Arena Run Summary

I didn't take screen shots from every run. But I have gotten in the habit of taking notes from each game. Here are the notes from a couple recent runs.

drafted a super sweet mage deck

game 1 - lose v paladin - saw none of my good cards, super pissed

game 2 - win v mage - he played all the shitty secrets. we got a ysera down as well.

game 3 - win v warrior - he did nothing early, we had 2x ooze. it was ugly

game 4 - win v priest - he went all in on northshire cleric from T1. and we just raced him once we drew our pyroblast. killed him on T8

game 5 - win v mage - we squelched this guy because he wouldn't shut up. he misplayed huge in the early game. we were ahead on damage and just rode him down. sadly no pyroblast

game 6 - lose v rogue - drew late game cards early. had ok opener but he played solid card after solid card T4-7. backbreaking defender of argus FTW. we then had 1 turn to draw flamestrike or one of our cone of colds or our frost nova. sadly the deck teased us with a second pyroblast

game 7 - lose v mage - didn't see our good cards, not going to win when that happens

this was super frustrating because the deck was awesome but we didn't see the sweet cards in the games we lost. sometime you lose because of poor luck. but i hate blaming the loss on said bad luck. but i also hate wasting time. my best judgement of the luck in the run was that the draft portion was above average luck and the games were below average luck.

And here is another one::

shaman time - totally shitty deck. no fire elementals

game 1 - lose v paladin - some slight inefficiencies in the early game. no powerful expensive cards so i really get punished for the awkward start. fun stuff with etbs and bounce though. lost with my opponent on like 7 cards and me on 0, ugggg. to be fair he did have 2x consecrate which is super good against me and me low curve

game 2 - win v mage - i was pretty exposed to blizzard or flamestrike but he never dropped one. i crushed him.

game 3 - won v rogue - good start got on a major front foot. he stabilized around 10 life thanks to 2x argent commander. i got a weapon and started chewing away his life total. he began working on me. then i top  decked a lightningbolt ftw! woooo for the easy part of the bracket

game 4 - lose v shaman - he had feral spirit and fire elemental. boooooo. i held my own for a while but he just had better cards

game 5 - lose v shaman - he had a doomhammer

my deck was atrocious. i blame the RNG in the draft phase. i picked shaman and never saw the good shaman cards. 

Just look at me blaming luck again! Awesome. that is totally the way to get better. Ok, here's the breakdown for one more run.

druid

game 1 - win v priest - our opponent is a n00b

game 2 - win v mage - only good spell he played was blizzard, we ground him down and won. at one point it was liek 20-30 and we had a board and like five mor ecards than him

game 3 - lose v warrior - we could not handle a T5 venture co mercenary, we think because we never saw the tools in the draft to deal with hit

game 4 - win v warrior - poor start for us. then we T5 venture co merc and he couldn't handle it, eventual 3-1. so then we just kept playing huge dudes and he died, wasn't close at all

game 5 - win v mage - regular start. he was a little durdly and never showedus a sweeper which is like why you play mage

game 6 - lose v mage - ok early, and the we got to grind out top deck mode. he got pyroblast, defender of argus, defender of argus. we got sunwalker, blank, blank. game loss

game 7 - win v priest - solid early game, then soild 6/7/8 drops. he had a faceless manipulator then a mind control and we still demolished him.

game 8 - lose v warrior - he had weapons in the early game and took the lead. then landed a gurubashi berserkeer which our deck can't handle becuae of the 7 butt. then from the front foot he dominated and everything he played was good.

our deck was awful because we didn't have answers to high toughness stuff. to be fair, we didn't see any.

Well this time I'm blaming the RNG for a bad deck.


So I seem to be explaining away the losses on luck somewhere. I think what is more likely is a failure to see all of my options. I am going to go forward and try to think of other options. My card evaluation is probably not the best but I think it is good. I think the mid game is probably the biggest place for improvement.
All of that being said. Even the pros don't go 12 wins every time. To that end we have been tracking results. Up until this point the blog post has been lacking. But no longer. I made some graphs.

the first one is pretty clear add up all our wins divide by all our games played. the second one includes gold earned in the arena and not gold earned in other ways. And here's the 5 run moving average.