Digging into the New Arena Updates – Tips & Tricks for Power Level Picks in Arena

It seems like Team 5 intends to completely overhaul Hearthstone’s limited format, with multiple earth-shattering changes coming along over the course of the last year. The latest is perhaps the most impactful of them all – let’s take a look at what it entails, what kind of previous changes led to Arena’s current iteration, and how you can take advantage of the changes!

Love at First Sight?

Hearthstone’s 10.4 patch has brought along a brand new way of Arena drafting: instead of three cards of the same rarity, the offerings now consist of three cards that have relatively equal power levels. Not only that, but we also get to play with the special, Arena-exclusive cards that the panel audience voted for at BlizzCon last year.

This is perhaps the single most impactful change in the history of the format ever since it’s been introduced to the game instead of the Forge – a different take on a limited mode where you “paid” three packs to enter and could keep the cards you drafted, completely changing the way you are supposed to optimally construct your deck. It’s been a part of a long trend where the developers were trying to shift the way Arena is played: they’ve certainly been successful in that regard.

A Brief History of Arena

The four latest Arena adjustments were all focused on getting rid of “Curvestone” – a state where having on-curve minions on the first three or four turns was close to game-winning –, trying to inject different drafting preferences and more counterplay into the format. The change from Wild to Standard meant that the card pool wasn’t so large that playing around individual cards like Flamestrike was strictly a mistake, while the 7.1 patch has brought along an increase in spell offerings at the cost of cutting down on the neutral vanilla minions that kept anchoring the curve.

Synergy picks were meant to encourage a diversion from the supposedly same-y decks that kept cropping up in the format, but the execution was so botched that it was relatively quickly removed altogether, much to the joy to the Arena community. Micro-adjustments, meanwhile, intend to bring the different classes closer to each other, even at the cost of obfuscating the various offering odds and generally making the whole drafting process more opaque. While it’s mostly met this goal, it came at a cost of some odd anomalies where specific powerful cards tend to show up quite often, which is, of course, exactly the phenomenon that plagued the pre-hotfix 10.4 Arena experience, which completes this little quartet of ours.

The main intention of the latest changes was to get rid of the auto-pick scenarios that were quite prevalent in the previous iterations of Arena, choices where one card was clearly superior to the other options. Now – instead of rarity – they are bundled together by their strength, making draft choices more about deck synergy and gameplan choices than pure power level. While the initial implementation was so busted that it required a hotfix to get things back to normal levels – for instance, 9% of decks had at least one copy of The Lich King, the new system seems to be functioning pretty well since then, making good on the design promises laid out in the announcement video. In any case, the cards per drafting choices becoming more similar in terms of strength is an unquestionably positive development, provided the same cards don’t appear over and over again. There are still some growing pains, but the hotfix made the game mode pretty entertaining and non-broken for the time being.

Tips and Tricks for Arena Patch 10.4

This article reflects the state of the post-hotfix Arena, and therefore will contain advice other than “draft all The Lich Kings” and “don’t forget to play around the fourth Spikeridged Steed”. The hotfix drastically reduced the quality of the average offering quality in each “bucket” of three cards you get to see, which has a significant knock-on effect on your potential strategies.

For one, this means that it’s okay to go aggro – before the adjustment, it was way too likely that your opponent got to draft premium control tools like Spikeridged Steed or a bunch of AoE effects – now it’s more likely that they are saddled with some unimpressive minions that you can just whizz by. Note that the new system correctly identifies 2-drops as premium cards, therefore you have to make a conscious decision and aggressively go for them from an early point in the draft.

The same holds true in general, no matter what archetype you’re going for – with the power levels being less of a guideline at this point, you should make an early and conscious decision about your strategy, and make your selections accordingly. Some classes are more qualified for certain approaches than others – Rogue will do better as a tempo class and Priest decks will usually converge to control – but you usually have a decent amount of leeway, definitely way more than you had before the 10.4 changes.

It’s worth mentioning that you probably shouldn’t try to make too many reads about your opponent’s hand for the time being – since we have no idea about the offering odds, meaning we have no idea how often certain cards show up in the new drafting process, it’s close to impossible to figure out what your opponent might be holding. All in all, the game mode is more and more about reaction than prediction, and keeping some initiative back for a potential swing turn is just a good strategy in general, no matter what your opponent might magic out of a random card.

The same problem also applies for your own drafting process: previously, you could gauge the likelihood of a certain card showing up again later in your draft and that would influence your decision. Right now, the process is completely opaque, meaning you should simply pick the card that fits your current deck the most. This is likely going to change slightly once we have more data available on sites like HSReplay, but we simply don’t have the information right now to make educated choices on the matter.

This is perhaps the greatest concern about the new system: too much obfuscation in terms of offering odds and drafting possibilities. Unfortunately, this is something Team 5 has become more and more reluctant to share, therefore external sources are likely going to stay an important part of staying on top of the Arena metagame, especially if the undocumented “micro”-adjustments are also going to stick around.

Best of luck, and don’t forget the old adage: when in doubt, go face!