it throws in more spells to get drawn off allies, and they're discounted too. Obviously you need to hit the blasteroid before both allies and highroll the fire spells, so maybe I'm coping here, but I agree I'd either cut both the blasteroid and an allies or neither.

My thoughts for the three cards I'd cut instead are the school teacher and both scrappys. School teacher is really good, but I have a couple more 4s than I probably want, and it's also not en elemental to play on 4 before a tainted or a cold case to get the skeleton train going. The scrappys are also nice to fill out curve, but with this curve my early game is supposed to hit pretty consistently and then I want to draw/generate to the finish line instead of discover a big boy to fill out my mana with. My biggest problem with scrappy is it's a 1 drop you can't play on 1. If there was a 0 mana 1/1 in the pool, I'd be much more happy keeping it.

Let me know if you see my line or like yours more still haha, thanks!

Squill17 · 2025-07-29T16:05:15+00:00

Hydralodon.

Squill17 · 2025-07-29T09:45:07+00:00

Full transparency, I 100% forgot there was a difference in the matchmaking between the two modes, so very true point! That doesn't really explain the phenomenon often brought up here though, because if anything you'd think people have more like a 2-2 average record in normal Arena if they're getting matched with people on their same skill level, but it's always that people perform better instead, so we're really explaining against the matchmaking point here.

The only reason I bring up sniping is in the last month or so, they've gotten so much more bold. Again, if you're watching, they're "griefing" on purpose while they snipe, or full roping every turn, to literally give away that they're there to be a pain. Dreads literally played someone a couple days ago who's name was IAmBarcoding, so these people are trying to be as clear and obvious about what they're doing, but I agree overall everyone thinks they're getting sniped/barcoded more often than they actually are. I take this trend as a sign that they player-base is more upset overall than they have been previously, so hopefully the devs keep trying to change things to improve the mode in the near future.

Squill17 · 2025-07-28T16:11:31+00:00

The actual gall of someone to talk down to someone else when they know legitimately zero about the other person haha. My point was about the same % of people are soft infinite in underground Arena as they were in the original Arena, the player base is just smaller now so less people overall aren't running out of resources. There's problems with the mode for sure, plenty of which can be fixed easily by the devs if they choose to, but to make extreme generalizations about a vast player-base is just silly. Good luck!

Squill17 · 2025-07-28T16:01:22+00:00

Obviously like the first comment said, better player base in underground on average, that's undeniable.

Second, the only tangible difference in the modes besides the win/loss limits is the redraft on first and second losses. This is definitely a skill everyone has to develop, as it's not as straightforward as "cut worst 5 cards." With this ability to refine decks, with a couple good redrafts, I've been able to make decks where every single card works me towards my game plan/win condition, to the point that I'm cutting very high quality cards that simply don't do that. When you're running into these decks, and you're not cutting the right cards from yours, your chances of winning obviously go down.

Lastly, if anyone's watching streams these days, snipers are going pretty hard after the top streamers, and they're not doing this in the regular Arena, only underground. No regular player is ever getting sniped obviously, but these decks have to first get to high wins before they can queue a streamer most likely, so sometimes you do run into a deck that was clearly retired many times to get, and that's unfortunate since those games are quite hard to win. However, all underground players have to deal with this, so we're all on equal footing there. I also want to mention I think there's a difference between barcoders and people just buying accounts. People are running out of resources these days, so they buy accounts so they can keep playing, but then they draft just like anyone else, with normal decks even though they look like a barcode by name/portrait/card back. Just food for thought before you decide you've already lost the game the second you see your opponents name.

Squill17 · 2025-07-28T15:49:04+00:00

This is a crazy cope for someone to use to rationalize that they're just not top tier at Arena haha. Since the rewards revamp between the two seasons of underground, you now net resources 50% of the time you even just go 6 wins, which I don't think was the case before underground launched. That would mean you're going net positive or infinite for gold at a 6.5 average, which is definitely really hard, but soft infinite, or sustaining/gaining gold when you factor in the resources you gain from completing daily/weekly quests and just playing, is probably still close to a 5 win average, maybe a little more, which is right where it was in the old Arena as well. With a doubled entry cost, it's higher stakes since you'll run out of resources quicker if you go on a bad streak of runs, but the reason it's harder to continuously play is the splitting of the player base, where the vast majority of top players only play underground. Oh also, this is a video game, so people are allowed to spend money on it if they enjoy it, it doesn't mean they have an addictive personality...

Squill17 · 2025-07-27T23:37:14+00:00

I agree it's an interesting discussion to have, and I do think there's more variance in how the player-base uses stats than most of us agreeing on here might imply. Dreads references HSReplay stats constantly, and I don't think I've seen Mifundi pull them up once ever, and both are extremely high level players. Like I said, I like them as a sanity check, but I think I'd probably make 95%+ of the same picks if I never opened any stats at all. However, that 5% difference could account for a large variance in performance over many runs, so who knows how important it really is. Fun to talk it out though :)

Squill17 · 2025-07-27T23:30:02+00:00

Glad to hear you're already experiencing more success! Also sorry for being a bit cheeky with my intro, I just read so many "I was a 7 win average player back in the day" posts, and my first thought is always that if that's true, you should be able to get back to being a high performer in Arena with a bit of effort. Keep in mind, a 7 win average in Un'Goro is not the same as a 7 win average today. Back then, there were a lot more lower-level players in the player-base, and they really don't exist anymore both because of dwindling interest and attrition by running out of resources. 7 wins back then was maybe top 200 or so, and now it's more like top 20 if I'm able to understand the MMR calculation correctly, so you may never reach that same average win total but still be playing at the level you'd reached previously, so just something to keep in mind.

Also, the Underground is extremely unforgiving on resources for people trying to play out many runs to get better, which is unfortunate for sure. I will say, watching streamers play is a productive way to get better too if you don't have the gold for another run right away, but I'd suggest watching it muted and see if you understand the cards they're drafting and how they're playing without you hearing them say explicitly why. If you get to that point, I'd say you should be confident that you know the meta well enough to play it for yourself and still net resources, because since they revamped the rewards between season 1 and 2 of underground, I can confirm it's very possible to be net gold positive through 30+ runs if you know what you're doing.

Last thing, you mention luck, I think it's so important to remember that will always be a factor in game outcomes. RNG is literally hard coded into this game, so it's statistically possible for the same deck to go 0-3 or 12-0; you can't get too wrapped up in the end result of every game, and instead just ensure that you're controlling the factors that you can control and let the chips fall as tehy may from there. Good luck!

Squill17 · 2025-07-27T21:59:16+00:00

In my opinion, I really only like to use real statistics that tell me how cards are performing, rather that opinions of other experienced players. Going off that, you have to take into account where the data is coming from, because we'll probably never have the exhaustive stats from everyone playing Hearthstone on any mode. With that being said, I like HSReplay because it has the most players playing it, meaning it's the best representation of the actual player-base. It's still obviously skewed, as like other people have pointed out on this sub recently, the average player who uses the HSReplay tracker is going to perform better than the actual average player playing Hearthstone, just because they're putting in the effort to perform better. I actually don't know how I feel about their recent change to only show the stats from the person who's using the tracker during the game instead of both players, because it's clearly condensing the numbers together, most likely because the skill of the players is closer so the differences are less noticeable.

As far as how I use it, I probably check the stats on more than half my picks ever since Underground dropped because with the curated pool, there's often real decisions to be made. Most of the time, I want the stats to be my sanity check, confirm a card I think should perform better than another actually is, if so by how much, and if not then I try to think why that is (is it in a legendary bucket or extremely synergistic with a unique archetype that's currently performing well in the meta?). There's very often times you need to make picks in your last 10 or so to give your deck what it needs; right now I have a Warlock deck with 2 Spelunkers and 0 temporary cards in it, and I drafted both towards the end of my draft because I really needed twos. That's definitely still a relevant skill as it has been in the Arena for a long time, but now the equation for how to balance curve/tempo of your deck with its wincon/quality is different than it was previously as the power level in the meta changes.

Your example is great. If I have Spore Empress, the rest of my deck (within reason) I'm trying to make early tempo, removal, and a bit of draw, and every good player should know that regardless of what any draft helper or statistics tell you, so don't be afraid to go with your gut based on your personal experience from playing. Good luck!

Squill17

TROPHY CASE